A spokesman for the Trump campaign declared that they would be “filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers” in response to The Apprentice, which shocked audiences at Cannes by showing the former president raping his first wife.
Following the global premiere of Ali Abbasi’s film on Monday, main spokeswoman for the Trump campaign Steven Cheung stated that legal action will be taken, in an interview with Variety.
He declared, “This garbage is pure fiction that sensationalises lies that have been proven false for a long time.” “This is election meddling by Hollywood elites, as with the illegal Biden Trials. They know that President Trump will retake the White House and defeat their preferred candidate because nothing they have tried has worked.”
Review of The Apprentice: A cartoon depiction of Donald Trump’s formative years
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“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation; it belongs in a dumpster fire and shouldn’t even be allowed to exist outside of the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a discount movie store that is about to close.”
At the Cannes film festival on Monday, Abbasi’s film—which stars Sebastian Stan as Trump and begins with a disclaimer that the events it depicts are fictionalized—received an eight-minute standing ovation.
Scenes showing Trump getting liposuction, undergoing scalp reduction surgery, and—most controversially—pushing his first wife, Ivana, to the ground and raping her reportedly caused audience members to gasp.
The sequence is a dramatisation of an incident from 1989 that was previously described in 1990 as part of the couple’s divorce proceedings.
In the movie, Trump becomes enraged when Ivana makes fun of his appearance. She remarks, “You look like a fucking orange.” The future president is then seen raping his wife and forcing her to the ground while saying, “You’re getting fat, you’re getting ugly, and you’re getting bald.” “Have I located your G-spot?In the movie, he queries.
Ivana Trump detailed a similar assault that she claimed happened soon after her husband’s scalp-reduction surgery in her 1990 deposition. Trump, according to her, shoved her to the ground and grabbed handfuls of her hair. Ivana first claimed that what happened was a rape, but she later recanted her account.
“On one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently towards me than he had during our marriage,” she added in a statement from 1993. I called this a rape because I felt violated as a woman, but I don’t want my comments to be taken literally or criminally.
Throughout the divorce process, Trump rejected his wife’s account of the event, calling it “obviously false.”
Alongside Jeremy Strong as Trump’s attorney and fixer Roy Cohn, The Apprentice also stars Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump.
“In sketching out his pre-White-House career, The Apprentice worryingly moves us back to the old Donald, the joke Donald who had a cameo in Home Alone 2 and of course his own hit TV show, the joke that is now beyond unfunny,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in his two-star review for the Guardian. It seems unnecessary and clumsy.
