Donald Trump is decidedly unhappy with his portrayal in a film that received an eight-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. The former president and presidential front-runner is vowing to take legal action.
According to Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung, the presumptive Republican nominee intends to sue the filmmakers behind “The Apprentice,” a film that follows Sebastian Stan as a young Trump creating his real estate empire amid the seedy streets of 1970s and 80s New York City. It co-stars Jeremy Strong from “Succession” as the future president's real-life former attorney and mentor, Roy Cohn.
Cheung revealed that a lawsuit would be forthcoming over “blatantly false assertions.” In the film, Stan is portrayed as raping Maria Bakalova, who plays Trump's first wife, Ivana.
Ivana accused Donald of sexual assault in her divorce deposition, but she later recanted.
“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” Cheung said in a statement shared with The Hill. “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.”
“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, it belongs in a dumpster fire,” he added.
At a press conference in Cannes, director Ali Abbasi seemed unconcerned about Trump's threat.
The Hill has more:
At Monday's premiere, Abbassi recalled, “When we did this movie, everyone said, ‘Why do you want to make a movie with Trump? You know, if you want to tell something about the world, do it in a nice way, in a metaphorical way.'”
But, he said to applause, “There is no nice, metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism. The messy way, the banal way, is only the way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, at its own level.”
“It's not going to be pretty,” he added, “but I think the problem with the world is that the good people have been quiet for too long.”
Hours before its Monday premiere, Variety reported that Dan Snyder, the billionaire investor in the film, was not happy with its final creative direction. Sources told the outlet that Snyder, the former owner of the Washington Commanders and a friend of Trump, invested in the biopic through film company Kinematics because he thought it would be a flattering depiction of the former president.
Snyder flew into a rage after seeing a cut of the film in February, and lawyers from Kinematics went to war with the filmmakers in a failed attempt to stop the film's release. Kinematics President Emanuel Nuñez later stated that the dispute between the company and filmmakers was unrelated to Snyder.
