(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump won permission to ask New York’s highest court to overturn a ruling that he is not immune from state court lawsuits while in office.
The ruling Tuesday by an intermediate appeals court in Manhattan came in the case of former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos, who sued Trump for defamation after he publicly denied her claims that he sexually assaulted her more than a decade ago.
Trump claimed the U.S. Constitution places him beyond the reach of state courts, but his argument was rejected by a trial judge. In March 2019, a panel of appellate judges in Manhattan backed the lower court, saying in their decision that a “president is still a person.”
The appellate court said Tuesday it would not reconsider its own decision, but it put Zervos’s lawsuit on hold while Trump petitions the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest. The president hasn’t yet filed the appeal. Zervos had sought to depose Trump in the case later this month.
“We believe that the Court of Appeals will agree that the U.S. Constitution bars state court actions while the President is in office,” Trump’s law firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, said in an email.
Presidents can already be sued in federal court, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Clinton v. Jones.
Beth Wilkinson, Zervos’s lawyer, said in an email, “We remain confident that we will prove her defamation claim in court and that Mr. Trump will face responsibility for his actions.”
Zervos sued Trump three days before he took office, accusing the president of defaming her for denying her allegation that he’d groped her and forcefully kissed her at Trump Tower and at his bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel in California. Trump has repeatedly denied the allegations.
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