Producer claims Trump on tape from The Apprentice utilizing n-word
- Ex-producer says he was there when Trump made boardroom remark
- ‘This is a completely fabricated and bull**** story’ said the Trump campaign
A former producer has come forward to claim Donald Trump used a racial slur during the filming of Season 1 of ‘The Apprentice,’ the show that helped launch his presidential campaign.
Bill Pruitt, who worked as a producer on the show, says he was in the room when Trump used the ‘n-word,’ and says he is coming forward with his recollections now that he is finally free from a non disclosure agreement that was in effect for 20 years.
He says Trump made the long-disputed comment during a boardroom conference where Trump and show personnel were discussing how the season would wrap up months down the road, amid a final duel between two contestants: one black, and one white.
‘Would America buy a n***** winning?’ Trump asked, according to Pruitt’s account.
It is a key passage in Pruitt’s new article in Slate that expresses regret for how the show scraped away imperfections to portray Trump in a heroic light to make the show work. It was a decision led viewers to believe Trump was a ‘natural-born leader’, which became a valuable political asset.
He says Trump made ‘misogynistic as well as racist’ comments during the filming, including toward staff. The article quotes an architect as saying Trump stiffed him on half his fees for a golf clubhouse, and quotes the future president saying he has a small house on one of his golf courses that ‘Melania doesn’t even know about’, suggesting it could be a ‘personal lair for his sexual exploits.’
A former producer on ‘The Apprentice’ claims Trump used a racial slur during a meeting in the show’s ‘boardroom’ while weighing two contestants
‘While leering at a female camera assistant or assessing the physical attributes of a female contestant for whoever is listening, he orders a female camera operator off an elevator on which she is about to film him. ‘She’s too heavy,’ I hear him say,’ Pruitt writes.
‘Another female camera operator, who happens to have blond hair and blue eyes, draws from Trump comparisons to his own Ivanka Trump. ‘There’s a beautiful woman behind that camera,’ he says toward a line of 10 different operators set up in the foyer of Trump Tower one day. ‘That’s all I want to look at.”
Rumors of the offensive tape have long circulated, but the tape, if it even exists, has never surfaced.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Chueng blasted the new account.
‘This is a completely fabricated and bull**** story that was already peddled in 2016. Nobody took it seriously then, and they won’t now, because it’s fake news. Now that Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrats are losing the election, they are bringing up old fake stories from the past because they are desperate.’
Former Apprentice contestant and Trump White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has claimed to have heard the tape, which the Trump camp has long denied exists.
A Trump campaign spokesman denied the story, calling it ‘bull****’
Show staff and Trump were discussing whether contestant Kwame Jackson or Bill Rancic, who is white, would prevail
Former contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman wrote about speaking to a ‘source’ about such a tape in her book. DailyMail.com has reached out to Omarosa for comment. The essay also quotes Trump discussing a golf house that then fiancee Melania Knauss (l) doesn’t know about
Bill Rancic won the season and landed a job with the Trump Organization in Chicago
The show ended with a final contest
Pruitt writes with regret about how the show pumped up Trump (seen here with NBC exec Mark Burnett). He says the show set up a fake boardroom inside Trump Tower, where Trump’s offices had chipped furniture that wouldn’t work for TV
The accusations resurfaced while a jury deliberates in Trump’s Stormy Daniels hush money trial in Manhattan
But her book only describes hearing about it secondhand from a ‘source’ who she called.
‘On this phone conversation, I was told exactly what Donald Trump said – yes, the N-word and others in a classic Trump-goes-nuclear rant – and when he’d said them. During production he was miked, and there is definitely an audio track,’ she wrote.
According the alleged episode Pruitt describes, Trump made the remark while gaming out what would become a final contest between two candidates to work alongside Trump: Kwame Jackson, who is black, and Bill Rancic, who is white.
‘The race between Jackson and Rancic should seem close, and that’s how we’ll edit the footage,’ writes Pruitt.
He quotes a Trump executive, Carolyn Kepcher, saying Kwame ‘would be a great addition to the organization.’
Trump wants to know why Jackson didn’t fire Omarosa, who proved to be a problematic teammate.
‘I don’t think he knew he had the ability to do that,’ Kepcher responded.
”Yeah,’ he says to no one in particular, ‘but, I mean, would America buy a n***** winning?”
Producer Bill Pruitt has penned an essay blasting Trump from his time on the set of ‘The Apprentice’
Pruitt says Kepcher’s skin turned bright red and that he turned away. Showrunner Jay Bienstock coughs and changes the subject, according to Pruitt’s account.
‘None of us thinks to walk out the door and never return. I still wish I had,’ Pruitt writes.
Bienstock and Kepcher didn’t respond to requests for comment, Pruitt writes. He says he recalls all of the quoted conversations in the article ‘to the best of my ability’ and says they ‘are not verbatim’.
‘So, we scammed. We swindled. Nobody heard the racist and misogynistic comments or saw the alleged cheating, the bluffing, or his hair taking off in the wind. Those tapes, I’ve come to believe, will never be found,’ writes Pruitt.
As for the finalists, both contestants had the right stuff to succeed, according to Pruitt, who called Jackson and Rancic capable and confident, even without the editing boost that ‘winners’ would receive.
‘In actuality, both men did deserve to win,’ he wrote.
