In the 1970s, lawyer Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump a simple principle for political fighting: attack, counterattack, and never apologize.
Trump uses this strategy in “The Apprentice,” an independent biopic about him that premiered this week at the Cannes Film Festival.
In a cease-and-desist letter, one of Trump’s lawyers threatened legal action over the film’s release, calling it “direct foreign interference in the U.S. election.”
“If you do not immediately cease all distribution and marketing of this defamatory prank, we will be obligated to pursue all appropriate legal remedies,” attorney David Warrington wrote in the letter obtained Friday by Business Insider.
The film depicts the rise of Trump as a New York real estate mogul in the 1970s and 1980s. Trump is played by Sebastian Stan, best known for his role in the Marvel films as an American soldier subjected to a body wash of brains by the Russians.
In the biopic, he becomes a New York power broker under the tutelage of Cohn (played by “Succession” actor Jeremy Strong), a colorful and controversial figure in American politics who made his name in 1950s as a Senate lawyer rooting out communists. Party members with U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy.
According to critics who have seen it, the biopic shows Trump undergoing liposuction, having surgery for hair loss, living with erectile dysfunction and rejecting his brother, who suffered from alcoholism. It also shows Trump raping his first wife, Ivana.
“The Apprentice,” produced by Dublin-based production company Tailored Films, is still seeking deals with distribution companies that would release it in U.S. theaters and on streaming services. Although a lawsuit against the filmmakers could fail, the threat of litigation could cripple those negotiations.
The threat of a lawsuit can also work the other way, creating a Streisand effect that draws more attention to a film that might otherwise have been relegated to the arthouse film market.
Warrington works for Dhillon Law, a firm that has represented Trump in several other cases — it raised nearly $900,000 from PACs funded by Trump donors last year — and has filed defamation lawsuits against journalists in the past.
The cease-and-desist letter is addressed to director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, who directed Business Insider to a statement attributed to the film’s producers.
“The film is a fair and balanced portrait of the former president,” say the producers. “We want everyone to see it and then decide.”
At a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival this week, Abbasi said the film is really about “how the system is built and how electricity flows through the system,” according to the Los Angeles Times, and did not seem concerned about a possible lawsuit.
“Everyone talks about his prosecution of a lot of people,” he said. “But they don’t talk about his success rate.”
In a statement released earlier this week, Strong compared Trump’s attacks on journalism to the rhetoric of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong — comparisons that Warrington called “disturbed.”
Warrington also criticized Sherman, a Vanity Fair reporter, for making what he called “racist, Marxist and otherwise derogatory statements” about Trump in the past.
“The Apprentice” was partly financed by outsiders, according to Warrington’s letter. The letter warns that releasing the film in the United States would amount to “foreign interference in our elections.”
“The film, released six months before the November 2024 election, aims to influence the 2024 election by falsely defaming President Trump,” he wrote.
Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, said the independently produced film “doesn’t even deserve a spot in the direct-to-DVD section of a discount bin at a movie store in discount prices that will be closed soon” and “This is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will take back the White House and beat the candidate of his choice because nothing they what they did didn’t work.”
“We have sent a cease and desist letter to address the blatantly false claims made by these fake filmmakers,” he said in a statement. “This bullshit is pure fiction that sensationalizes long-debunked lies.
businessinsider
