About halfway through The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s divisive biopic about the early career of Donald Trump takes a jarring turn that will inevitably alienate some viewers. Up until this point, the plot has largely focused on the relationship between Sebastian Stan’s Trump and his mentor, notorious prosecutor Roy Cohn, whom Jeremy Strong plays as if Cohn invented the sinister gay trope (honestly, he might have). Written by Gabriel Sherman, The Apprentice dramatizes actual events, including the scene in question, when Trump sexually assaults his then-wife, Ivana Trump (Maria Bakalova). It’s an intensely unsettling scene that feels crucial to the film’s narrative structure and impact – clearly, I can’t stop thinking about it weeks later – but is it necessary?
Perhaps naively, I wasn’t expecting a graphic sexual assault scene in the middle of The Apprentice, but given the subject, I shouldn’t have been surprised. It happens about halfway through the movie, when Ivana attempts to recapture the intimacy in her marriage to Donald, whose insecurities have fully curdled into repulsive misogyny. Ivana gives her husband a self-help book about intimacy, and he rejects her, explaining that he’s no longer attracted to her at all. They get into a heated argument that turns physical, and Donald violently sexually assaults his wife. That description may seem redundant, but given that scenes of sexual assault have become less frequent in movies and TV, and the ones we do see are relatively tame, it’s apt.
Like almost everything else in The Apprentice, this scene is based on an actual event. Sherman, the film’s screenwriter and a professional journalist, told Entertainment Weekly that he had the script vetted by his lawyers in the hopes of avoiding the wrath of the notoriously litigious former president. “I submitted an annotated draft of the script to our lawyers that was point-by-point articulating where the information came from, and how I dramatized the scenes,” Sherman said. “So it was rigorously supported by the research.” The scene is based on a sworn deposition Ivana Trump gave during her divorce from Donald Trump, in which she described her husband’s attack as a “violent assault.”
Author Harry Hurt III covered the deposition and the alleged assault in his 1993 book The Lost Tycoon. In the lead up to its publishing date, Trump’s team released a conspicuous statement from the former Mrs. Trump in which she walked back her previous allegations:
“I wish to say that 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 toward 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.”
The Apprentice does interpret Ivana’s deposition in the literal sense, resulting in the most disturbing and controversial scene in the entire film (Roy Cohn’s collection of frogs notwithstanding).
As a young cinephile in my teens and twenties, I often defended similar scenes in movies and (to a lesser extent) television shows. Sexual assault is a vile, irrevocable act that leaves victims deeply traumatized and forever changed – and if it’s crucial to a character’s story, it seems disingenuous to gloss over it. If movies are meant to generate empathy, then shouldn’t sexual assault be shown as the heinous act that it is? Shouldn’t the filmmaker attempt to depict assault in such a way that elicits a proportionate reaction from the viewer? I’m less inclined to jump into the rape-scene discourse these days, and thankfully, there are fewer rape scenes to discourse about, but as someone who has experienced sexual assault, and who believes that movies – and art – are capable of generating empathy, I still get preoccupied by these questions.
In The Apprentice, the scene creates a line of demarcation; what was, for the previous hour, a black comedy about two horrible men, suddenly becomes a horror film. On a functional level, the scene is meant to rattle you, and it vigorously upends the unspoken covenant between the film and the viewer. We watch movies from a safe distance, taking comfort in the fact that what we’re seeing isn’t real, and it can’t hurt us. But there’s a meta quality to this scene and the latter half of The Apprentice, as we’re violently reminded that Donald Trump isn’t just a character or a political boogeyman – he’s real. And lest you forget, he’s not only been accused of sexual assault by more than 20 women, but in 2023, he was also found liable of sexually assaulting journalist E. Jean Carroll in 1996. Despite this (and his multiple indictments and criminal convictions), Trump is still on the ballot in November.
For these reasons alone, depicting the sexual assault of Ivana Trump feels imperative. It’s a pivotal scene that makes the second half of The Apprentice more impactful, transforming the film from a white-collar political fable into a visceral warning. And the scene is based on Ivana Trump’s sworn deposition; it wasn’t invented to up the narrative stakes. At the same time, the moment is so disturbing and so violent that, like many viewers, I can’t help but wonder if it could’ve been softened in the editing room – a question that seems almost ridiculous to ask about depicting a heinous act of gendered violence. Of course it should be horrible. It is horrible.
The Apprentice offers a vital reminder that behind the humorous verbal flubs and deranged all-caps tirades on social media, which we have so much fun ridiculing, there is a horrible man whose actions have human consequences. Again, I ask: Is that scene necessary? I don’t have a simple answer. But I do know that I haven’t stopped thinking about this movie since I saw it. If nothing else, it’s effective.