Warren Mayor Jim Fouts said an audio recording that surfaced Tuesday in which he purportedly uses a gay slur is fake.

Fouts called the recording, the topic of a report by Deadline Detroit, an attempt by his political opponents to undermine him and take attention away from the good things happening in the city.

“I was a sent a copy of it, and it's clearly more of the same," he told the Free Press. "It’s another phony, manipulated, manufactured, out-of-context — it’s just a phony tape."

Deadline Detroit cited an unnamed former city employee in reporting Tuesday that the recording was secretly made in the mayor's office.

The news outlet said the voice in the recording says, “(This) is personal to me, just like being a fag is personal to somebody, being fat is personal to somebody ..."

Fouts has previously strongly denied making offensive statements in other recordings. In late 2016, Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel released a recording that seemed to catch Fouts disparaging disabled people. Other tapes surfaced with a voice that sounded like the mayor's disparaging black people and women.

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Fouts was elected mayor in November 2007 and plans to seek another term in 2019.

He pointed to new development projects, a planned second civic center, his efforts to increase diversity in Warren's workforce and a fall 2018 poll that showed him with a 76% approval rating among residents as successes of his mayoral tenure.

"Everything I focus on is serving and protecting the citizens of Warren," he said. "I think we’re the most successful city in the metro area, and obviously, there (are) some people who like to detract from that, and that’s why they come up with the phony tapes. We've got an election coming up."

Contact staff writer Ann Zaniewski at 313-222-6594 or azaniewski@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter: @AnnZaniewski.