Left: Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks at the National Guard Association of the United States’ 146th General Conference, Monday, Aug. 26, 2024, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster). Right: actor Sebastian Stan portraying Trump in The Apprentice movie (Briarcliff Entertainment/YouTube).
Former President Donald Trump early Monday blasted the “FAKE and CLASSLESS” movie “The Apprentice” and called it “defamatory,” this after prior threats to sue were disregarded by the filmmaker as bluster.
“The Apprentice” biopic, which premiered in New York just days ago, stars Sebastian Stan as a younger Trump and Jeremy Strong, of “Succession” fame, as Roy Cohn, the fixer Trump praised even in recent years as a great lawyer who “did not take notes.”
After midnight Monday on Truth Social, Trump first blasted the Briarcliff Entertainment film as “FAKE,” questioned whether the filmmakers even had the “right” to name it “The Apprentice” — given the NBC reality TV show he starred in of the same name — and called the production “defamatory” considering that “widely discredited” Vanity Fair special correspondent Gabe Sherman wrote it.
The Truth Social post, in full:
A FAKE and CLASSLESS Movie written about me, called, The Apprentice (Do they even have the right to use that name without approval?), will hopefully “bomb.” It’s a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” My former wife, Ivana, was a kind and wonderful person, and I had a great relationship with her until the day she died. The writer of this pile of garbage, Gabe Sherman, a lowlife and talentless hack, who has long been widely discredited, knew that, but chose to ignore it. So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us. MAGA2024!
The mention of his late first wife Ivana Trump appears to suggest that any theoretical defamation suit could focus on a sexual assault scene in the film, based on a decades-old divorce deposition in which Ivana made a rape allegation she would later disavow as her ex-husband ran for president the first time.
In May, after the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and the Trump campaign threatened to sue over “pure malicious defamation” and “blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” director Ali Abbasi said publicly that he wasn’t worried.
“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people. They don’t talk about his success rate, though,” Abbasi reportedly said, commenting on why he moved forward with the film when others were apparently scared off by the threat of litigation.
Sherman, the film writer, defended his work days ago during an appearance on CNN, saying it had been in the works for several years and in search of funding, and that the release of it prior to the 2024 election was a coincidence.
“It’s not a hit job,” Sherman said.
In a recent interview, actor Jeremy Strong specifically defended the Ivana Trump scene as supported by the “historical record.”
“It was given in a testimony under oath at risk of perjury. And then rolled back many years later, no longer under oath. So I guess let everybody else be the judge of the veracity of that,” Strong said, according to the Telegraph.
Law&Crime reached out to the Trump campaign to ask if the former president does, in fact, plan to sue.
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