Trump Accuser Says President’s Documents Match Her Story

(Bloomberg) -- A former reality-TV star who claims Donald Trump sexually assaulted her before he was president said documents that the Trump Organization was forced to hand over corroborate her story.

Former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos on Thursday asked a New York state court judge in Manhattan to unseal nine additional pages of documents that Trump is trying to keep secret, saying they reveal in “striking detail” the strength of her story.

“Long before this case was filed, plaintiff publicly described exactly when, where, and how the sexual assaults took place,” she said. Trump “insisted that there was no truth to plaintiff’s allegations, but he has now been forced to produce documents from his own files confirming that he and plaintiff were exactly where she said they were, exactly when she said they were there.”

The Trump Organization is arguing the pages shouldn’t be made public because they include Trump’s old cell phone number.

“That argument is nothing short of absurd given that defendant no longer uses that number and, indeed, himself publicized it to his millions of Twitter followers during the 2016 campaign,” Zervos’s lawyer, Mariann Wang, said in the filing.

She said the remaining documents provide further details to support her account of meetings with Trump and that he lied and defamed her when he denied those accounts.

Trump Organization attorney Alan Garten didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment.

Zervos, who met with Trump in hopes of securing a job after her TV appearance in 2005, is one of more than a dozen women who’ve come forward accusing him of sexual misconduct. In September, a former Trump campaign staffer who sued the president for allegedly kissing her without permission, dropped her lawsuit after evidence emerged contradicting her story. Even so, many women, including Zervos, have stood by their claims.

Among the documents Zervos says she got from the Trump Organization to support her claims are:

• An email from Zervos to Trump’s secretary Rhona Graff in the fall of 2007 inquiring whether Zervos could take Trump to lunch when she was in New York
• A response from Graff in which she told Ms. Zervos to reach out when she was in town and that she could meet with Trump at Trump Tower
• Itinerary documents produced by the Trump Organization that show Trump flew from Las Vegas to Los Angeles on Dec. 21, 2007, and stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel for two nights, until Dec. 23, 2007
• Zervos’s follow-up email on Dec. 3, 2007, when she arrived in town

Zervos claims Trump kissed her twice on the lips at the Trump Tower meeting and that he grabbed and sexually assaulted her in his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow.

So Trump’s “own records -- produced for the first time in 2018, long after Ms. Zervos initially spoke out -- strongly corroborate Plaintiff’s account of the sexual assaults that defendant inflicted on her,” Wang wrote in the filing.

Zervos has previously signaled she wants to depose Trump under oath. In her lawsuit, she claims that Trump defamed her in 2016 when he said she lied about encounters in which she said he forcibly kissed her and groped her.

A New York appellate court in March ruled Zervos’s case can proceed, rejecting Trump’s argument that the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution bars lawsuits against him while he’s president, even for alleged actions that took place before he was elected. Presidents can already be sued in federal court over such claims, following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Clinton v. Jones.

The case is Zervos v. Trump, 150522/2017, New York Supreme Court, New York County.

To contact the reporter on this story: Erik Larson in New York at elarson4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Joe Schneider, Peter Jeffrey

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.