Donald Trump Denies ‘Apprentice’ Accuser’s Groping Claims
Donald Trump said that he “vaguely” remembers Summer Zervos, a contestant on the fifth season of “The Apprentice,” and denied that he met her at the Beverly Hills Hotel or “greeted her inappropriately a decade ago.”
In a press conference with attorney Gloria Allred on Friday, Zervos claimed that Trump made unwanted sexual advances on her when they met at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2007, after she was off the show yet was seeking his business advice and employment with his company.
“I vaguely remember Ms. Zervos as one of the many contestants on ‘The Apprentice’ over the years,” Trump said in a statement. “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 said that she did send an email this year, but that she also wrote in the message that “Your interest in me as a potential employee meant the world to me. Your interest in me as anything more blew my mind and I lost my footing. I further said, I have been incredibly hurt by our previous interaction.”
Trump also lashed out at the media, saying that it is now “creating a theater of absurdity that threatens to tear our democratic process apart and poison the minds of the American public.”
“When Gloria Allred is given the same weighting on national television as the President of the United States, and unfounded accusations are treated as fact, with reporters throwing due diligence and fact-finding to the side in a rush to file their stories first, it’s evident that we truly are living in a broken system,” he said in the statement.
He added, “Hillary Clinton can spend all of her time and money pushing complete lies against our campaign, but I refuse to fall victim to this vicious cycle of personal attacks. In the coming days I plan on addressing our nation in a more personal way to present my vision for how together we fight to bring back American jobs and defend our country against radical Islamic terrorism. I will take my message directly to the American people and bypass the unethical press that wants to see their candidate elected.”
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