The Daily Fuckup

New York’s highest court cleared one procedural hurdle in the Summer Zervos defamation case on March 30, 2021, when it dismissed Donald Trump’s appeal as moot after he left the presidency. The decision did not decide the merits of Zervos’s claims or Trump’s defenses. It simply left the lower court rulings in place, which meant the lawsuit could continue.

Zervos, a former contestant on "The Apprentice," sued Trump after he publicly denied her allegations that he had sexually assaulted her and said her account was false. Trump argued that the state court should not be able to force a sitting president to defend a private civil case while in office. New York courts rejected that argument before he left office, and the appeal reached the Court of Appeals after he was no longer president.

The appellate court said the question over whether a sitting president could be compelled to give videotaped testimony in the case no longer presented a live dispute. In practical terms, that left Trump without the temporary presidential-immunity argument he had used to slow the case. The underlying defamation suit was not over; it remained available to move through the trial court process.

The ruling was another reminder that leaving office did not erase pending litigation from Trump’s calendar. It also showed the narrower point at issue in this round of the fight: the court was not blessing either side’s factual claims, but declining to rule on an appeal that no longer affected the parties in the same way once Trump was out of office.