San Francisco ? A federal appeals panel on Tuesday revived Gennifer Flowers’ defamation suit accusing Hillary Rodham Clinton of masterminding a campaign to discredit her claim of an affair with Bill Clinton.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 that Flowers could try to prove the former first lady, now a senator from New York, conspired against her with two presidential aides, George Stephanopoulos and James Carville.

Still, the court said Flowers faced an “uphill battle” and must convince a Nevada judge there was evidence of a conspiracy before the case could proceed to a jury.

The controversy dates to 1992, when a supermarket tabloid wrote that Bill Clinton and Flowers had an affair while he was Arkansas governor. Bill Clinton denied the accusations, so Flowers held a news conference to play audio tapes she said were of secretly recorded intimate phone calls between them.

Carville, now on CNN’s “Crossfire,” and Stephanopoulos, now an anchor on ABC’s Sunday morning program “This Week,” said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” that Flowers had doctored the tapes. Stephanopoulos repeated that allegation in a book.

The two aides maintained they were shielded from defamation claims because they were commenting on news accounts.

Flowers said news accounts that the tapes were doctored were false. Her lawsuit says Stephanopoulos and Carville knew or should have known they were false, and that they and the former first lady conspired to generate the news reports.

“A defamatory statement isn’t rendered nondefamatory merely because it relies on another defamatory statement,” Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in Tuesday’s opinion. “In this case, the truth of the news reports on which defendants claim to have relied is disputed.”

The 1999 case, filed in Nevada, was dismissed two years ago by U.S. District Judge Philip Pro, who said it had been filed too late and did not state any claims that could prompt legal action.

Larry Klayman, Flowers’ attorney, said he would seek unspecified damages when the case returned to court.

“We allege Hillary Clinton was the mastermind of them uttering the words that the tapes were doctored,” Klayman said. “They destroyed her.”

Flowers, a former Nevada lounge singer, now lives in New Orleans and runs a restaurant with her husband, Klayman said.