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SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals court reinstated Gennifer Flowers’ defamation and conspiracy suit against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former presidential aides George Stephanopoulos and James Carville. 

Ruling 3-0, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Tuesday that Flowers should have her day in court to try to prove the aides fouled her reputation when they publicly accused her of doctoring audio tapes between Flowers and Bill Clinton. 

As for the former first lady, now a senator from New York, she is accused in the suit of conspiring with the two behind the scenes to discredit Flowers. 

The controversy began in 1992, when a supermarket tabloid wrote that Bill Clinton and Flowers had an affair while he was governor of Arkansas. 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 the woman doctored the tapes. Stephanopoulos repeated that allegation in a book. 

The two maintained they were shielded from defamation claims because they were commenting on news accounts of such allegations. 

Flowers maintained that news accounts of the tapes being 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 this case, the truth of the news reports on which defendants claim to have relied is disputed.” 

The senator’s attorney, David Kendall, said in a statement that “the case is just as frivolous as it always was.” Stephanopoulos’ publisher, Little, Brown and Co., said in a statement it is confident that he “will prevail in this action.” 

Carville’s attorney did not return repeated phone messages. 

Larry Klayman, Flowers’ attorney, said he will seek unspecified damages when the case returns to federal court in Nevada.