In The Apprentice’s skin-deep world, plastic surgery is a bigger sin than rape

Trump and his family are racist, so The Apprentice has a random Black man stand up at a city planning meeting to tell us so. Cohn, a closeted bigot who died of AIDS (as famously depicted in Angels In America), is a hypocrite, so The Apprentice has Trump peep Cohn getting railed at a party. But their racism and hypocrisy and greed and shallowness have actual tangible effects on the world and the people in it, something The Apprentice stops short of acknowledging. Perhaps this is why it’s weathered critiques of not taking sides, or overly humanizing its characters. It’s not that the film’s stance on Trump and Cohn is ambivalent or unclear or too human, it’s that it doesn’t have the guts or scope to actually grapple with what they did.

The rape scene is perhaps the most glaring example of this. The account of the rape was first documented in Harry Hurt III’s book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives Of Donald J. Trump, which sources it from “a copy of [Ivana’s] sworn divorce deposition, from 1990, in which she stated that, the previous year, her husband had raped her in a fit of rage.” The book ended up including a non-denial denial from Ivana—“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.”—and she later recanted her sworn testimony during Trump’s first presidential run. But what she recanted was so specific and harrowing that it’s hard to interpret it as anything but “literal.”

Hurt’s book places the scalp reduction surgery before the rape. Ivana even recommended the plastic surgeon. Trump was enraged that the operation to help hide his bald spot was more painful than he’d expected, and attacked his wife, tearing off her clothes, holding back her arms, yanking out handfuls of hair from her head, and raping her. Ivana ran upstairs after, hiding behind a locked door and crying for the rest of the night. The next day, she emerges and returns to the scene. “As she looks in horror at the ripped-out hair scattered all over the bed, [Trump] glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: ‘Does it hurt?’” Hurt writes.

The Apprentice’s script, written by political reporter Gabriel Sherman, doesn’t just remove the horrific detail and the terror of its victim, but reverses the motivations. In the film, Trump’s vanity is the immediate trigger for violence. In reality, the violence and vanity are intertwined and ever-present. Sherman focuses on his ego, Hurt on his vindictive cruelty. The Apprentice’s rape is an wounded reaction; the one described by its survivor is one of pure retribution. One version is certainly easier to film, and comes punctuated with a facile punchline: When finished, Trump asks, “Did I find your G-spot?”

And it was almost even worse. Vulture reports that it the scene “was not written as a rape” initially. Instead, “the early parts of the scene featured no sex but rather a physical altercation after Ivana ridicules Trump for having undergone a surgical treatment for baldness. The sequence later transitioned to ‘rough’ but consensual sex in a bedroom.” Others in the same report, though, push back on this, saying that the earlier drafts were “considerably more violent” and included more details from the deposition, like Trump tearing out Ivana’s hair.

Whether it was toned down, or brought closer to the violent reality, the end result sticks closely to the rest of the movie’s ethos: take the easy win, then move on. Trump’s history of sexual violence gets namechecked while The Apprentice scores another potshot at its potbellied target. In a movie that only barely gets beneath the skin of its central figures, liposuction pumps and scalp staples represent its sharpest weapons.