As if Donald Trump wanted to spend more time in court, his campaign is now threatening to sue the makers of The Apprentice after it was reported that the biopic, which premiered at Cannes on Monday, features a scene in which Sebastian Stan’s Trump violently rapes his first wife.
“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told The Daily Beast on Monday night. “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked.”
Cheung went on to blast the film as “election interference by Hollywood elites” on the same level as the criminal charges brought against Trump in four separate cases over the last year, which Cheung termed “the illegal Biden Trials.”
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“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, 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,” Cheung spat, “it belongs in a dumpster fire.”
The Ali Abbasi film, which reportedly opens with a disclaimer about the fictionalized nature of the events the movie depicts, shows a heavily made-over Stan as the rising mogul sexually assaulting Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova) after forcing her to the ground. An insider familiar with the project told Variety that the scene is “violent” and “uncomfortable.”
“Did I find your G-spot?” the film’s Trump asks afterward, according to The Guardian.
Ivana, who died in July 2022 at age 73, first accused her former husband of rape in a 1989 divorce deposition. Trump denied the allegations at the time, and Ivana later contradicted her own claims, walking them back in 2015 as “totally without merit.”
It isn’t just the ire of the former president that has been stoked by the movie, which does not yet have a distributor. Billionaire and noted Trump buddy Dan Snyder is reportedly hopping mad about the film’s depiction of his friend, which he assumed (for some reason) would be positive—a belief that led him to invest in the flick.
“Sources familiar with the back and forth say Snyder took issue with multiple aspects of the film and weighed in on what should be changed,” Variety reported on Monday morning.
By that point, Trump had not yet weighed in on The Apprentice. One source told Variety that a word from him—whether positive or negative—“would be like a gift.”
