The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi accused of groping "A-list actor"

William Hughes

Feb. 21, 2025, 6:25 p.m.

2025’s cursed Oscars season didn’t get any less so today, as Deadline reports that The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi has broken ties with his U.S.-based representation, reportedly over allegations of a groping incident at a Golden Globes afterparty. The Deadline piece cites unnamed sources who accuse “an inebriated Abbasi” of having “aggressively groped an A-list, CAA-repped actor” at the event. (Variety, meanwhile, clarifies that the afterparty in question “was not an official CAA gathering”; no outlets have reports on who the actor in question was.) Although he hasn’t addressed the allegations, Abbasi confirmed today that he has parted ways with both CAA and 360 Entertainment, and is now only represented by LARK in the U.K. It’s not clear, from reports, who decided to break up here with who; per Variety, “A representative for Abbasi had no further comment on the matter.”

All of this comes, of course, as The Apprentice is in the midst of an Oscars run, with stars Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong both nominated for their roles as Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, respectively. (Abbasi himself is nominated for Best Director at this weekend’s upcoming Independent Spirit Awards, which could prove potentially awkward.) The film had an extremely complicated route to the box office, having debuted at Cannes in May of 2024, but then faced a mixture of distributor hand-wringing and potential legal threats over its depiction of Trump—notably the decision to dramatize an allegation of rape that Ivana Trump made, and then later denied, against her former husband. After fights over funding and efforts to crowdsource some extra measure of success, the film ultimately landed at the box office right as the 2024 election was going full-tilt, presumably to the joy of people who were not already burnt-out-to-husks by anything to do with its central subject matter.