Piers Morgan challenged Brett Ratner to respond to a photograph of him with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during his appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored on Monday.
The Melania director appeared with Epstein and two women in a photo included in the Justice Department’s latest file dump.
Asked about his response to the picture, Ratner said, “Oh, well, that picture in particular happened around 20 years ago.
“That is a photograph of my fiancée, who invited me to this event — and that’s where the picture was taken. I had never been in contact with Jeffrey Epstein before that photo and I was never in contact with him after,” he claimed.
Ratner refused to reveal the identity of his ex-fiancée, whose face was redacted, as well as another woman featured in the photo.
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“I mean, it’s horrible. You see, I’ve been somehow sucked in, you know, through an image,” Ratner added of the attention surrounding the Epstein files.
“There’s so many stories about so many different people. It’s hard to really follow and track what’s truth and what’s not truth. You could see where one photograph kind of puts me, you know, there with him and then all the stories start to spin out.”
He added: “I didn’t know him. It wasn’t really my world.”
Ratner’s new documentary about First Lady Melania Trump marks his career comeback after he was accused of sexual misconduct by six women in 2017.
Olivia Munn alleged he had “furiously” masturbated in front of her on a film set, while Species actor Natasha Henstridge claimed he “physically forced” her to perform oral sex.
The accusations arrived in the midst of the #MeToo movement following the high-profile allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Ratner, who “categorically” denied all the allegations against him, has never faced charges.
Since its release, reviews for Melania have been largely negative. On the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, it has a score of just 11 percent from critics, but the site has been flooded with audience reviews that are 99 percent positive.
In a one-star review for The Independent, critic Nick Hilton wrote: “Perhaps Melania is merely a piece of post-modern post-entertainment. After all, it is transparently not a documentary.”
He added: “Melania spends most scenes playing a staged version of herself, and shots of the first lady are composed with all the deliberateness Ratner brought to his work on X-Men: The Last Stand. This is somewhere between reality TV and pure fiction.”
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