The Lawsuit That Could Just Maybe Derail Trump

When Frost/Nixon, the movie about the 1977 televised interviews between journalist David Frost and former president Richard Nixon, came out in 2008, I had a lot of fun dramatically reciting the film’s climactic line, spoken by Frank Langella as a sweaty, darty-eyed Nixon. Frost (Michael Sheen) asks Nixon to clarify whether he’s suggesting that the president can decide, in certain situations, whether to break the law if it’s in the best interest of the nation. In a legendary fumble, Nixon counters, “I’m saying that when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” There’s a moment of stunned silence. “I’m sorry?” Frost replies. “That’s what I believe,” Nixon asserts. “But I realize no one else shares that view.”

I was reminded of that scene on Tuesday afternoon, as I sat in a courtroom in lower Manhattan watching Donald Trump’s lawyer Marc Kasowitz urge a state judge to dismiss a defamation lawsuit brought by Summer Zervos — one of the sixteen women who’ve accused Trump of sexual misconduct or assault — on the grounds that a state court does not have jurisdiction over the president. The hearing was over in an hour, and Judge Jennifer Schecter has yet to make her ruling. There were no stunned silences, no Frost/Nixon–level statements that caused the room to collectively gasp. But there was a flicker of hope, if not for the complete downfall of the president, then for some semblance of justice in a year that has seen a numbing string of abuses of power come to light.

Zervos, who owns a restaurant in Huntington Beach, California, first met Trump when she was a contestant on The Apprentice in 2005. She claimed that Trump assaulted her twice, in 2007: once in his office in New York, where he kissed her on the lips twice without her consent, and again at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she met Trump for what she thought was a meeting to discuss being hired by his organization and where he again greeted her with an open-mouthed kiss, before grabbing her shoulder, placing a hand on her breast, and pressing his genitals against her. She came forward with her story shortly after Trump dismissed his language in the infamous Access Hollywood tape, in October 2016, as “locker-room talk.”

Zervos filed her lawsuit — the only currently ongoing piece of litigation against the president — in January, three days before Trump’s inauguration. It holds that Trump “used his national and international bully pulpit to make false factual statements to denigrate and verbally attack Ms. Zervos and the other women who publicly reported his sexual assaults in October 2016.” The suit lists numerous tweets and statements Trump made at rallies during the campaign — that the women coming forward were making “false smears for personal fame,” that the allegations were “total lies,” “100% made up.” Zervos’s lawyers include a screengrab of a Daily Caller article that attempts to discredit Zervos, and that Trump retweeted along with the comment, “Terrible!” Zervos is asking for just $3,000 in damages, to signal that she’s looking not for money but, as Jia Tolentino wrote on the New Yorker’s website, for “a systematic re-engagement with the truth about Trump’s sexual misdeeds.”

Read more: https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/12/07/the-lawsuit-that-could-just-maybe-derail-trump/