Amazon Prime Video picks up Melania Trump documentary due out later this year

Amazon Prime Video has licensed an upcoming documentary about new first lady Melania Trump that is expected to be released later this year, an Amazon MGM Studios spokesperson confirmed to NBC News.

In a statement, the spokesperson said filming for the documentary began last month. The project lists Melania Trump and Fernando Sulichin as executive producers. Brett Ratner will direct the film – he co-owns RatPac Entertainment, which was once associated with former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

“We are thrilled to share this truly unique story with our millions of customers around the world,” said the » added the Amazon spokesperson.

The announcement comes just months after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in November, and just two weeks before the couple returns to the White House for a second term.

The relationship between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ businesses and Trump has come under scrutiny in recent weeks due to a perceived new friendliness between the two men.

Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021, but he still serves as executive chairman of the company. The billionaire also owns The Washington Post newspaper and Blue Origin, an aerospace company.

During Trump’s first term, there were a number of high-profile clashes between the then-president and Bezos or his companies.

For example, in a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon alleged that Trump launched “behind-the-scenes attacks” against the company. The company claimed that the then-president’s public and private attacks caused it to lose a major cloud services contract for Amazon Web Services.

Last week, a Post cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, publicly said she quit her job at the paper after being blocked from publishing a satirical cartoon about tech CEOs, including Bezos, kneeling before the president-elect.

Other CEOs in the cartoon, Telnaes said, included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong.

Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman and others have each pledged to donate $1 million to the president-elect’s inauguration committee.

Washington Post editorial page editor David Shipley pushed back on the idea that Telnaes’ design was abandoned because of Bezos.

In a statement to CNBC, Shipley said: “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same subject as the cartoon and had already scheduled the publication of another column – this one this being a satire. The only prejudice was against repeating a year.

Telnaes’ revelation came just months after Post readers and current and former staffers criticized the paper for announcing it would no longer support presidential candidates.

In their own reporting, Post reporters wrote that the paper’s editorial board had decided to support Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. The same article reports that Bezos himself made the decision to stop supporting the candidates.

In an article published a few days later on the newspaper’s website, Bezos wrote: “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voter in Pennsylvania will say, “I accept Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. In reality, presidential endorsements create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending it is a decision in principle, and it’s the right one.”

Bezos did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News about whether he was involved in securing the license for the upcoming Melania Trump documentary.