A judge told a Hollywood film studio to give unaired footage from President Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice to entrepreneurs who claim they were swindled when the Trump family endorsed a troubled multilevel marketing company on the reality TV show.
U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield ordered Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to hand over hundreds of hours of recordings from two episodes in which members of the marketing company, ACN Opportunity, were on set.
“It seems appropriate the tapes be made available,” Schofield said Thursday, according to Bloomberg News.
Trump and his three eldest children, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump, were sued in 2018 for promoting ACN from 2005 to 2015. Trump suggested that investing in the company’s desktop videophone would be little or no risk. But the service was quickly overshadowed by smartphones, and the plaintiffs argued they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Trump and his children have denied wrongdoing.
If the entrepreneurs receive the recordings, it would be the first successful effort to get unaired footage from the Apprentice series. There have been several attempts to access unaired footage following claims that Trump made racial slurs while on set.
