NEW YORK — Women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred has withdrawn from representing Summer Zervos in her defamation suit against President Donald Trump.
“Our withdrawal has nothing to do with the merits of her case against President Trump,” Allred said. “We will have no comment regarding the reasons for our firm’s withdrawal. We continue to wish Summer the very best in her pursuit of justice.”
Zervos, a former contestant on NBC’s “The Apprentice,” filed a defamation suit against Trump in January 2017, alleging that he defamed her after calling her a liar when she publicly accused him of sexual misconduct.
She will continue to be represented by New York-based Mariann Wang, who, in a statement, thanked Allred and her firm of Allred Maroko and Goldberg for their work on the case.
“We look forward to proving her claim,” Wang said of Zervos in a statement to CNN.
Zervos alleges she went to Trump for career advice after being cut from the show and that Trump kissed her twice on the lips during a lunch meeting in his New York City office and also kissed her “very aggressively and placed his hand on my breast” on a separate occasion in Beverly Hills. Both alleged incidents happened in 2007.
Allred broke the news of the allegations by holding a press conference with Zervos in California in October of 2016 — just weeks before the presidential election.
Trump responded to Zervos’ claims in a statement at the time.
“I vaguely remember Zervos as one of the many contestants on The Apprentice over the years,” the statement read. “To be clear, 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. In fact, Ms. Zervos continued to contact me for help, emailing my office on April 14th of this year asking that I visit her restaurant in California.”
Zervos filed the lawsuit against Trump days before he was sworn in as President in 2017.
Allred is also representing several women who could be called to testify in the upcoming Bill Cosby retrial.
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