sed command escaping backslash "/"

Hello friends/'unix experts',

i have a file as below

 
cat sample.txt
 
satish
/rakesh/
sandhya
/sandeep/

i have to replace /rakesh/ with rakesh, how can i do it with sed, i tried below code but its throwing errors

 
sed -e 's/'"\(/rakesh/)\"'/\1rakesh/g' sample.txt

please help me.............

sed 's!/rakesh/!rakesh!g' sample.txt

or

sed '/rakesh/s!/!!g' sample.txt