Kevin Trudeau: a long way down?

That's right, it's come to this,
yes it's come to this,
and wasn't it a long way down,
wasn't it a strange way down?
~ Leonard Cohen, "Dress Rehearsal Rag," Songs of Love and Hate, 1973

Well, Dear Ones, here is the newest video from serial scammer Kevin Trudeau. In this video he is desperately begging for donations to his new legal defense fund, not to be confused with the always-dodgy StandWithKT fund, which the court-appointed receiver seized on August 7, along with all of the other extant (at that time) Trudeau business entities. (Click on link to play the video; if that doesn't work, try this link.) [Note: I modified this paragraph from the original posted on September 17, because it seems clearer now to me that this is not some seekrit viral video that Kevin did not intend for public consumption. ~CC, 18 September, 2013.]
 
In this video, Kevin laments that if he doesn't raise a certain amount of money "this week," his attorneys will withdraw from the case because he can't pay them. They are on standby with a motion to withdraw from the case, says he. For the past few months there had been talk about this as a possibility but it has not happened yet. Now he says it is imminent, though we really don't know how much of this is true and how much is his customary crocodile-tears exaggeration. (I did notice that even though Kimball Anderson is still listed on the criminal docket, in his video Kevin only mentioned the names of two other lawyers with Winston & Strawn, Thomas Kirsch and Katherine Rohlf.)

A few other things stuck out for me while watching this vid. First, Kevin seems to be uncertain about his potential sentence should he be found guilty in his criminal trial, which begins November 4. In the video, he says a couple of times that he believes the government wants to put him away for 10-18 years. That was the government's original recommendation, but since then, according to Kevin's own lawyers, Judge Guzman upped the potential sentence to life in prison. Has this changed? Or does Kevin not know about it? It seems that since he is such a drama queen he would certainly mention a potential life sentence if he knew about it.

Also, regarding the seminar he says he is going to be giving in Washington DC in October, immediately following the GIN Family Reunion, in order to raise funds for his legal defense: At first in the video, he advertised his seminar as being on October 21. Then at the very end he clearly said October 24. Which is it, dude? The larger question of course is whether he will be able to actually give the seminar. The FTC wants to keep him in the jurisdiction (Northern Illinois). And even though his presentation, if it happens, will be completely separate from GIN, there are questions about whether his conducting a seminar to raise money for his legal fund is allowed under the terms of the receivership. Certainly some of his loudest detractors (the Loony Coldwell camp) are trying to keep that event from happening, and they claim to be in touch with the FTC, the receiver, FBI, IRS, and who knows who else in order to keep the leash on Katie as tight as possible.

For now, though, it appears to me (though I am no legal expert, of course) that he is conducting his legal fundraising under the watchful eye of the receiver, the court, the FTC, and any and everyone else who has any authority over him and his business entities... so, sorry, Loony, you and your band of phony heroes are going to have to dig a little harder to find something to nail him on right now.

Speaking of phony heroes...


But back to our Movie of the Week. Several people have said Kevin looks awful in this latest video, but I guess we all see what we want to see. I did see and hear a bit of desperation but I don't know if it was sincere. However, I thought he looked relatively polished for being such a "virtually homeless, virtually penniless" boy. And it seemed that overall Kevin was putting a positive spin on his situation as usual: a hustler to the very end.

He even took pains to laud the professionalism of the court-appointed receiver, making it sound almost as if he and some of the folks at the receiver firm are old buddies. (Then again, that's what The Secret star and hustledork extraordinaire Joe Vitale pulled a few years ago with ABC News reporter Dan Harris, but to no avail: Harris' resulting piece on Joe made Joe look pretty silly.) Kevin talked about the receivership as if is a blessing and a possible road to cleaning up his businesses and allowing him to start over and stride forward into a bright, bold new future. (At the end of the video, though, he didn't seem quite so sure of the brightness of that future.)

Kevin does seems concerned about the trouble he is in -- though again, with Kevin you never know. On paper, he is clearly in trouble, but since Kevin has never been known for his forthrightness, we don't know how much he actually perceives he is in trouble. It does seem clear that he is still playing the martyr, the First Amendment Stuporhero. Once again he tells the story of how the big bad gummit has been coming after him since 1989 -- "1989!" he stresses, repeatedly -- just because of stuff he wrote and said, exposing Big Pharma and government corruption and so forth. (He neglects to mention his little stints in prison for larceny and credit card fraud in 1991-93). He tells the same sad story that has won the hearts, minds, and wallets of thousands of gullible folks over the years. He even fudges regarding a lawsuit where he sued the government; he said he won. (Well, no. He didn't. Wikipedia has a fairly good summary of his legal troubles over the years, citing numerous sources listed at the end of the article.)

He also exaggerates other aspects of his troubles. My friend Julie worked for the promotional company ITV Direct during the infamous "coral calcium raid" that is part of Trudeau's narrative. She was actually there when the Feds confiscated the supplement that Trudeau and his buddy were claiming was a cure for cancer. Contrary to claims Trudeau has made when telling this story, no one was thrown to the ground, she says.
 
In short, this latest drama-queen video is the same old b.s. we're accustomed to hearing from Kevin Trudeau. And the whole begging routine -- especially his offer to perform his magickal one-on-one "energy work" to remove blockages and whatnot (if you just donate enough money) -- is a real eye-roller. Equally absurd: his claim that he is going to reveal secrets that he has never, ever, ever, ever, ever revealed to anybody, not even the high-level GIN members, not even the Inner Circle members who spent, at minimum, $50,000 or $75,000 for access to his greatness. Seriously, does anyone still believe this crap?

Here's a rundown on the "value" you can expect to get for your donation to The Cause (click to enlarge):

 
And yet... and yet... I have to slap myself these days because once in a while I find myself almost feeling sorry for Kevin. Almost. I am a compassionate fool, when it comes right down to it. Last night I found a dead mouse under the sink. I was the one who put out the bait for it. The mouse died by my own hand. And yet seeing that cute little thing lying there, with its perfect little pink hands, almost made me cry. Almost. And this happens every time, as you may know because I know I've written about this a few times before. But I've killed mice before, and although it never brings me joy and always makes me sad, I will no doubt kill them again.

Kevin Trudeau is no hapless mouse under the kitchen sink, and no one (that I know of) is trying to kill him. He is egotistical, arrogant, eternally duplicitous, possibly a sociopath, and certainly a serial scammer, who brought his troubles on himself. As my pal Tim wrote on a Facebook discussion:

What surprises me is that kt doesn't just settle with the FTC and carry on with his scams. GIN was able to bring in close to 100 million, I believe kt could have settled for 10 - 15 of that somewhere along the line. He could also have set up a reasonable payment plan and continued to suck GIN dry with payments to the FTC. Instead he is exposing his money shelters all over the world and making it more difficult for him to get future scams off the ground.

And yet, somehow, the thought of Kevin wasting away the rest of his days in a prison cell -- a remote possibility, I still think, but a possibility nonetheless -- doesn't bring me joy. You won't hear me making jokes about him sharing a cell with Bubba. (I think such jokes are disgusting, unless we're dealing with violent criminals such as murderers, rapists, and sexual predators. I've said before and I'll say again that I find it utterly revolting to read Loony Coldwell's remarks about Trudeau in the arms of Bubba (or "Babba," as he sometimes spells it), when if anyone belongs in or under a Bubba cell, it's...well, not Kevin.) 

Even before the criminal trial commences in November, Kevin risks being thrown in jail, at least for a while, for possibly violating the terms of the receivership agreement. I wrote about that yesterday (and also linked to two recent (September 16, 2013) court documents concerning this matter. 

Looking at Katie's latest video, and seeing and hearing him beg (whether sincerely or not), I can't help thinking of the lyrics to the chorus of Leonard Cohen's early 1970s tune, "Dress Rehearsal Rag." Kevin may not have hit bottom yet, and he may never do so -- he may yet find that safety net of enablers who come forward at the eleventh hour -- but it does seem, these days, that he is on his way down.

And it has been a long, long way.

* * * * *

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