With all the talk of Stormy Daniels‘ lie detector test and news that the president congratulated a foreign dictator on winning a sham election, you may have forgotten that there are threats to the legitimacy (such as it is) of Donald Trump’s administration that don’t involve porn stars or Russians.
So let’s open the Manhattan yellow pages-sized Big Book of Trump Scandals and turn all the way back to 2007 – a simpler time, when the Donald was just a handsy reality show host, and not the nominal leader of the free world.
Back in 2017, former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by Trump on two separate occasions a decade prior.
When Trump publicly derided Zervos as a liar, she responded by filing a defamation suit.
Naturally, Trump’s lawyers (the hardest-working bastards in the legal biz) did everything they could to have the case thrown out of court.
But today, another item was added to the laughably long list of legal setbacks for 45, as a New York judge denied a movement to dismiss Zervos’ claim, which means the case will now move forward.
The statute of limitations for possible criminal charges has expired, but the defamation lawsuit allows Zervos and famed attorney Gloria Allred to bring Trump to task for his alleged crimes.
“In a defamation action, the question is truth. That’s your defense in defamation: The truth of the matter. So the underlying action of sexual harassment gets litigated in this defamation action,” civil rights attorney Areva Martin recently told CNN.
“It’s a back-door way to talk about the sexual harassment, the groping, the touching.”
Trump’s lawyers tried to convince Judge Jennifer Schecter that sitting judges should be immune from such suits.
The judge wasn’t having it, and she cited a suit against Trump’s second most-hated former president in today’s decision:
“No one is above the law. It is settled that the President of the United States has no immunity and is ‘subject to the laws’ for purely private acts,” Schecter wrote
“For the very same reasons articulated in Clinton v Jones, a stay for the duration of the Trump presidency must be denied.”
More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, but thus far.
It’s currently unclear if Zervos’ suit will encourage other alleged victims to file suit against Trump, but today, Lisa Bloom, an attorney who has represented several of the women, took to Twitter to encourage “a rich Patriot to step forward and promise to pay all costs, fees and penalties for any Trump accuser who wants to speak out.”
“I applaud the decision to allow Summer’s case to go forward,” Bloom told CNN. “It is clearly the law that a sitting president can sue and be sued. I hope this will encourage other women to come forward.”
