Kevin Trudeau: an interview from the clink, and an attempt to take Business Insider for a ride

 
One of the long-awaited media stories about currently imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, aka KT, aka Katie, was finally published yesterday, January 20, 2015 on Business Insider. It's pretty lengthy for an online article, but worth the read.

When he first contacted me back in June 2014 after coming across my blog, author Aaron Gell, who at the time was the features editor for Business Insider but has since become the editorial director for Maxim Magazine, told me that he wanted to paint a more nuanced picture of Trudeau than the usual "he's a scammer" piece. Clearly he is a scammer, Aaron acknowledged, but he wanted to dig a little deeper.

I thought that was a great idea and have even said on more than one occasion, including on this blog, that Kevin isn't all evil or all good, and that the real story about him is no doubt far more complex than is apparent in most of the content that has been produced about him for the past couple of decades -- including the stuff you read here. Aaron also told me that he'd been approved to have an in-person interview with Katie in the cage (that would be FPC Montgomery, Alabama), so I was instructed to keep mum about it all in order to avoid scaring Katie, who apparently doesn't like it when journalists communicate with his critics. So mum I kept, though the stupidest man in Scamworld mentioned the story months later on Facebook when Aaron finally got around to talking to him. And Abe Husein, who got a mention (though not a particularly flattering one) in the piece, had dropped a few hints as well.

Now the story is out, to decidedly mixed reviews. On the one hand, as a long-time friend and observer of Kevin's told me privately, it's a good walk-through for newbies. And even I learned a couple of new things about Katie, though in some cases they were just newer versions of Katie's older lies (more about that in a moment). Aaron also provided a competent capsule summary of the complex legal cases, duly quoting the investigators and prosecutors and even the judges, and, I thought, offering as good and concise an explanation as any I've seen about how and why the longstanding civil case became a criminal one.
 
On the other hand, as numerous people have noted, there are factual errors, some of which Aaron has since corrected, as well as errors of omission and some notable gaps in the story. Most glaringly of all, some noted that it seemed Aaron was veering too much towards saying that Kevin isn't such a bad guy after all. The piece wrapped with what seemed like blatant rationalizations from long-time Katie cohorts Ed Foreman and Fred van Liew, who, though they pretty much said that Katie is indeed a liar (Foreman all but disavowed Kevin's silly "Brotherhood" and "GIN Council" tales), insinuated that for the most part he lies for good causes, such as inspiring people to dream big and whatnot. This all led to the concluding quotation, which was Katie saying essentially the same thing. One person commenting to the piece called it a "love letter" to Kevin.

I'll tackle the latter problem first -- the apparent soft stance about the scamming -- and then get to the errors and omissions. I admit that even though I was expecting a balanced look at Kevin Trudeau, I too was a little taken aback by that ending, though after discussing it with Aaron I understand his reasoning a little better. His aim, he said, was not to give Katie a pass but rather to raise some philosophical questions. So after mulling it over a little bit I wrote a comment myself. Here it is in part; you can read the whole thing here (and I'm only quoting myself at length because I'm too lazy to rewrite or paraphrase):

...Yes, there were omissions and some factual errors and a few major gaps in the story. But it's tough to get a book's worth of information down in a single article, and given the short attention span of some folks, this article may have been more than long enough as it is.

And yes, if you read this article superficially, particularly the ending, it may seem that Aaron is being little more than an apologist for Trudeau. But read it more carefully. I think the incidents as reported here, along with the quotations from others (Trudeau's friends/fans and detractors alike), and the silly stories Kevin told Aaron, speak for themselves. Aaron did not say he believed all of these stories. He just let Kevin talk.

And he didn't hit us over the head with the statement that Kevin Trudeau... is a scammer. That wasn't his objective and it's not his job. That's the job of snarky bloggers like yours truly and Bernie O'Mahony at GINtruth, not regular reporters... But ultimately it's the job of readers to draw their own conclusions.

So while Aaron's piece may seem on one level to be morally ambiguous (believe me, I had a little bit of a problem with the ending myself), I think it did flesh this lifelong con artist out a little more, and Aaron managed in the process to demonstrate some of the problems that keep Scamworld going, such as people's need to believe and to be inspired.

"Hope springs infernal," as one of my blogging colleagues, Steve Salerno of SHAMblog fame, likes to say. And even if Kevin's star fades away -- don't count on it yet, though; he still has a hearty fan base -- there will always be more scammers popping up with another version of the same pie-in-the-sky promises. And people will continue to believe.

You know me: I always have to work that "no neat and tidy endings" theme in somehow -- because it's valid.

Aaron told me he had another reason for avoiding blatant accusations, beyond his desire to raise philosophical questions, and beyond the fact that this was not a blog post or op-ed piece. He felt that Katie's devoted fans might be more likely to read -- and think about what they are reading -- if he took a more subtle approach.

There may be some validity to that point, though my sense is that the true devotees are not going to see the bad in Katie at all, and aren't going to perceive the contempt that he clearly holds for them. Early on in the piece Aaron cites Fred van Liew, reminiscing about Katie's youthful shenanigans.

After high school, Trudeau found work at an auto dealership, where, Van Liew says, he soon became the No. 1 salesman by eagerly chatting up the customers whom his colleagues stereotyped as window shoppers and cheapskates. “The other guys would say, ‘This guy’s a loser,’ but Kevin didn’t do that. And he’d sell them [a] car.”

He also became adept at pushing auto loans. “He would tell people, ‘Save your credit with your bank in case you need it for something else,’” Van Liew recalls. “Was it the best advice? No. Was he doing it to get you the best deal? Hell no. He was in it for profit and money! He knew most people are idiots.” Still, like many friends and associates we spoke to, while Van Liew is up front about Trudeau’s ethical shortcomings, he nonetheless praises him as a fundamentally good-hearted person: “When Kevin found someone in genuine need or who was ready to move forward, he’d help.”

"Most people are idiots." That's it in a nutshell, according to more than one disgruntled ex-insider or ex GIN member I've corresponded with over the years, who say the belief that most folks are idiots and ripe for manipulation sums up Katie's general attitude towards his customer base. (And it's not just Trudeau; it is apparently a distressingly common attitude in Scamworld, as I wrote about years ago.)

Will Katie's most devoted followers see the subtext and realize that Katie himself actually holds them in contempt? Maybe some will, but my guess is that most won't. We all see what we want to see.

Despite any real or perceived weakness in the moral message of Aaron's piece, most of the readers who have commented so far really seem to "get it" where Kevin is concerned. They see him for the con artist he is. They're not fooled by the rationalizations of Fred van Liew or Ed Foreman or Kevin himself. One wrote:

Great sales people don't lie, cheat and steal from the customers. Kevin is a convicted crook and for good reason -- he is one. Thousands of doctors aren't withholding cures from their patients. Only a fool would believe this but then there are a lot of fools. Goebbels is laughing from his grave.

A few even connected the dots between Katie and the rest of Scamworld, recognizing that the problem is much bigger than Katie and is pretty much intractable.

Even so, nobody I've seen, on this piece or elsewhere, has ever stated the core issues in the blunt terms that my pal Salty Droid did on his famous "Conspiracy to Destroy" blog post last year. I've quoted this before but it bears a re-quote:

After a lifetime of epic grift :: serial huckster Kevin Trudeau is finally in jail … rotting like he always was. KT got ten years for failing to comply with some government paperworks he signed ten years ago as a punishment for the bullshit he’d been pulling the ten years previous to that. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been brutally sucked from the sad in the meantime :: and basically … nobody gives a fuck.

It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the total revenues from Trudeau’s life of scamjobery had topped a billion dollars. This book :: that book … whatever … the books don’t matter. It’s about cartels of badguys buying {preselected for sadness} people in bulk from media/info companies :: and then trading those people around until they become empty vessels … robbed of their money … and often of their sense of self.

The media :: the government :: and the courts … will all tell you a different story though. A much less complicated story :: disconnected from the hard problems of reality …

“He is a habitual liar and a fraudster,” Assistant U.S. Attorney April Perry said.

As a result of the size of the fraud and Trudeau’s two previous felony convictions, federal sentencing guidelines called for 20 to 25 years in prison, a range that Guzman said he thought was “appropriate.” However, he eventually agreed with prosecutors who said a 10-year term was sufficient since — unlike in many fraud cases — no one who bought Trudeau’s book was financially ruined.

Just a little bit :: totally …wrong.

I've often said that despite the fact that he's a lifelong scammer, I don't really believe Katie belongs in a cage -- certainly not for ten years -- and that's one area where Salty and I disagree. Even so, I'm hoping that future pieces on Kevin Trudeau will dig a little more deeply into the true harm that Scamworld hucksters inflict, though again, I understand that this wasn't what Aaron set out to do with this piece.

Errors and omissions
Although I didn't really learn much new information about Kevin in this article, since I've been obsessed with this topic for so many years, I did learn a few new things. One of the eye-openers for me was a glimpse into the nastier side of Katie's personality, if the narrative from his ex-wife Kristine Dorow is any indication. (See the content under the sub-head, "Up Close and Personal" on Aaron's piece.) Though I don't know for sure, I have a feeling that this was one of the leads provided to Aaron by the aforementioned stupidest man in Scamworld, Not-Doctor Leonard Coldwell. I'd heard some gossipy things about this particular ex from Coldwell but knew to take them with a grain of salt until and unless I heard the same thing from other sources as well. Apparently Aaron really did interview Ms. Dorow.

One of the seeming errors of omission, however, was the lack of any mention of Trudeau's ex-wife Christie Marie Sheldon, who is running some "psychic" schemes of her own these days. I still have a partially-finished blog post about her and another person who was reportedly a big influence on and inspiration for both Christie and Kevin: a clownish looking, Q-tip-headed "psychic" who goes by the name of Gary Spivey. Kevin and Christie reportedly perfected some of his pseudo-spiritual and manipulative shticks by hanging with Gary back in the day. Eventually I'll get around to finishing that post. But I wonder why Christie wasn't mentioned at all in Aaron's piece, which noted: "He has been married at least three times (a number he declined to confirm)." Court documents indicate he has been married at least four times, though.

As another friend of mine who worked with Katie years ago said, "He kept his private life private." But it's fairly well known that he was at one time married to Christie, so I can only speculate that Aaron didn't mention Christie for the same reason he didn't mention Kevin's older brother Bob (Robert Trudeau, Jr.): he didn't interview them.

Bob reportedly refused an interview with Aaron because Aaron wouldn't pay him, and Bob said he is tired of telling his story for free. Since 2012 he has also been saying he's working on a book about his life with his troubled younger brother. And he is one of the consultants for a fictionalized movie that is being made about Kevin and GIN, The Platinum Bonus, although Abe Husein, another one of the consultants, told me they won't be paid for their consultancy work until the movie is in production. Knowing Hollywood, that could be... never. Bob also recently told a group of friends on Facebook that he had plans to turn his mother's house into a paid tourist attraction after she passes away (his father passed late last year), but I think he may have backed down on that. I'm sure he'll find some way to capitalize on his infamous brother. (The Dream Stealer: The Kevin Trudeau Story appears to be another movie project in which Bob is involved.)

But interview or not, it's curious that Bob wasn't even mentioned at all in Aaron's piece. As a matter of fact, former colleagues of Katie's have told me that Katie rarely or never mentioned his brother at all. I've always cut Bob more slack than some say he deserves, simply because I still kind of feel for him, being in the shadow of his sociopathic brother.

There are other shortcomings in the article, according to several GIN members and ex-members who said that Aaron's piece told the GIN story incorrectly or incompletely. One omission I noticed was that even though he mentioned the $150 monthly fee, Aaron didn't mention the $1,000 "initiation" fee for Level 1 membership (which was the "product" for the now-defunct MLM). Beyond that, I'll leave it to ex-GIN members to help fill in the story for Aaron, if they wish. My friend John Foster, an ex-Katie fan, founding member of GIN and author of a self-published book about some of the inner workings of the organization, might be a good source to help fill in some of the gaps.

Aaron also mentioned that as a major asset of Trudeau's, GIN was sold for $200,000 to some of Katie's buddies, which I reported here last year here and here. He didn't mention the proposed sale of the Natural Cures holdings, another major foundation of Trudeau's scampire. I reported this item in November (see under "New-ish Katie court docs"), and linked to the motion for approval of sale that had been filed in September. This is an important asset because Natural Cures, though originally launched to feed Kevin's legal defense fund, according to court documents, was the vehicle by which he became an ersatz health hero, and attracted many of the fans who were ultimately funneled into GIN. His UK crony Lee Kenny supposedly purchased Natural Cures for a mere $100k in late 2012, but there's been a bit of a custody battle since then.

But that's a minor omission compared to the total lack of mention in Aaron's piece of Mark Hamilton (aka Mark Scamilton on this Whirled) and the entire Neo-think (aka Neo-stink) scampire. I've long speculated that the Neo-stink "Secret Society" shtick played a big role in Kevin inventing his own Secret Society scams. And Scamilton, according to court documents, earned more in the GIN MLM than virtually anyone else. It's possible that Scamilton, being the secretive sort he is, refused an interview too. Or it's possible that he was a behind-the-scenes source like me and not mentioned for that reason. But Scamilton was an actual player in the big scam that was GIN, and in the Natural Cures scampire before that, and he and Katie have been buddies and business partners for a long time.

Also missing from Aaron's narrative is Donald Barrett, Kevin's infamous infomercial partner, who actually did some jail time himself. Then there's Janine Nubani Contursi, Katie's former girlfriend, long-time business partner, and former co-defendant in earlier FTC cases. And there's Reno Rolle, who helped Kevin build his publishing scampire with the first Natural Cures book (and who joined the production team of The Platinum Bonus in December 2013). And there's the aforementioned Lee Kenny. Again, I don't know if Aaron tried to contact them and couldn't, or if he just ran out of time and space. I do think he gave too much space to ex-GIN marketing director and current Coldwell cohort Peter Wink, who laughed to Aaron that he and other insiders knew for a long time that the GIN Council was sheer fantasy, and joked about it among themselves. To me that smacks of complicity... but that, of course, is a whole other topic.

Lies and rationalizations
Reading Aaron's article and the stories Katie told him about being approached in his bedroom by sinister government operatives, it's pretty clear to me that Katie was trying to play him, and was continuing the same old cycle of lies that he has used with everyone else for years. Some criticized Aaron for not following up on some of those stories and trying to verify those that were verifiable. But it could be that Aaron just assumed they were lies and decided to let Kevin ramble, letting the absurdity of the tales speak for themselves. As I mentioned in the above-linked comment on the Business Insider site, I don't see any indication that Aaron actually believed the b.s.

In any event, as is often the case with Katie (and many other scammers I've written about), he can't even keep his lies straight, as I noted in another comment to Aaron's piece. Kevin has often told the story that the Brotherhood first recruited him when he was 15, not in his 20s. Here is one example from an infomercial for Your Wish Is Your Command (the recruitment tool for GIN); thanks to my friend Julie Daniel for finding this.




Yet as I've noted numerous times before, on an earlier infomercial for YWIYC he told the "interviewer" that he was a member of the Brotherhood from 1975 to 1999. He was only 12 in 1975.

And now he tells Aaron that he was in his 20s when he was first approached by the Brotherhood -- in a bowling alley, of all places.

As I also wrote in my comment, I'm really a little surprised that Trudeau is still telling the Brotherhood story instead of just letting it drop, but since many people, including Abe Husein, were fooled into joining GIN because of this story and the closely related tall tale of the GIN Council, that may be one of the matters still under investigation as fraud, so perhaps Katie feels he has to keep the lie going for the sake of the GIN scam that is still going on under the leadership of Trudeau's long-time cronies. But if he's going to stick with it he should at least be consistent.

I have never been a GIN insider or member or anything remotely close to being a Trudeau fan, but even I -- along with probably millions of other people -- could tell GIN was poppycock just because of those stories, particularly taken in the context of Trudeau's long history of scamming.

* * * * *

Overall, and notwithstanding the seemingly soft ending, I think Aaron did a pretty good job with an unwieldy topic. Even Lenny Coldwell, writing on his Facebook timeline, called it an objective "summery" [sic]. I don't think that any one article, no matter how carefully crafted and fact-checked, no matter how many people are interviewed, can really capture Kevin Trudeau. The real story remains untold, which isn't say that I'm the one to tell it, even though I have obsessively covered aspects of his story for years on this blog. Actually, I wouldn't be a bad choice at all, come to think of it. Even so, Katie, though fascinating in and of himself, is significant to me primarily as a cog in the big sick machine of Scamworld. But his true story may never be told, in large part because his entire narrative is a hopelessly tangled web of lies and evasions, and too many people are still willing to protect him. Those who seemingly want to spill the goods on him sometimes have ulterior motives of their own and are chronic liars in their own right (e.g., Coldwell). So where Kevin Trudeau is concerned, truth remains as elusive as that GIN Council.

As someone who is in a position to know said to me privately, "He's never been who he says he is and never believed any product or service he's sold. That's the real story. He's just a 12-year-old magician looking for his next audience."

And that may sum it up better than just about anything else I've read recently.

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