A former contestant on the Apprentice, Summer Zervos, on Friday accused Donald Trump of groping or aggressively kissing her on two separate occasions in 2007, when she met the businessman privately for what she thought were going to be discussions about job opportunities.

Often speaking through tears, Zervos read a prepared statement in the Los Angeles offices of her lawyer, Gloria Allred. Earlier on Friday another woman, Kristin Anderson, told the Washington Post Trump had groped her at a New York nightclub in the early 1990s.

The accusations – which Trump later denied, saying in a statement he “vaguely remembered” Zervos but “never met her at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago” – were the latest in a wave of such claims against the Republican nominee for president. The accusations have been made following the release last Friday of remarks recorded during an appearance by Trump on Access Hollywood TV show in 2005, in which he said his fame meant he could kiss women without consent and “grab them by the pussy”.

Trump has angrily rejected all such accusations, which also followed a presidential debate last Sunday in which he said he had never done the things he boasted of in the Access Hollywood tape, remarks he said were merely “locker-room talk”.

At a rally in Florida on Thursday, Trump called his accusers “horrible, horrible liars”, implied that one was not attractive enough for him to approach, and portrayed the allegations as part of a vast establishment conspiracy against him, the Hillary Clinton campaign and the media working in concert.

His words earned a stinging rebuke from first lady Michelle Obama, but at a Friday rally in North Carolina he said of one accuser, Jessica Leeds: “Yeah, I’m gonna go after you. Believe me – she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you. Man. You don’t know – that would not be my first choice.”

On Friday, Zervos said that in 2007, Trump greeted her and said goodbye to her at a meeting in his New York office with a kiss on the lips. Brushing it off as his form of greeting, she said, she agreed to meet Trump for dinner later that year when he traveled to Los Angeles.



At a Beverly Hills hotel, Trump’s security guard led her to a bungalow where he was staying. When she was inside, Zervos claimed, Trump greeted her with an open-mouthed, aggressive kiss while grabbing her shoulder , and put his hand on her breast. Several times, she claimed, she pushed him away and indicated he should stop.

When Zervos resisted Trump’s advances, she said, he tried to lead her toward the bedroom of the bungalow. “Let’s lay down and watch some telly-telly,” she claimed he said. When she said, “C’mon man, get real,” she claimed, he replied, “Get real,” and thrust his genitals at her.

Zervos, who was an Orange County restaurant owner when she appeared on the fifth season of the the Apprentice, said she was making her accusations public because of Trump’s claims that he had never touched a woman without her consent.

In his statement, Trump said: “I vaguely remember Ms Zervos as one of the many contestants on The Apprentice over the years. 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 14 April of this year asking that I visit her restaurant in California.”

Trump went on to claim “the media is now creating a theater of absurdity that threatens to tear our democratic process apart and poison the minds of the American public”, and said “in the coming days” he would “address our nation in a more personal way”, bypassing “the unethical press that wants to see their candidate elected”.

Late Friday night, the Trump campaign also released a statement from Zervos’s first cousin, John Barry, who described himself as “completely shocked and bewildered”. He said: “I think Summer wishes she could still be on reality TV, and in an effort to get that back she’s saying all of these negative things about Mr Trump.

“That’s not how she talked about him before. I can only imagine that Summer’s actions today are nothing more than an attempt to regain the spotlight at Mr Trump’s expense, and I don’t think it reflects well.” The Trump campaign released an email that Trump referred to in his earlier statement.

In addition to the women who have emerged to contradict Trump’s claims to never having acted on his words, a woman named Jill Harth has maintained for many years that Trump forcibly assaulted her in 1992 at his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago. In July, Harth told her story to the Guardian.

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Zervos said once she had refused Trump’s advances several times, he seemed to transform and to only want to discuss her business goals. “I wondered if the sexual behavior was some kind of test and whether or not I had passed,” she said. It was obvious to her, she said, that Trump still wanted to discuss a job, as he told her to meet him at one of his golf courses the next morning.

“Even though Mr Trump had sexually harassed me, I still wanted to get a job in the Trump Organization,” she said. Because she had rejected Trump’s sexual advances, she said her thinking went, the job would be on merit.

Zervos went to the golf course and was instead greeted by the club’s manager, who gave her a tour. The manager later offered her a job, she said, but for half of the salary she told Trump she was seeking. She called Trump to say she felt she was being punished for refusing to have a sexual relationship with him.

Trump, she claimed, instructed her never to call his personal number again.

Allred said she could provide corroborating evidence to Zervos’s claim, although she declined to do so on the spot. She said she had spoken with two people whom Zervos had called to confide about Trump’s behavior. In her prepared statement, Zervos said she had told both her parents and a friend about her encounters with Trump.

A timeline of Donald Trump's alleged sexual misconduct: who, when and what Read more

Zervos noted that she is a Republican. Throughout the presidential campaign, she said, she has always paid Trump compliments when people asked her, based on her experience on The Apprentice, what he was really like. But in private, she claimed, she sent him an email through his campaign explaining how he had hurt her.

“I had no idea about his behavior with other women,” she said.

Allred said she had been contacted by “many more women” who were not sure they wished to go public with their accusations, presumably against Trump.

Speaking tearfully, Zervos told the press that she decided to go public because: “I want to be able to sleep, when I’m 70, at night.”

“Mr Trump, when I met you I was so impressed with your talents that I wanted to be like you,” she read from her statement. “Instead, you treated me like an object to be hit upon … Today I feel you were interested in me because you wanted to have a sexual relationship with me and for no other reason.

“You do not have the right to treat women as sexual objects just because you are a star,” she concluded.