Donald Trump vs. ‘The Apprentice’
The former president and his friends are attempting to stifle a biopic that portrays his relationship with his infamous mentor, Roy Cohn.
THERE WAS NO REASON EVER TO EXPECT that this movie would be met with smooth sailing. But The Apprentice is encountering especially rough waters on its way to trying to explain the inexplicable—how Donald Trump turned out the way he did.
The film, by Danish-Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi, is about a young Trump’s relationship in the 1970s and 1980s with political fixer Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong of Succession), who mentored him in the art of brutality. It premiered last month at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a customarily lengthy standing ovation. The filmmakers are currently in talks with Briarcliff, an independent U.S. distributor interested in the rights, and if the deal goes through, they will be able to release the movie before the election.
Trump (Sebastian Stan) is portrayed as self-centered and vain, getting liposuction to remove his love handles and scalp-reduction surgery for his bald spot. And the version shown at Cannes includes a scene in which Trump, upset about the pain of this latter procedure, rapes his first wife, Ivana (played by Maria Bakalova of Borat fame). The scene is so shocking it “drew audible gasps from the Cannes premiere crowd,” relayed the Hollywood Reporter.
The Apprentice also depicts Cohn blackmailing a Justice Department official with photographs of him “frolicking with cabana boys in Cancun,” as the Variety reviewer put it, describing an episode that may not have occurred.
Reviews of the film from its Cannes showing were largely but not overwhelmingly positive. But the reaction from Team Trump was unequivocal. The former president’s campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung vowed to sue, saying, “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked.” He added, for good measure, “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.”
And, true to form, Cheung chucked The Apprentice into the Trump campaign’s sackful of grievances, writing: “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.”
ACCORDING TO THE NEW YORK TIMES, Trump’s lawyers have issued cease-and-desist letters to the filmmakers claiming the movie is “direct foreign interference in America’s elections” because Abbasi is Iranian Danish and some of the film’s funding comes from Denmark, Ireland, and Canada. “If you do not immediately cease all publication and marketing of the movie, President Trump will pursue every appropriate legal means to hold you accountable for this gross violation of President Trump and the American people’s rights,” one such letter read.
But Michael J. Niborski, a Los Angeles-based lawyer who specializes in media defamation cases, often representing film and television clients, tells me that Team Trump “has virtually no chance of actually stopping the movie from being released” by suing for defamation. “As you can imagine, getting a piece of media banned in advance is next to impossible under the First Amendment.”
Once the film is released, says Niborski, who also teaches courses on entertainment and media law advocacy at Loyola Law School, Trump would be free to “bring a defamation lawsuit against the filmmakers and the writers and whoever else he chooses,” but it would be subject to the high standard of proof set for public figures in a 1964 Supreme Court case, New York Times v. Sullivan. The filmmakers would not only need to have gotten things wrong but be proven to have done so with “actual malice”—that is, with “reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
And for his part, Abbasi, in a press conference in Cannes after the Trump camp announced its intention to sue, displayed no trace of actual malice. He actually seemed eager to give Trump a chance to appreciate the film.
“I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie that he would dislike,” he said. “I don’t necessarily think he would like it. I think he would be surprised, you know? And like I’ve said before, I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening and have a chat afterwards.”
Asked whether he was “scared” about being sued, Abbasi shrugged: “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people. They don’t talk about his success rate, though.” The audience laughed and clapped.
As the BBC noted, The Apprentice “begins with a disclaimer that many of its events are fictionalized,” which Niborski says does offer some protection. In an interview with Vanity Fair before the premiere, Abbasi said his goal was “to do a punk rock version of a historical movie [and not] get too anal about details and what’s right and what’s wrong.”
But questions about veracity are never irrelevant to a discussion of films that contain scenes that might be seen as fact, especially when their subjects are still with us. The truth matters, even when it comes to Donald Trump, to whom truth matters not at all.
IN A DIVORCE DEPOSITION IN 1990, Ivana did accuse Trump of raping her while in a fury over the pain of his scalp reduction surgery, saying “Your fucking doctor has ruined me.” He allegedly threw her to the ground, pulled out chunks of her hair, and forced himself upon her. But in 1993, after details of the incident were recounted in a book, Ivana retracted her earlier account, saying:
On one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a “rape,” but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.
In 2015, Ivana reaffirmed her denial, calling the rape allegation she made “totally without merit,” adding, “Donald and I are the best of friends and together have raised three children that we love and are very proud of.” Ivana Trump died in 2022.
Niborski says the filmmakers are “allowed to rely on source material that has some air of credibility, and of course his former wife’s description of this in a deposition is a reliable source.” The fact that she later recanted “could create a little bit of a problem” for the filmmakers by providing a basis for Trump to argue that this showed “reckless disregard” for the truth. But filing a defamation suit would open the former president up to discovery, providing unwelcome opportunities to explore Ivana’s earlier account.
As for the scene depicting Cohn, a closeted gay man, blackmailing a Justice Department official with pictures of him “frolicking with cabana boys,” this may be a clearer case of fictionalization. David Cay Johnston, the author of The Making of Donald Trump, tells me he has “not heard that story,” as he probably would have if it had a basis in fact. (Niborski says there is no risk of a defamation action here because Cohn is deceased.)
Of course, the filmmakers have artistic license to use this almost clichéd blackmail scene to convey the deeply corrupt nature of Cohn’s mentorship of young Donald. After all, they say right up front that some things in the film were made up. And movies do this all the time.
But a defamation lawsuit is not the only potential problem The Apprentice faces. As Puck’s Matthew Belloni has reported, another threat may be coming from within: Around $5 million of the film’s small budget comes from an investment by Dan Snyder, the billionaire former owner of the Washington Commanders. Belloni writes that Snyder saw the film before its debut at Cannes “and hated it”—Variety mentions the rape scene as having particularly galled him. And while he can’t cancel its release, his approval is a requirement for any stateside distribution deal, such as the one being negotiated with Briarcliff. As Belloni writes, this means Snyder could “slow-walk the film out of a U.S. release.”
Snyder, a donor to Trump’s 2016 inaugural committee and 2020 presidential campaign, invested in The Apprentice “because he was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president.” As if.
Whether because of Snyder’s interference or because of the tough market, delays in securing an American release have apparently gotten under the skin of Abbasi, who on June 3 posted out his frustration: “Its not a fucking sequel nor is it a fucking remake. Its called #The Apprentice and for some reason certain [powerful] people in your country don’t want you to see it!!!”
“There are only a few companies who can release that movie,” an unnamed distribution executive told Variety. “Any company who has a ‘for sale’ sign or that has the intention of merging [or] buying someone will be hesitant to do it, as there is a chance [Trump’s] regulators will be punitive if he’s elected.”
“After all,” as Michelle Goldberg noted last Friday in the New York Times, “when Trump was president, his Department of Justice tried to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, the company that owned CNN,” in what was “widely seen as retaliation for CNN coverage that displeased Trump.”
The AT&T merger with Time Warner went through in the end; there are limits to Trump’s power, even if he ends up being re-elected. Then, too, the market is very hard on lower-budget independent films like The Apprentice. Even Francis Ford Coppola struggled for months to find a U.S. distributor for his latest film, his largely self-funded $120 million magnum opus, Megalopolis, which also drew a protracted standing ovation following its premiere at Cannes. Some of the barriers to distribution Abbasi’s movie has faced are common to his industry these days.
But to the extent that threats, promises of retribution, and hostile dealings with powerful investors may be having an effect on the movie’s fortunes, it appears that Trump has learned well from his mentor.
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