Already fighting dozens of indictments and an ongoing hush-money trial in New York, Donald Trump wants to head back to court over the movie that took Cannes by storm today.
“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” the Trump campaign’s Steven Cheung declared Monday over the The Apprentice film by director Ali Abbasi. Depicting the rise of Trump (Sebastian Stan) out of his father’s shadow thanks to the well-connected and ruthless Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the film just debuted in the South of France to an 11-minute standing ovation.
“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” spokesperson Cheung said of the Competition film. “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.”
Among the many incidents from Trump’s early years in the 1970s and 1980s to his The Art of the Deal fame, there is a scene in the film of the past and potentially future president raping his then-wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova). The first former Mrs. Trump, who died in 2022, had spoken of the sexual assault in the years following the couple’s divorce but later recanted the incident in the decades before her death.
The Apprentice also has a rather graphic view on Stan’s Trump getting hair treatment for his emerging bald spot and liposuction for his emerging girth. As long has been rumored in Trumpland over the decades, there is also some pill popping — in this case amphetamines.
Deadline’s Pete Hammond called The Apprentice “compelling” in his review today, but Trump 2024 seems only compelled to want to beat the picture into the ground.
“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 stated. “It belongs in a dumpster fire.”
Of course, The Apprentice is far from the first depiction of Trump, his family, acolytes and their alleged underhanded ways to appear on either the large or small screen. It also is worth noting that Trump and his minions threaten to sue critics or detractors all the time — a move straight out of the Roy Cohn playbook. Even when the former Celebrity Apprentice host does sue, he just as often quietly retracts the action or lets it die down the line.
In that context, it was seen as a near-certainty that Trump would lash out against The Apprentice with legal wrath — whether he files something, well, that’s another matter altogether.
What we do know is, with the prosecution having rested its case in the hush-money trial earlier Monday and a defense witness testifying, Donald Trump will be back in Judge Juan Merchan’s Manhattan courtroom Tuesday. Whether he crosses the line on the looming gag order or not — again — is TBD.
Lacking a distributor for now in this election year, The Apprentice is being sold at Cannes by CAA, WME and Rocket Science.