Former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos filed a lawsuit in New York Tuesday against President-elect Donald Trump for defamation. The lawsuit against Trump comes three days before his inauguration.
Zervos, who was on season five of The Apprentice, came out in October and said that President-elect Trump inappropriately kissed and touched her in 2007 in a number of encounters. Trump promptly denied the allegations and said in a statement, “I never met her at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago. That is not who I am as a person, and it is not how I’ve conducted my life.”
Celebrity attorney Gloria Allred is representing Zervos. Allred and Zervos both held a conference shortly after the November election and asked for Trump to retract his statement. Zervos said at a press conference Tuesday that since Trump hasn’t retracted his statement there was no “alternative” to filing the lawsuit. She did, however, add that she would dismiss her case if Trump were to say she was telling the truth.
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in a statement that the lawsuit is “more of the same from Gloria Allred.” Hicks added, “There is no truth to this absurd story.”
Allred said that the lawsuit alleges that Zervos had been subjected to unwanted sexual touching by Trump. The attorney quoted from the lawsuit at the press conference and it described Trump’s behavior as that of a “sexual predator.” Allred said that Trump used his power to denigrate Zervos and it caused her economic harm and reputational damage.
“This lawsuit seeks to make Donald Trump accountable for the significant damage he caused Ms. Zervos,” Allred said. According to the attorney, Zervos passed a polygraph test with a very experienced polygrapher, whom Allred refused to name. Allred said that the lawsuit seeks minimal damages and that “what we really want is to prove is that defamation has taken place.”
The 1997 case Clinton v. Jones established that a sitting president does not have any immunity from civil litigation related to incidents that happened before the presidency.
