
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign is threatening to sue the makers of the controversial biopic “The Apprentice.”
Trump Campaign Vows To Sue ‘The Apprentice’ Filmmakers Over Scene Of Ivana Trump Rape By Then Real Estate Mogul https://t.co/2wJxPKyLra pic.twitter.com/nOWxPHQlNB
— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) May 21, 2024
In a statement to Variety after the film’s debut at Cannes International Film Festival on Monday, the Trump campaign’s chief spokesperson Steven Cheung stated, “We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers. This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked.”
“As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked,” he said further.
Slamming the film as “malicious defamation,” Cheung argued that it “should not see the light of day and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.”
“The Apprentice,” directed by Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi, has been met with mixed reviews. While it has been praised on one end, it has also been criticized as a vapid cartoon depiction of Trump.
The most controversial part of the film is a scene that portrays Trump assaulting and forcefully sleeping with his ex-wife, Ivana Trump.
In the scene, the former president is shown reacting in fury after Ivana insults him, saying, “You have a face like a fucking orange. You’re getting fat, you’re getting ugly, and you’re getting bald.”
Trump is then shown forcing Ivana to the floor, forcefully sleeping with her and then asking, “Did you find your G-spot?”
Ivana, who died in 2022, accused Trump, a then-real estate mogul, of a similar assault in a 1990 divorce deposition, saying that Trump pushed her to the floor and pulled out some strands of her hair. She also suggested that he slept with her forcefully after that, but said later that the forced intercourse never happened. According to her, the incident made her feel “violated” but not forcefully slept with “in a literal or criminal sense.”
Trump denied Ivana’s assertions, dismissing them as “obviously false.”