Trump Lawyers Send Cease-and-Desist Letter to ‘The Apprentice’ Producers to Block Sale
Lawyers for Donald Trump have sent a cease-and-desist letter to the producers of the biopic The Apprentice in an effort to prevent the sale and distribution of the film.
After the movie — which stars Sebastian Stan as the then-young real estate scion alongside Jeremy Strong as infamous Trump lawyer Roy Cohn — debuted earlier this week at the Cannes Film Festival, Team Trump threatened to file a lawsuit against The Apprentice for its unsavory and “pure fiction” portrayal of the mogul-turned-president.
With the film festival wrapping up and producers looking at distribution deals, Variety reported that Trump’s lawyers preemptively fired off the cease-and-desist letter, perhaps in an effort to scare off potential suitors.
“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,” Steven Cheung, Trump campaign communications director, said in a statement.
However, producers for The Apprentice — which shares its title with Trump’s long-running reality competition — said in a statement responding to the cease-and-desist letter (via Variety), “The film is a fair and balanced portrait of the former president. We want everyone to see it and then decide.”
Following The Apprentice’s premiere, director Ali Abbasi invited the notoriously litigious Trump to watch the movie himself before getting lawyers involved.
“I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike,” Abbasi said during a press conference. “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 afterward if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign.”
Abbasi added, “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?”