“You should really keep your mouth shut about Bill Clinton and go on with your life. You could be discredited. You could have an IRS investigation.”AN ALLEGED CALLER TO ACTRESS ELIZABETH GRACEN An actress who says she had a long-ago fling with President Clinton came under IRS scrutiny just weeks after a warning that she could be audited if she didn’t keep quiet, her lawyer says.
Elizabeth Ward Gracen, star of the “Highlander” TV series, has been deluged with dozens of letters from the tax man – claiming she didn’t file returns and threatening to seize her wages and property.
Gracen, a former Miss America who says she had sex with Clinton in 1983, isn’t the first woman linked to the president to interest the IRS.
Paula Jones, who settled her sex-harassment lawsuit against him last year, was audited after she rejected a deal with Clinton – and the Treasury Department is investigating why the IRS got involved.
Filming her TV show in Europe, Gracen refused to talk about her situation, but one of her lawyers contacted by The Post said the IRS is on her case for no good reason.
“She pays her taxes, she’s really square,” said the lawyer, Vincent Vento. “I don’t think anybody wants to take on the government … She just feels it’s completely unfair.”
The threat of an IRS probe came from the same anonymous caller who once warned Gracen she was about to get a subpoena and should get out of town, Vento said.
The former beauty queen has no idea who the caller was, but her lawyer said the list of people with a motive is a short one.
“The only person who would benefit would be the president of the United States, unless there’s some other agenda out there,” Vento said.
The first call came around Christmas 1997, when Gracen was at her parents’ home in Little Rock, Ark., he said.
At the time, Jones’ lawyers were trying to get Gracen to testify about her relationship with Clinton for the sex-harassment suit.
“The call was very professional and somewhat ominous,” Vento said. “They said, ‘Look, there’s a subpoena out for you about Bill Clinton. I’d advise you not to be around.'”
Gracen wouldn’t have given the call a second thought – except that the next day, after she’d left on a trip to Las Vegas, the subpoena was served in Little Rock.
Over the next few months, Gracen – who had publicly denied an affair with Clinton in 1992 – was on the road, dodging the process-servers.
In the spring, she recanted her six-year-old denial and admitted she and Clinton had once had sex. By summer, she was in Canada, filming her new show, “Highlander: The Raven.”
In an interview with the Toronto Star about her show, she also talked about how her friends and family were intimidated and how she feared for her safety after the Clinton connection surfaced.
“The interview gets picked up and becomes a big story,” Vento said.
Within weeks, Gracen got another phone call at an unlisted number in Canada, and she recognized the voice from the call warning her about the subpoena eight months before, Vento said.
“They say, ‘You should really keep your mouth shut about Bill Clinton and go on with your life. You could be discredited. You could have an IRS investigation,'” the lawyer recounted.
A few weeks later, the letters from the IRS started coming in, sent to her parents’ house, which is not listed on her tax filings, Vento said.