MAGA podcaster Katie Miller has offered a deranged explanation for why Melania Trump’s documentary has been pulled from theaters in South Africa.
Miller, the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, responded to a Meidas News post on X reporting that the local distributor for Melania had withdrawn the film in South Africa amid concerns about its political context and timing.
“Of course—since they are biased against white people,” Miller wrote, referring to a country that was governed under a racist white-minority apartheid regime for decades.
There has been no official explanation for why distributor Filmfinity opted to pull Melania from theaters in South Africa ahead of its Jan. 30 worldwide release.
Meidas News cited sources who said there were concerns that the documentary about President Donald Trump’s wife could be perceived negatively in the current global political climate. There were also worries about the optics of screening a film closely tied to a political figure in a country with a fraught history of propaganda.
President Trump has launched a series of unhinged attacks on South Africa during his second term, including spreading false claims that white farmers are facing a “genocide” in the country.
Another potential red flag was controversy surrounding the film’s director, Brett Ratner, who was accused of sexual assault by multiple women in 2017 at the height of the MeToo movement.
“Based on recent developments, we’ve taken the decision not to go ahead with a theatrical release in the territory,” Thobashan Govindarajulu, Filmfinity’s head of sales and marketing, told The New York Times.
The big-budget documentary—costing an estimated $75 million to produce and promote—will still receive a worldwide theatrical release on Friday. The film follows the first lady during the 20 days leading up to the president’s second inauguration last January.
The film is not expected to recoup anywhere near its $75 million budget at the box office, with social media users gleefully sharing images of empty seats where the movie is being played across the U.S.
Mark Sardi, the chief executive of Ster-Kinekor, one of the two major cinema chains in South Africa that had secured bookings to show Melania, confirmed that the film met all local regulations and said he was unaware of why the distributor pulled it.
“Our basic position is that we’re not in the business of censorship,” Sardi told the Times. “I expect the decision would have been a commercial one, balanced against a whole lot of current issues.”
