Summer Zervos, former ‘Apprentice’ contestant, to sue Donald Trump for defamation

Summer Zervos has filed a defamation lawsuit against President-elect Donald Trump, lawyer Gloria Allred said Tuesday.

Zervos, a former contestant on Trump’s reality show The Apprentice, is one of over a dozen women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct.

The announcement of the lawsuit comes just days before Trump’s inauguration as president.

READ MORE: Here are the sexual misconduct allegations facing the Republican candidate

The lawsuit says Trump used his position as a presidential candidate to defame Zervos, when he called her a liar for her accusations of misconduct. Late last year, she asked Trump to retract his words, but he never did.

“No one is above the law, including the president-elect, soon to be president of the United States,” Allred said in a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

1:53 ‘No one is above the law, including the President-elect’: lawyer

Allred said that after he was hit with accusations of sexual misconduct, Trump “knowingly, intentionally, and maliciously threw” Zervos and other accusers “under the bus” and called them “liars.”

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Zervos said she would be willing to retract the lawsuit if the Republican president-elect retracts the statement he made and acknowledges that her accusations are true.

WATCH: Gloria Allred said a defamation lawsuit filed could force NBC to turn over tapes from the show.

1:20 Trump defamation lawsuit could force ‘Apprentice’ tapes to be released

Allred said that she “would fully expect Mr. Trump’s attorneys will be fighting this with everything they have.”

“We are going to fight this fight, we are going to fight this battle, because Ms. Zervos is the right one to fight for,” Allred said.

Zervos, who competed on the television show’s fifth season in 2006, gave a news conference with Allred in October, saying Trump tried to get her to lie down on a bed with him when she met him in 2007 to discuss a possible job.

“He then asked me to sit next to him. I complied. He then grabbed my shoulder and began kissing me again very aggressively and placed his hand on my breast,” said Zervos.

During the campaign, Trump’s team released a statement calling the allegations “false and ridiculous.”

WATCH: Donald Trump says women who accused him of sexual misconduct are ‘horrible, horrible liars’ (Oct. 2016) 

0:57 ‘She would not be my first choice’: Trump on woman accusing him with assault on plane

• ‘She would not be my first choice’: Trump on woman accusing him with assault on plane
• Trump calls accusers ‘phoney’; questions lack of witnesses
• ‘Never happened, never would happen’: Trump on accusers who claim sexual assault, misconduct
• ‘I have no idea who these women are’: Trump on accusations by women who claim he assaulted them
• Attorney Gloria Allred to Donald Trump: You should be ashamed of yourself

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Zervos is part of a group of women who came forward with accusations after the release of the now infamous tape of Trump making obscene comments about women — which he has dismissed as “locker room talk.”

*with files from Reuters