Upcoming Donald Trump biopic, The Apprentice depicts him as a rapist

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Donald Trump is depicted as a rapist who assaulted his first wife, Ivana, in a new biopic, The Apprentice, which has its world premiere in competition at this year’s Cannes film festival on Monday. Directed by the Iranian-Danish film-maker Ali Abbasi, the drama provides a fictionalised account of a 1989 incident that was previously detailed in the couple’s divorce proceedings.

The scene, which occurs near the end of The Apprentice, depicts Trump reacting with fury after Ivana disparages his physical appearance. “You have a face like a fricking orange,” she tells him. “You’re getting fat, you’re getting ugly, and you’re getting bald.” The future president is then shown forcing his wife to the floor and raping her. “Did I find your G-spot?” he asks in the film.

In her 1990 divorce deposition, Ivana Trump described a similar assault that she said occurred shortly after her husband’s scalp-reduction surgery. She claimed that Trump pushed her to the floor and pulled out handfuls of her hair. Ivana initially described what followed as a rape, but later walked back on the claim. In a 1993 statement, she said, “On one occasion during 1989, Mr Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently towards me than he had during our marriage. As a woman I felt violated … I referred to this as a rape, but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

During the couple’s divorce proceedings, Trump dismissed his wife’s version of the incident as “obviously false”.

Scripted by the bestselling non-fiction author Gabriel Sherman, The Apprentice casts Romanian-born actor Sebastian Stan as Trump and Maria Bakalova as Ivana, while the Succession star Jeremy Strong plays the brutish New York lawyer Roy Cohn. The film is a twisted rites-of-passage drama that shows Cohn schooling the young Trump in the dark arts of American business. One of the key rules, Cohn tells Trump, is: “Admit nothing, deny everything.”

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