Donald Trump threatens legal action over rape scene in biopic

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has threatened legal action against the makers of a biopic charting his rise as a property tycoon.

From left, actors Martin Donovan and Maria Bakalova, director Ali Abbasi and actor Sebastian Stan in Cannes for a showing of the film The Apprentice. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has threatened legal action against the makers of a biopic charting his rise as a property tycoon.

The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi, had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this week, receiving an eight-minute standing ovation. But the film, which shows the young property developer raping his first wife, Ivana, has been called “garbage” by the former president’s campaign team.

Viewers in Cannes gasped at scenes that showed Mr Trump raping Ivana after she mocked his appearance. “You have a face like a f. king orange,” she tells him in the film. “You’re getting fat, you’re getting ugly and you’re getting bald.”

Ivana, who died in 2022, detailed the assault in a deposition during her divorce from Mr Trump in 1990 but later toned down the allegation, saying she had been “violated” but not in a “criminal sense”. Mr Trump dismissed her account as “obviously false”.

The Apprentice opens with a disclaimer that many of the events portrayed are fictionalised but Steven Cheung, Mr Trump’s chief campaign spokesman, said: “We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”

Saying that the film was “election interference by Hollywood elites”, he added: “It belongs in a dumpster fire.”

The film’s premiere coincided with Mr Trump’s criminal trial in New York over hush-money payments to conceal an alleged affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Mr Trump has pleaded not guilty.

Abbasi told reporters in Cannes: “Donald’s team should wait to watch the movie before they start suing us. I don’t necessarily think this is a movie that he would dislike.”

The Apprentice won plaudits for its portrayal of the young Trump. Writing in The Times, Kevin Maher described it as “the Donald Trump movie that you never knew you needed: full of compassionate feeling yet ruthless in analysis”.

THE TIMES