State judge denies legal immunity for President
Answering a constitutional question that the Supreme Court left open nearly 21 years ago in a case against President Bill Clinton, a state trial judge in New York ruled Tuesday that
President Trump does not have immunity to being sued in state court on claims related to sexual misconduct that did not involve official acts.
The ruling keeps alive a lawsuit filed in January last year by a former TV reality show performer, who alleges that Trump has harmed her reputation by accusing her of lying about her claims of sexual assault.
Judge Jennifer G. Schechter, who sits in New York City on the New York County Supreme Court, declared that “no one is above the law” as she rejected two pleas by personal lawyers for the President: first, that the Constitution gives him, as President, immunity to being sued in state court, and, second, that the case should be postponed until he is no longer President.
The judge’s ruling came in the defamation lawsuit pursued by Summer Zervos, a California woman who had been a contestant in 2005 on Trump’s reality TV show, The Apprentice. The lawsuit seeks a court order requiring Trump either to retract or apologize for all of the public statements she claims he made that defamed her, to pay damages to cover her personal loss, and to pay punitive damages designed to make an example of his conduct. The amount of damages would remain unspecified until a trial is held.
Judge Schechter recited a litany of statements that the lawsuit asserted Trump had made, especially when campaigning for the presidency and in Twitter messages specifically calling women who had accused him of sexual misconduct liars. The judge said that Ms Zervos had made a sufficient claim at this early point in the case that Trump’s statements, if a jury finds them to be false and that they were aimed at Ms Zervos personally,
would prove her defamation complaint.
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https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/state-judge-denies-legal-immunity-for-president