Rumors of Kevin Trudeau's imminent release from prison are flying, with a little help from Kevin himself

Today I popped onto Facebook to see if there were any updates on imprisoned serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, aka KT, aka Katie on this Whirled, whose "GuruKev" shtick I blogged about in December and again earlier this month. Was I surprised to see the news that he is going to be released from prison very soon, presumably far ahead of his first eligible release date in May 2022.

Well, maybe calling it "news" is a bit of a stretch. So far there's just the word of one of his pseudonymous supporters who claims to have heard the word straight from Katie himself. Looking it over, it appears to me to be just another gimmick to fire up the base and pull in more money. But you be the judge. And if you do actually have any real information about this matter, I'm all eyes.

What I saw today was a January 20, 2020 cross-posting, on several Katie-friendly Facebook pages, of a message from someone going by the name "Rahelios," who claims to be a KT friend and mentee.

It was on the GuruKev Facebook page...
...and the Free Kevin Trudeau Facebook page...
...and the Kevin Trudeau Teachings page...
...and the "official" Kevin Trudeau Fan Club page...

...and this is what it said:

KEVIN'S FIRST PUBLIC APPEARANCE!

From RAHELIOS:

Hello all you wonderful people! KT asked me to let you all know that he is going to be released soon. No one knows exactly when, but we think it could be this year.

When Kevin is released, he will make a major public appearance somewhere in the USA.

He will invite to this event ONLY those people that have supported him during his incarceration. This includes anyone who made contributions to his legal defense fund; those who are subscribers to the Nuggets of Gold Newsletter; those who are students of the Science of Personal Mastery Course; and those who have sent money to Kevin's prison commissary account.

THIS IS IMPORTANT. When you see Kevin again, you will see a man that has undergone a complete transformation, a metamorphosis, a transmutation where all the old has been released and everything has been made "new".

Throughout history, "world changers" have gone to prison (such as Mandela and Gandhi), or gone into seclusion (like Buddha, Moses, the Pandavas, or Rama). When they "emerged" they were different than before. Their vibrations, frequencies and levels of consciousness were higher than ever. Their sense of knowingness was fully established, and their "powers and abilities" were fully released.

They were fully "connected" and "plugged into" Source.

We can tell you that you will absolutely want to be at this first event. Everyone in attendance will get a personal one on one picture with Kevin, and much more.

We encourage you to email KTLegalDefense@gmail.com and ask how you can sign up for the Nuggets of Gold Newsletter, or send some money to Kevin's prison commissary account so you can be on the "Exclusive Invitation List".

We also encourage you to tell others about this. Getting more people to subscribe to the Nuggets of Gold Newsletter (by making a contribution to Kevin's legal defense fund) will earn you many "energetic merits" and give you a huge "boon".

No one knows when this event will happen. It could be this year or next year.

The sooner you qualify to be invited, the better!
Do it now!

On the Kevin Trudeau Teachings page, on which I found to my surprise that I am allowed to comment (for the time being, anyway), I posted a brief question: 'Is this for real, or is this just one of those law-of-attraction tricks where you "act as if" and pretend it's happening, hoping that the Universe will make it so?' So far I haven't received a response, but I'll update if I do.

Several participants on the various Facebook threads also asked for details. A couple of folks wondered if maybe the Free Kevin contingent had finally gotten through to Donald Trump, to whom Kevin's fans have been sending hundreds of annoying messages for several years -- messages that Trump himself probably never saw. (I've written about that matter several times here.) A few folks even expressed skepticism about the news of the imminent release. But the Kevin fans who asked for clarification didn't get any satisfactory answers either, at least not that I could see.

I tried to find out who "Rahelios" was, and on what authority he based the announcement of a possible early release for Katie. My cursory search only led me to a "Letter From a Friend" on the Kevin Trudeau dot com site; Rahelios was tagged as the author, although that was not the name that appeared on the signature. (This led me to an original erroneous conclusion that Rahelios was just a pseudonym for the person who signed the letter, Eugene Gourevitch. More on that in a while) And although it may seem like a bit of a diversion from the original point of this post, here is the link to the letter, which is important to some of the larger themes on this blog.

The missive is rife with the usual free-speech-martyr lies and distortions that Trudeau and his minions and followers have been spouting for years. There's the big lie that Katie got thrown in the clink just for writing a book that had info that "they" don't want you to know about. (It's a variation on the big fib that he was prosecuted and persecuted simply for saying on TV that a diet was "easy.") There's the lie that he wasn't even charged with a crime but that his long sentence was chiefly the result of the petty vengeful nature of a federal judge. There's the lie that his 10-year sentence is the longest ever imposed for contempt (I cited two longer contempt sentences in a February 2016 blog post; see links at the end of this post).

There's even the lie that Trudeau was living comfortably in Europe when his troubles began. Nope, his troubles began decades before he was semi-hiding out in Zurich (and accused the ABC News team that tracked him down in that expensive city of "ambush journalism"). Yes, it's true that for a while, in the time leading up to his criminal trial, he did travel from his luxury digs in Zurich in order to show up in the US for court hearings when his presence was required. But it wasn't to "stand up for OUR RIGHTS and OUR FREEDOMS"; it was most likely a combination of an arrogant assumption that he would end up getting off easy, and an effort to make it look as if he was trying to cooperate with the US government's "unreasonable" requests. However, his passport was ultimately confiscated, and he was forbidden to travel back to Zurich when he asked the court for permission. At that point he was apparently deemed too much of a flight risk.

Unsurprisingly, the Letter From a Friend also includes the obligatory praise for Kevin's character and "honor" and his seemingly superhuman powers.

I did not want to make this letter too personal, but Kevin has been as good a friend to me as anyone could possibly wish for, whether in prison or on the street… There is no place you could ever get to know a person as well as you do living next to them 24-hours a day, seven days a week for almost three years in close quarters. You don’t even spend that much time with your spouse or children.

Kevin is truly one of the most honorable people I have ever met and I’m proud to know a person of such rare vintage.

They just don’t make ’em like that anymore. [smiley emoji]

I also admire his fortitude and constant cheer and sense of inner peace in the light of the massive injustice that has been perpetrated upon him. He is always blissfully happy, and nothing ever “gets him down”. His attitude is simply “superhuman”.

Kevin was living a comfortable life in Europe when this drama started to unfold. He did not have to come back to America to face these ridiculous “contempt of court” charges brought against him by a single vindictive judge. He did so to stand up for OUR RIGHTS and OUR FREEDOMS. Please take a few minutes out of your day to do the same for him. 

The letter is signed, as I noted above, by Eugene Gourevitch, who is apparently one of Katie's former prison buds. If the name Eugene Gourevitch sounds familiar, it may be because Gourevitch, like Kevin Trudeau, is a crook and liar, who helped rob a former Soviet republic blind, and whose wild and crazy story was written up in Bloomberg a few years ago. Gourevitch was convicted of wire fraud related to insider trading, and sentenced to five years in prison.

Here's a summary of the tale, just in case you can't get past Bloomberg's paywall.

...After then helping his captors perpetrate a massive insider-trading scheme, Gourevitch became desperate to escape. He had authorities bearing down on him from Kyrgyzstan, as well as from Italy, where he was accused of taking part in a tax avoidance scheme that somehow involved the Italian mob.

With seemingly nowhere else to go, he turned to the U.S. government to become an informant against his captors, even though he knew he would be implicated as well.

But deep into the investigation, Gourevitch suddenly reverted to his criminal ways. He stole $6 million from Bakiyev’s bank account and tried to undermine the authorities’ investigation. He ended up getting busted and turned over the cash to the U.S. government...

So let me get this straight. A known crook, fraudster, and liar -- Eugene Gourevitch -- is not only giving his wholehearted endorsement to a second crook, fraudster, and liar -- Kevin Trudeau -- but, more importantly, he is urging you to show your support for Trudeau in any way you can (including, by implication, monetarily).

Even though Gourevitch didn't go on about "energetic merits" or about a Big Event in the future to which only people who had given money to Kevin will be invited, he still urged everyone to educate themselves about Kevin's "travails" and to "support" him in his noble fight against "tyranny." This implies monetary support as well as advocacy efforts, though Gourevitch's ask re the former isn't as blatant as that in the messages by Rahelios and others who have apparently been managing Trudeau's messaging since he has been incarcerated. I know from long years of covering Trudeau on this blog that every message from him or his proxies or his good buddies involves either the intention to sell/upsell a frauduct or flopportunity; outright solicitation for money; or both.

Gourevitch's "Letter From a Friend" is yet another reminder of the well-documented fact that prisons, whether they're grim holes or white-collar sleepaway camps, aren't so much corrective facilities as they are incubators for further crime. Kevin Trudeau is proof of that.

After all, it was while he was incarcerated back in the early 1990s that he met a convicted cocaine distributor named Jules Lieb, with whom he struck up a business partnership following their release. They went to work for an MLM firm called Nutrition for life but were operating through their own company, Trudeau Marketing, through which they sold a variety of frauducts while aggressively recruiting other distributors. Trudeau and Lieb were eventually nailed for operating an illegal pyramid scheme and for failing to disclose felony convictions and bankruptcy, as the law required.

It was also during that first prison stint that Trudeau reportedly met Nouveau Tech/Neo-Tech scampire founder Wallace Ward (father of Neo-stinker "Mark Hamilton," aka Wallace Ward Jr.). The Wards, particularly the younger one, were instrumental in helping Trudeau sell the GIN scam, particularly targeting older consumers who had more money than sense.

And since he's been at FPC Montgomery, Katie has been working nonstop to keep old schemes going and cook up new ones with some of his roomies. Besides Eugene Gourevitch, who at the very least seems to be laying a foundation for some future venture with Trudeau, there's foreclosure-rescue scammer Jason Sant, whom I mentioned in my December 2019 GuruKev post. Apparently inspired by Kevin, Sant started a scheme he calls the SCC Mastery Course.

Leopards and spots, Dear Ones, leopards and spots...

It's not that I think everyone with a felony conviction should be thrown to the wolves and never given a second or possibly even a third chance. I don't feel that way in general; to the contrary, I lean towards a "ban the box" philosophy. But Kevin Trudeau is a lifelong con artist, a repeat offender whose scams and offenses are very well documented. The writing is on the wall (and on the Internet, and everywhere else that there's writing).

Sadly, though, none of that seems to matter much to Katie's fan base. And if the comments on the various Facebook pages are any indication, there's still a very enthusiastic base of people who are willing to swallow Kevin Trudeau's hero/martyr story, as well as his present and future schemes, hook, line, and sinker. In fact, there seem to be a significant number of fans and followers who don't even know that Trudeau is in prison. A couple of them on the Facebook threads I cited above were completely unaware that he's locked up, and they wanted to know what had happened. Clearly his propaganda is being disseminated by sources that fail to mention his troubled history and current incarceration.

So will Kevin Trudeau soon be free from prison? Your guess is as good as mine. But I suggest taking everything that he says, and that his cronies and enthusiastic supporters say he said, with more than a few grains of salt, and possibly a giant margarita to accompany that salt, if that's your thing. (Have one for me; I don't drink alcohol.) I'll keep you posted about this, and I hope that you'll do the same for me.

But definitely see the January 26 addendum following the P.S.

PS added 25 January, 2020 ~ I hadn't seen this link at the time I published this post, but I  stumbled across it yesterday. It's a page from the site of an advocacy organization, Keeping a Family Foundation/Saving Grace, founded by a man named John O. Sinclair, that ministers to prisoners/ex-prisoners and their families. Sinclair was another one of Kevin Trudeau's prison buddies, and Trudeau and other cons such as Enron's notorious Jeff Skilling wrote letters that Sinclair says helped influence the decision for his early release. (Here is a direct link to Trudeau's letter, dated September 2018.)

Pending my actually being able to find out more information about Sinclair (such as the reason for his imprisonment), I am not automatically going to relegate him to the status of serial scammer. (And no, he's not the John Sinclair that comes up most often on the search results; that other guy is a white poet who was given an excessive prison sentence for marijuana charges.) If this John Sinclair is doing legitimate work to help deserving people who are or were in prison, particularly people of color who unjustly received harsher punishment than their white counterparts, more power to him. But I'm thinking that perhaps he needs to choose his friends more carefully.

 Addendum, 26 January 2020


It is becoming more and more apparent that rumors of Kevin Trudeau's imminent release from prison have been greatly exaggerated, and the source of that exaggeration is, indeed, Kevin himself, as I'd speculated earlier. It is also becoming increasingly apparent that the Global Information Network (GIN) still has a cozy relationship with Kevin, even though he no longer has "official" ownership. They haven't turned their backs on him, nor he on them.

Since I first published this blog post there has been another Important Announcement, not only on several Facebook pages, but also on the official GIN site, regarding Trudeau. This one seems to walk back the previous Facebook messages about the imminence of Trudeau's release. And it purports to be straight from the incarcerated horse's mouth.
In a nutshell: GIN is actively promoting its incarcerated founder, Kevin Trudeau -- or, more accurately, using him to promote their "Level 8" training. Well, actually, they're doing both.

The day after publishing this addendum, I turned it into a separate blog post and expanded upon it. Here's that link.

Related on this Whirled:

• 6 February 2016: Kevin Trudeau's Birthday Present: He Gets to Stay in Prison
  A reminder of just why Katie is in prison, and a debunking of some of his lies and distortions (e.g., the claim that his 10-year sentence was the longest ever imposed in the US for contempt)
• 18 December 2019: Saint Kevin Trudeau becomes GuruKev as Facebook clamps down on his "celebrity" page
  You'd think that people today would be too sophisticated for a shtick like this, but no...
• 6 January 2020: Meet the new year, same as the old year(s) in Scamworld
  Under the sub-head, "Nefarious Silicone [sic] Valley leftist plot against Kevin Trudeau"
• 19 August, 2011: Everything old is Nouveau again (or Neo-scam by any other name) -- Part 1 of 2
  I sure do take my time getting to the point, but this long two-part offering explores the Neo-stinky collaboration between Kevin Trudeau and a decades-old scampire that used old-school "secret society" tactics to target their victims. Turds of a feather...
  And there's plenty of additional Neo-stink/Trudeau info on this blog.