The day after the Cannes Film Festival premiered “The Apprentice,” a biopic of Donald J. Trump, the former president hit back at the movie, calling it “malicious defamation” and threatening legal action.
“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” said Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign.
Directed by Ali Abbasi and written by the author Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” follows Trump (Sebastian Stan) as an ambitious young man seeking to establish himself as a real estate magnate. He finds a mentor in the wily lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and a first wife in the fashion model Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova), though Trump is willing to discard both once they’re no longer of use to him.
The film is hardly a flattering portrait of the former president, and includes scenes where the business mogul goes under the knife for liposuction and a scalp procedure to fix his bald spot. In its most controversial sequence, the Trump character sexually assaults his wife after she criticizes his looks. (Ivana, who died in 2022, accused Trump of rape in her divorce deposition, though she disavowed the claim later.)
Cheung said the Trump team plans to file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”
Though the threat could affect the release of “The Apprentice,” which currently has no distributor, Abbasi sounded unfazed at the film’s news conference on Tuesday.
“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people,” the director said. “They don’t talk about his success rate, though.”
