Quote:A lawyer for former president Donald Trump has accused the filmmakers of “The Apprentice” of defamation and illegal election interference in a cease and desist letter obtained by The Washington Post.
The docudrama, which premiered to a huge standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, stars Sebastian Stan as the future president and tracks Trump’s rise to power and malevolence as a New York real estate mogul in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It depicts Trump as a rapist, and has been broadly attacked by the former president’s lawyers as a politically-motivated fabrication.
“The Movie presents itself as a factual biography of Mr. Trump, yet nothing could be further from the truth,” Trump attorney David A. Warrington wrote in the letter, sent Wednesday to the film’s director and writer. “It is a concoction of lies that repeatedly defames President Trump and constitutes direct foreign interference in America’s elections.”
Much of the three-page letter is spent attacking people involved with the movie for previous statements about Trump. It notes that Jeremy Strong, who plays Trump’s old political fixer Roy Cohn, compared the former president’s rhetoric to that of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Joseph Goebbels in a statement from the actor that director Ali Abbasi read aloud at a Cannes news conference. It accuses screenwriter Gabriel Sherman — a political journalist at Vanity Fair — of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” for his own attacks on the president.
The letter also cites Abbasi’s Iranian-Danish heritage and the film’s funding from countries such as Denmark, Ireland and Canada.
“It is illegal for foreign nationals to contribute or donate money in connection with a federal election,” Warrington wrote, citing Bluman v. Federal Election Commission, an early 2010s election-finance case whose relevance to “The Apprentice” is unclear.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/202...st-cannes/
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