Despite trudging through a ninth year in which the media claim to deplore President Donald Trump, this ninth year continues to prove the press still cannot get enough of him. And it’s not just the politicos in Washington covering his third consecutive presidential campaign or the paparazzi in Manhattan documenting the Republican’s first criminal trial.
Over in France, the entertainment tabloids have boasted that The Apprentice, a biopic of Trump’s early entrepreneurial career and collaboration with the late Roy Cohn, scored an eight-minute long standing ovation after its Cannes Film Festival debut. The Hollywood Reporter lauded Sebastian Stan, who plays the billionaire as a rising star real estate mogul, as “excellent” even if Trump haters consider him “a touch too likable” and “more nuanced” than contemporary parodies.
But Trump, the man, is furious at the film, and based on the reporting of one specific scene, the former president should be.
Trump’s first wife, Ivana, is played by a fellow Eastern European beauty, Maria Bakalova. While the film depicts Trump’s initial attraction to and courtship of the clever young Ivana, it also reportedly depicts the breakdown of their marriage coming to a horrifying climax in what Variety describes as a rape scene.
“In the controversial scene, Ivana playfully presents a book to her husband about the merits of a female orgasm,” Tatiana Siegel reports. “But the interaction between the two turns dark quickly, as an uninterested Trump tells his wife that he is no longer attracted to her. They argue, and then Trump throws her to the ground. As he angrily thrusts himself into her, an icy Trump sneers: ‘Is that your G spot? Did I find it?'”
In the post-#MeToo era, the folly of such a fictionalization isn’t just that Donald Trump denies ever raping anyone. It’s rather that despite Hollywood’s demand that we believe women, The Apprentice evidently does not believe Ivana Trump, who went to her grave maintaining that her ex-husband never raped her.
In a 1990 deposition during the explosive divorce proceedings between the Trumps, Ivana reportedly did accuse Donald of raping her, but we only have a second-hand version of this anecdote relayed by biographer Harry Hurt III, who obtained the deposition, since lost to us or sealed from us, for his 1993 book. In Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, Hurt said Ivana alleged that Donald berated her after a painful scalp reduction surgery and began to tear at her hair and clothes.
“Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months,” Hurt wrote. “Ivana is terrified. It is a violent assault. According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.'”
But by the time the book was published, Ivana publicly denied Hurt’s version of events.
“During a deposition given by me in connection with my matrimonial case, I stated that my husband had raped me,” said Ivana, who had finalized her divorce by then. “On one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
When the press rediscovered the story during Trump’s first presidential run in 2015, Ivana stood firm in her denial of “comments attributed to me from nearly 30 years ago at a time of very high tension during my divorce from Donald,” calling the rape allegation “totally without merit.” Ivana died in 2022 after more than 30 years of maintaining Donald had not raped her.
Now, other women have alleged that Trump groped, harassed, and raped them, allegations he has continuously denied. But The Apprentice doesn’t choose to depict an alleged rape denied by the accused — it graphically illustrates an assault denied by both the accused and the alleged accuser. As the Trump campaign has correctly lamented, it’s a weaponization of art to smear a potent presidential candidate, but it’s also a denial of a dead woman’s right to tell her own story.
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Given the frequent absence of any forensic evidence, rape is a notoriously difficult crime to prove, and for the sake of defamation law, it’s even harder to disprove. As evidenced by the countless #MeToo cases bouncing around from court to court, rape is even harder to prove or disprove when an alleged encounter took place multiple decades prior. For that reason alone, the Trump campaign will likely be on legally shaky ground if it chooses to challenge The Apprentice on defamatory grounds in court, and it’s also why the precedent set in the judgment against Trump in the E. Jean Carroll civil case was so damaging for First Amendment protections.
But as a purely ethical question, it seems wrong to pantomime the rape and abuse of a dead woman when she claimed such offenses were not the truth, let alone “her” truth.