Tom Arnold Scuffles With Mark Burnett Over Trump ‘Apprentice’ Tape
Actor Tom Arnold tussled with Reality TV maven Mark Burnett at a pre-Emmys party Sunday, September 16, and the story just keeps getting stranger.
The fight, for which Arnold filed a police report Monday morning, appears to be regarding the long-rumored outtakes of Burnett’s show “The Apprentice” in which Donald Trump allegedly drops the N-word. Taking a much different view of the administration than his ex-wife, Roseanne Barr, Arnold has been leading the charge to release the recordings as part of his new show “The Hunt for the Trump Tapes” which premieres on Viceland September 18.
The encounter seems to have drawn bruises, if not blood. Burnett’s wife, Roma Downey tweeted a blurry picture of her injured hand. Arnold replied to the Tweet, denying he attacked Downey and threatening to file a police report against her husband and sue her for defamation. On his own Twitter, he claimed that Burnett instigated the attack, choking him.
Got this bruise tonight when Tom Arnold tried to ambush my husband Mark and me at a charity event. Is your TV show worth it Tom?Please stop pic.twitter.com/lXvuKjIMI2
— Roma Downey (@RealRomaDowney) September 17, 2018
Bullshit. You lie your crazy husband attacked me you psycho. I’m filing police report & suing you for defamation. https://t.co/9yXAEXM6na
— Tom Arnold (@TomArnold) September 17, 2018
In relating the altercation to others at the party, Deadline reports, Arnold claimed that he not only was able to secure the incriminating “Apprentice” tapes, but had handed them off to the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow on Sunday. Farrow, who won a Pulitzer for breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, has yet to confirm this claim.
PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture intern. He can be reached at Grisar@Forward.com.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO