Earlier this month, we reported on a Kickstarter for a film called You’ve Been Trumped Too that focuses on Scotland’s Forbes family, which refused to sell their land to Donald Trump for his golf resort. According to filmmaker Anthony Baxter, the people running Trump’s resort have been actively antagonizing the family, going so far as to cut off their water supply five years ago and then refuse to fix it. That might seem a little outlandish coming from any other wealthy person, but cutting off a family’s water supply as petty revenge for interrupting a golf course-related scheme seems nearly as Trump-esque as having orange skin and wispy hair.
The Kickstarter ended up being successful, raising enough money for Baxter to move forward with releasing the film in the United States, but now it has attracted the attention of Trump and his legal team. According to a press release, Trump is now threatening legal action against anyone who screens You’ve Been Trumped Too and is “pledging to take a frail pensioner to court over claims made in the film.” Also, as Baxter points out, Trump pulled the same trick back in 2012 when he threatened to sue the BBC for showing Baxter’s previous film about this same family (You’ve Been Trumped).
Much like the Forbes family themselves, Baxter is refusing to back down to Trump’s threats. As reported by Deadline, he’s now planning to stream the entire You’ve Been Trumped Too documentary online as a way of standing up to what he calls “the bullying” of Trump’s legal threats. The stream will be held Thursday night on Facebook Live, and though specific details haven’t been announced yet, Baxter promised “more soon” on Twitter.
As for Trump’s side of this argument, his Trump International Golf Links organization has released a statement of its own, attempting to shoot down the claims made by Baxter and the Forbes family. Regarding the water issue, Trump’s people say the blame isn’t on them, but on “an antiquated, make-shift ‘well’ located on Trump land.” They claim that another neighbor who uses this same well had complained about it being “unreliable and fraught with problems” even before Trump owned the land, so they offered to let this neighbor connect to the Trump water supply. This offer was supposedly extended to the Forbes family as well, but they turned it down.
The Trump statement also makes a point to note that the Forbes family tried suing Trump’s golf company before the course was built, but they lost the case and were ordered to pay Trump’s legal fees. Trump International, an organization known for being very magnanimous, “has not enforced that award of costs.”