"The Apprentice": the film Trump doesn't want you to see
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Maria Bakalova (as Ivana Trump) and Sebastian Stan (as Donald Trump) in "The Apprentice" film. Photo: Pief Weyman
A new movie about young Donald Trump hits theaters Friday, despite Trump trying to block its release. It paints an unflattering portrait of his rise as a real estate mogul — and Republicans are calling it election interference.
Why it matters: "The Apprentice" film is a dramatization of Trump's tutelage under controversial lawyer/political fixer Roy Cohn — and includes scenes of Trump's character allegedly raping his first wife, Ivana, and having scalp reduction and liposuction procedures.
- The scenes are based on Ivana Trump's divorce deposition in 1990, in which she detailed a 1989 assault.
- She later walked back her claim that she was raped, and said instead that she "felt violated."
- Trump has denied the allegations.
What we're watching: In the film, Trump initially is portrayed as a bumbling but principled young guy who doesn't know how to handle the federal government's lawsuit against his family business for allegedly discriminating against Black tenants.
- He seeks help from Cohn, who teaches him three rules that ring familiar to the Trump whom Americans know today: "attack, attack, attack," "deny everything," and "never admit defeat."
- Trump's character becomes a brutish Machiavellian tycoon who builds a hotel next to Grand Central Station when the rest of New York was in an economic crisis in the 1970s and rushes into investing in Atlantic City casinos, all while making hyperbolic statements to media.
- "The Apprentice" takes a crack at private moments too, such as his courtship of Ivana Trump and his grappling with the death of his older brother Freddy from alcoholism.
Sebastian Stan is cast as Trump, Maria Bakalova as Ivana and Jeremy Strong as Cohn.
- Vanity Fair journalist Gabriel Sherman wrote the "fact-based" script, which stems from his research, biographies of Trump and Cohn, video from the 1970s and 1980s, and interviews with people who knew Trump as a child.
The other side: Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to Axios: "This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked."
- Cheung called the film — which opens just 25 days before the Nov. 5 election — "pure malicious defamation" and "election interference by Hollywood elites right before November."
- After the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Trump's lawyers sent the filmmakers a cease and desist letter in an attempt to block the release.
What they're saying: At a preview screening in D.C. on Sunday, Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi defended the inclusion of the rape scene.
- "Our job was to depict him as a human being in a fair way," Abbasi said.
- "[It] was a really important turning point for a really important relationship in his life, a last thread that connects him to humanity."
