Amazon Prime Video has licensed an upcoming documentary about incoming first lady Melania Trump that will premiere later this year, an Amazon MGM Studios spokesperson confirmed to NBC News.
In a statement, the spokesperson said the documentary began filming last month. The project includes Melania Trump and Fernando Sulichin as executive producers. Brett Ratner will direct the film: he is co-owner of RatPac Entertainment, which was once associated with Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
“We are excited to share this truly unique story with our millions of customers around the world,” he said. the Amazon spokesperson added.
The announcement comes just months after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in November, and just two weeks before the couple returns to the White House for a second term.
The relationship between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ businesses and Trump has come under scrutiny in recent weeks over a perceived new comfort between the two men.
Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021, but still serves as the company’s executive chairman. The billionaire also owns The Washington Post newspaper and Blue Origin, an aerospace company.
During Trump’s first term, there were a series of high-profile clashes between the then-president and Bezos or his companies.
For example, in a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon alleged that Trump launched “behind-the-scenes attacks” against the company. The company claimed that the then-president’s public and private attacks led to it losing a major cloud services contract for Amazon Web Services.
Last week, a Post cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, publicly shared that she quit her job at the newspaper after she was blocked from publishing a satirical cartoon about tech CEOs, including Bezos, kneeling before the president-elect.
The other CEOs in the cartoon, Telnaes said, included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong.
Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman and others have each pledged to donate $1 million to the president-elect’s inauguration committee.
Washington Post editorial page editor David Shipley rejected the idea that the Telnaes cartoon was scrapped because of Bezos.
In a statement to CNBC, Shipley said: “My decision was based on the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column, this time a satire, for publication. The only prejudice was against repetition.”
Telnaes’ revelation came just months after Post readers and current and former staff criticized the newspaper for announcing it would no longer endorse presidential candidates.
In their own reporting, Post journalists wrote that the publication’s editorial board had decided to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate. The same article reported that Bezos himself made the decision to stop endorsing candidates.
In an article published days later on the newspaper’s website, Bezos wrote: “Presidential endorsement does nothing to tip the balance of an election. No swing voter in Pennsylvania is going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A.” None. What presidential endorsements really do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision and it is the right one.”
Bezos did not immediately respond to a request from NBC News for comment on whether he was involved in licensing the upcoming Melania Trump documentary.
