by AFP
NEW YORK – Summer Zervos (picture), a former contestant on reality TV show “The Apprentice” who accused Donald Trump of sexual assault, ended her defamation lawsuit against the ex-US president Friday.
Zervos sued Trump in January 2017, just days before he entered the White House, claiming that he had lied when denying her allegations that he forcibly tried to grope and kiss her ten years earlier.
A one-page document filed with a New York state court in Manhattan said all claims “are hereby dismissed and discontinued in their entirety without prejudice.”
Neither side will receive any money, the filing added.
“After five years, Ms Zervos no longer wishes to litigate against the defendant and has secured the right to speak freely about her experience,” her lawyers Moira Penza and Beth Wilkinson said in a statement emailed to AFP.
“Ms Zervos stands by the allegations in her complaint and has accepted no compensation,” they added.
Zervos was one of around a dozen women to accuse Trump of sexual misconduct in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.
He has denied all the allegations and has never been prosecuted over any of them.
Zervos said that Trump had made unwanted sexual advances toward her when she met him at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles in 2007 to discuss career opportunities.
Trump moved toward her aggressively during the encounter and touched her on the breast but she rebuffed him, she alleged.
Trump’s lawyer described Zervos’s decision to drop her case “prudent.”
“She had no choice but to do so as the facts unearthed in this matter made it abundantly clear that our client did nothing wrong,” Alina Habba told AFP in a statement.
Trump still faces a slew of civil lawsuits, including one by writer E. Jean Carroll who alleges he raped her in the changing room of a luxury New York department store in the mid-1990s.
She is suing him for defamation, claiming that his denials of the alleged attack, in which he said, “She’s not my type,” had damaged her reputation and career.
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