A key moment in the new Donald Trump origin story The Apprentice arrives when Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, blackmails a Department of Justice official using compromising photos of the official and cabana boys. It marks the moment when Donald Trump — played by Sebastian Stan — realizes the power and ruthlessness of his new ally.

It is also made up: The Apprentice screenwriter Gabriel Sherman tells MovieMaker it is “a fictionalization.”

Sherman said he is not worried about the fictionalized gay blackmail scene hurting the film’s credibility.

“I’m not worried this scene would hurt the film’s credibility because the movie is art, not journalism,” Sherman told MovieMaker in an email. “The movie dramatizes the well-documented behavior and strategies Roy Cohn taught his apprentice, Donald Trump.”

Trump’s team has tried to stop the film’s release, sending a cease-and-desist letter when the film played at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

“The filmmakers now readily admit they fabricated scenes and created fake stories to fit some deranged narrative about President Trump that is completely untrue,” Trump Campaign communications director Steven Cheung told MovieMaker when asked about the scene. “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked.”

Cheung also said it was “election interference by Hollywood elites right before November, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”

“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.”

The film struggled to find a distributor until Briarcliffe Entertainment acquired it and announced plans for its release this week, less than a month before Election Day.

The gay blackmail scene has largely escaped attention because it has been overshadowed by another very unflattering, widely reported scene in which Trump rapes his then-wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova).

But the rape scene, unlike the blackmail scene, is based on a real report, albeit a dispute one: Ivana Trump reportedly once said in a 1989 deposition that Trump had raped her, but later denied it.

Background on The Apprentice, Donald Trump and Roy Cohn

The Apprentice — which cheekily shares a name with Donald Trump’s long-running NBC reality show — is set in the New York City of the 1970s and 1980s, and follows a young Trump as he gains power and influence with help from the real-life Roy Cohn.

Cohn famously worked with Joseph McCarthy during the anti-communist campaign of the 1950s and successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, sending them to the electric chair for spying for the Soviets.

Directed by Ali Abbasi, The Apprentice is based on Trump and Cohn’s real friendship, and many of the details and plot points in the movie are real — even though the blackmail incident that cements the partnership between Trump and Cohn is not.

The scene is sparked by the real-life housing-discrimination lawsuit that the Justice Department filed against Donald Trump, his father, Fred, and Trump Management in 1973. It accused them of discriminating against Black applicants who wanted to rent apartments.

In the film, as in real life, Trump sought Cohn’s help to fight the case.

Also Read: The Apprentice Director Ali Abbasi on Humanizing Donald Trump in New Film: ‘It’s Dangerous Not to’

In reality, Cohn wasn’t necessarily helpful. But in the film, he’s instrumental.

In one scene, we see Cohn inform Trump that he’s likely to lose the case. Then they pay a visit to an acquaintance of Cohn’s, a Justice Department official named Walter, played by James Downing. (He is listed in the film’s credits as “Walter — Department of Justice,” because he is made up.)

Cohn complains to Walter that the prosecutor he oversees, Barbara Katz, played by Edie Inksetter, is “being tough on us.” (Katz is also made up — the real prosecutor in the case was Judith Wolf.)

“Walter, my good friend. What a nice surprise. Your bulldog Katz, she’s being tough on us,” Cohn says in the film. “You know, this case isn’t fair. You and I both know that.”

When Walter replies that “justice is complicated,” Cohn produces some compromising photos and passes them to Walter.

“You know what could get complicated, Walter? A married man committing certain indiscretions with the cabana boys in Cancun,” Cohn says. “The last I checked, homosexuals were barred from federal civil service.”

Walter, afraid of being exposed, makes the lawsuit go away.

It’s an interesting scene, dramatically, because it shows both Cohn’s power and hypocrisy: He himself is gay.

Sherman says Cohn, who died of complications from AIDS in 1986, blackmailed plenty of people in real life, so the fictionalization is reasonable.

“That scene is a fictionalization of Roy Cohn’s well-documented history of using blackmail to influence people,” Sherman told MovieMaker.

Sherman also confirmed that there was no evidence that Trump got out of a housing discrimination lawsuit through blackmail.

“Barbara Katz and Walter are both composite characters,” Sherman said.

What Really Happened in the Trump Housing Discrimination Case?

Interestingly, a very different account of how the housing discrimination suit ended arrived on bookshelves a month before Friday’s release of The Apprentice.

It is included in the new book Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Succes, by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writers Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig.

(Both The Apprentice and Lucky Loser were timed to come out ahead of November’s presidential election, in which former President Trump, who lost re-election in 2020, is running against Vice President Kamala Harris.)

Lucky Loser reports that when the Justice Department filed the 1973 housing discrimination suit, Fred Trump, who had spent years fending off federal inquiries into his business practices, enlisted his longtime “friend and fixer” Abraham “Bunny” Lindenbaum to make the case “go away quickly and quietly.”

The book reports that within weeks of the housing discrimination lawsuit being filed, Lindenbaum informed prosecutors that the Trumps were willing to sign a consent decree promising to take steps to prevent future discrimination, without admitting any past wrongdoing.

“But Donald’s impulses were about to take the case in another direction,” Buettner and Craig write.

In the following pages of Lucky Loser, they detail how Trump enlisted Cohn to mount an aggressive defense against the housing discrimination lawsuit. Cohn’s efforts included filing a motion to dismiss and filing a $100 million countersuit against the government.

They also staged a news conference where the Trump team accused the government of trying to force the Trumps to take welfare recipients as tenants, which was not, in fact, part of the government’s case.

The judge in the case, Edward Neaher, quickly threw out Trump’s $100 million countersuit against the government, and legal and PR jousting played out in the ensuing months.

Ultimately, according to Lucky Loser, “After almost two years of Cohn’s maneuvering, the Trumps agreed to a settlement that was slightly worse than the one originally offered to them.”

Main Image: Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice, Briarcliff Entertainment.

Editor’s Note: Updated with comment from the Trump campaign.