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| Gina Gershon |
A Vanity Fair article implying that lesbian icon Gina Gershon engaged in an illicit affair with former President Bill Clinton has pitted the actress against the magazine in a war of words... and she’s not taking it lying down.
“It is such a crazy, outrageous lie,” Gershon said in an interview on Live with Regis and Kelly Monday. “It has nothing to do with me at the end of the day.”
In an ongoing battle with the magazine, both Clinton and Gershon have attacked the magazine’s allegations as false while Gershon’s legal team drafted a letter demanding Vanity Fair print a retraction.
But the magazine’s representatives deny the implication that the former President and the starlet ever took their friendship to a deeper level.
"Todd Purdum's article does not indicate that former president Bill Clinton had an improper relationship with Gina Gershon," a spokesperson from the magazine said in a statement. "The story merely examines the concerns of some of Clinton's aides about reports of his behavior. We don't believe that any correction is warranted."
But the magazine’s denial of the allegations has only served to incense Gershon more, prompting her to fire back to Philbin and Ripa on the morning talk show.
“That was kind of crazy. It was my day off, and I read this thing,” Gershon said on the morning show about first learning of the allegations. “I met him three times at events.”
Purdum’s cautiously phrased article stops short at claiming Gershon and Clinton slept together, but it’s laden with innuendo about questionable relationships between Hillary Clinton’s husband and Gershon and billionaire heiress Belinda Stronach, among others.
The article asserts that Clinton’s “episodic friendship” with billionaire auto-parts heiress and Canadian Parliament member Stronach is frequent tabloid fodde and that more recently, “high-end Hollywood dinner-party gossip” has linked the former president to actress Gershon, Purdum asserted in his article.
Additionally, Purdum wrote that there has been talk of several other ‘female friends’ Clinton purportedly engaged with inappropriately.
Bill Clinton’s office vehemently attacked the Vanity Fair article’s commentary on his private relationships, his business connections and his health status in a 2,476-word memo his office released last week.
The melee surrounding the article prompted Purdum to weigh in, saying he was "very careful to say there is no clear-cut evidence that President Clinton has done anything improper. I reject the notion that I'm making an insinuation. But I'm very comfortable quoting the people I quote because I know who they are, and I know that they are very senior people who have known President Clinton for a very long time and work for him at very high levels."
The letter from Gershon's rep admonishing the article read, "My client has the utmost admiration and respect for both the President and Senator [Hillary] Clinton, and she is extremely offended by the false and defamatory inference that she engaged in an adulterous relationship with the President."
"It disturbed me on so many levels. I felt I had to stand up and say the truth,” Gershon told Philbin and Ripa.
