Hillary Clinton says her husband’s affair with former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky was not an abuse of power and he was right to not resign from the US presidency in the wake of the scandal.

The twenty-year-old episode has come under renewed scrutiny in the #MeToo era, with critics questioning whether the power imbalance between a sitting president and an intern made it impossible for the relationship to be considered consensual.

Speaking on CBS News on Sunday, Hillary, a former presidential candidate and secretary of state said she disagreed that her husband should have resigned following the public outcry that trailed the incident.

“Absolutely not,” Hillary replied when asked whether her husband should have resigned after the incident.

Pressed further whether the relationship was an abuse of power, she added: “No, no’, noting that Lewinsky, who was 22-years-old at the time was already an adult.

In 1999, the American Senate had held a month-long trial of then President Clinton which ultimately fell well short of the two-thirds majority required to convict and remove him from office.

Lewinsky had long maintained the affair was consensual but in an essay which was published in Vanity Fair earlier this year, she wrote that she had begun to re-evaluate that view.

Bill Clinton has also been accused by several other women of sexual misconduct in cases going back to the 1970s.