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Friday, June 26, 2020

This Sweet Life: Poignant new memoir by mother and sister of James Arthur Ray victim Kirby Brown

Ginny Brown and her daughter, Jean Brown, have released This Sweet Life: How we lived after Kirby died, an intimate memoir about losing their daughter/sister, Kirby Brown, in a phony sweat lodge perpetrated in October 2009 by James Arthur Ray. Ray, as you almost certainly know, is a sociopathic selfish-help guru and star of that infamous infomercial for greed and narcissism, The Secret; for the deaths of Kirby and two other people, James Shore and Liz Neuman, he was convicted of negligent homicide and ultimately served less than two years in an Arizona state prison. He has been relentlessly pounding the comeback trail ever since his release, parading himself as a survivor of nearly unbearable personal trials and an expert in "redemption."

While Ray smirks on Instagram and Facebook and touts his overpriced "coaching" services, Ginny Brown and Jean Brown have been left with their unspeakable grief. But they have turned that grief not only into a nonprofit organization to help others,
Seek Safely, but now into a book that they truly hope will make a difference. This Sweet Life has been described, in numerous reviews by advance readers, as both a beautiful and heartbreaking book and an essential work that helps to expose the dark side of the industry to which so many people turn in their quests for enlightenment and inspiration.

I am very much looking forward to reading it.

There will be
a live book launch event on Facebook on Tuesday, June 30, 2020 at 7:00 PM EST. My pal Jason "Salty Droid" Jones, who has blogged extensively and poignantly about this matter, will be participating. So will former Ray follower Connie Joy, author of Tragedy in Sedona: My Life in James Arthur Ray's Inner Circle.

For more info about This Sweet Life,
visit the Facebook page.

And, oh, yes,
here's where you can order a copy of This Sweet Life for yourself. I already have.

Never forget.

Related on this Whirled

 

Thursday, June 25, 2020

Loony Lenny takes credit for serial scammer Kevin Trudeau's imprisonment

Waaaaaay back on January 31 of this year (this sure has been a long year so far, hasn't it?) I published a long-ish post about a letter that serial scammer Kevin Trudeau, aka KT, aka Katie, wrote to the Honorable Judge Robert Gettleman, the judge who had presided over Trudeau's civil court battles for years. My post was in response to a January 26, 2020 report in the Chicago Sun-Times about the matter.

Specifically, Trudeau asked Judge Gettleman to give him a rundown on how much money Trudeau still owes for his misdeeds, and to whom he needs to pay that money when the time comes, and what he might legally be allowed to do to make a living upon his release from prison.


Quite a few months later, the Sun-Times piece apparently drifted into the awareness of Katie's former b.f.f., fake doctor/cancer quack/right-wing ranter/conspiranoid Leonard Coldwell (most recently highlighted on this Whirled for his covidiocy), who is often late to the party when it comes to the events of the day. Late or not, you can bet that LoonyC had something to say about it. On June 5, 2020, he puffed out his little chest and Facebook-posted the link to the Sun-Times article, along with this comment:
Biggest conman ever we got him 10 years in Prison. You mess with me you go away.. And Trudeau its [sic] not even over yet I am not done with you.
Oooo, scary, right? Katie would most likely be quaking in his prison-issued slip-on shoes, if only he were able to see Facebook, which, by all reports, he absolutely is not.

A couple of Coldwell's Facebook followers took the bait, begging to know what had happened between Coldwell and Trudeau. One follower wrote of being on a
Global Information Network (GIN) cruise in 2011, when it seemed that Kevin and "Dr. C" had been the very best of friends.

But so far Lenny hasn't responded to the queries.

Well, Coldwell follower who asked the original question -- and anyone else who either doesn't know the story or is simply in the mood for a recap -- here's a capsule history of Kevin Trudeau and Leonard Coldwell. Let's just say that a lot has happened since 2011. I've written many thousands of words about the matter on this blog over the past eight years or so, but I know your time is valuable, so here you go.

A tale of two scoundrels
Leonard Coldwell (born Bernd Klein, though he legally changed his name in Virginia in 1998) left his native Germany for the US in the late 1990s, for reasons that have never been entirely clear. And in case you are wondering, he has never been a real doctor in any sense of the word, either in Germany or in the US, even though the foundation of his "career" has been his self-claimed expertise in health issues, particularly cancer. (Here's a long-winded look at his "credentials.") Once in America, Coldwell struggled for a few years to make it as a motivational speaker/natural health "expert." But, according to information provided to me by someone who was in the very best position to know, he wasn't very successful and was often on the verge of financial disaster -- that is, until Kevin Trudeau promoted him and his body of "work" in Trudeau's first Natural Cures book. That was a true turning point for Coldwell. The extent to which Leonard Coldwell owes his "success" (such as it is) to Kevin Trudeau cannot be overstated.

Or as my pal Jason "Salty Droid" Jones so eloquently put it in
his first blog post about Coldwell in August 2012:

In spite of [his] impressively fake :: fake credentials … Leonard Coldwell was never able to make much of himself...

...Then came Kevin Trudeau circa 2005. Trudeau was using a
popular lead gen book :: infomercials … and every other trick in the Scamworld book “they” don’t want you to know about to separate people from their money … writ large. Trudeau made fake doctor Lenny Coldwell his B-team bitch :: that changed things for Coldwell … and they’ve been together unhappily ever after.

With leads coming in from KT’s bullshit :: Coldwell could focus on manipulation and exploitation … which is far easier than generating the initial leads. Lenny needs easy jobs :: because he’s dumb … and he sucks at stuff.

A Salty Droid Dateline 60 minutes 4 PHDs exclusive investigation has revealed that Leonard Coldwell set up remote servers with family in Germany in order to process email leads generated by Kevin Trudeau’s fraudulent activities. Leonard would reply to emails as “Dr. Hohn” {who is a real person … and actual doctor} … and refer victims to his own products.

Such elaborate measures were prolly required because America’s Federal Trade Commission was crawling up the ass of Trudeau’s operation. I suspects they even sniffed out this fake Dr. Hohn situation. But they suck :: so they accomplished jackshit … and Trudeau and Coldwell scam on unabated....

Of course notoriety works both ways. Coldwell was most likely making much better money than he'd ever made because of his association with Kevin Trudeau (or, as Jason described it in a 2014 post, "swimming in Kevin Trudeau's wake with [his] mouth wide open") -- but on the other hand, neither Jason nor I would have ever heard of Coldwell, or written about him, if not for that association. I had been blogging about Trudeau for years before I'd heard of Coldwell.When Trudeau launched his huge GIN scam in 2009, he brought Coldwell right along as one of the club's main shills, eventually making him one of its sanctioned speakers. In exchange for agreeing to perform at a certain number of live GIN events per year, Coldwell was given a yearly salary of $200,000, in monthly payments of nearly $17,000 a month. (Here is the portion of his contract that he has shared publicly.)

Granted, that salary is far from being extravagantly large in the public speaking biz; actual A-list celebs and VIPs, which Lenny never has been and never will be, can command tens of thousands of dollars,
or even hundreds of thousands, for a single appearance. In other words, Coldwell's claims that he is the "World's Highest Paid Speaker" are... a bit exaggerated. At any rate, his GIN gig was supposed to be a ten-year contract -- a fact that Coldwell later used as a foundation for his gripe about being cheated, conveniently overlooking the fact that most contracts are rendered null and void if either party violates the terms of said contract, which Coldwell seems to have done on several occasions. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

As part of the perks of the "job," Coldwell got to fly first-class or business-class to GIN events, stay in the best hotels, go on all of the lavish GIN cruises, stuff himself at the buffets and get drunk on expensive booze, and take every opportunity to promote his own shtick (often violating the spirit of his contract) -- and all on Kevin Trudeau's dime. Well, technically, it was on the dimes of countless suckers who poured money into the GIN coffers in hopes of somehow becoming as fabulously wealthy and successful and deliriously happy as Kevin was always claiming to be, but in any case, it was all comped for "Dr." C.


In addition, Coldwell was, by his own admission on a teleconference call on October 14, 2012, given a downline for GIN's massive multi-level marketing scheme, which formed the basis of GIN's huge and fraudulent money grab. (I wrote about that in this January 2013 post; see under the sub-head, "Axes of evil"). Coldwell didn't earn the downline, and in the teleconference call he claimed that he didn't seriously work it. But he did apparently work it in his own way, such as by posting various promos for GIN (and of course for himself). The point is that while so many other rank-and-file members spent so much time and energy and money to earn and work their own GIN downlines, Lenny's was just handed to him.

All in all, it was a great gig for a formerly struggling and unknown fake doctor.
Coldwell did apparently gain a following within GIN, and later claimed that he was the very soul of the organization. (On this Whirled, we begged to differ.) In the glory daze of what was later shown to be a completely contrived bromance, Trudeau and Coldwell spent a lot of time publicly stroking each other off, figuratively speaking. Trudeau promoted Coldwell as his "personal physician in Europe." He fake-interviewed him in videos like this one to promote Coldwell's shtick. Coldwell relentlessly promoted Trudeau, or at least he promoted GIN, touting it as the best way to wealth, success and happiness. On various promotional propaganda Coldwell and/or Trudeau claimed to have been good friends for more than 20 years. It all was so lovely, and so phony, while it lasted.

For various reasons, though -- partly financial but mostly personal, from what I have been told by folks in a position to know -- the bromance collapsed. One major factor was that GIN was bleeding money, and Kevin needed that money to cover his legal fees and his lifestyle (more on that below). He had to cut expenses, which included cutting the number of live events and, apparently, getting rid of speakers who had become dead weight. Reportedly there were also complaints about Coldwell's behavior at some of the live events. And reportedly Kevin's own ego was a factor; he didn't like sharing so much attention with Coldwell, who, though full of shite, was undeniably entertaining and knew how to get a crowd riled up. Kevin himself implied that Coldwell's shtick was getting redundant.

And then there was the fact that, as mentioned above, Coldwell was apparently using GIN to promote himself in a manner that violated his contract with GIN. (He later claimed that GIN offered to settle with him, or "saddle," as he spelled it on his Facebook post about the matter, though who knows, he may have been talking about horseback riding or some perverted pony play.)
 

In any case, Coldwell's separation from GIN was emphatically not because he had just suddenly "discovered" that GIN was a scam and Trudeau a scammer, as he later tried to claim. Coldwell most likely would have gladly stayed on the GIN teat for years longer, but Trudeau fired Coldwell from GIN in the spring of 2012. It was shortly after the GIN Dream Weekend in Vegas in April 2012.

Coldwell's first responses to being booted out were tentative and rather restrained (for him, anyway), though undeniably rambling and incoherent, with insinuations that there might be a chance of reconciliation, or at least a chance of saving GIN, with Lenny at the helm of the salvation effort. (I provided links to his "let's save GIN" posts when I first wrote about them, but his ramblings on that topic have since been deleted.) But it soon became apparent that reconciliation wasn't going to happen, and that GIN had booted Coldwell out for good -- and that's when he began a series of increasingly vitriolic attacks on Trudeau's character and the scamminess of GIN. 

As it happened, and as I indicated above, I'd already been writing about the scamminess of GIN and Trudeau for several years, but nobody reads this blog so it didn't make a dent in the scam; I just thought I'd mention it again. At any rate, due to a combination of members' ignorance of, and their willful blindness to, Trudeau's scammy past, Coldwell was able with some success to brand himself to disillusioned GIN and ex-GIN members as a heroic whistleblower.

He really got their attention with a ruse that he kept up for months: a spurious claim that he had initiated a class action lawsuit against GIN/Trudeau and that anyone who'd lost money in GIN and wanted to join him could most likely get all of their money back and possibly more. All they had to do was send him their name and contact information. He dangled the lawsuit as a come-on to get people to sign up for a "Life After GIN" event/boot camp in Charleston, South Carolina, promising he would give attendees detailed information and updates about the lawsuit, as well as another opportunity to get in on the cash grab. People did sign up, and paid good money to attend, though quite a few reported being disappointed when there was very little said about the lawsuit at the "boot camp."

Not surprisingly, like pretty much every lawsuit threat or actual lawsuit in which he has been involved, absolutely nothing ever came of this "class action suit." But no doubt Coldwell was able to beef up his mailing list considerably, which was of course the whole idea


But it was the whistleblower ruse that Coldwell exploited most enthusiastically. His cohorts in this undertaking were former GIN member
Abe Husein, who gained considerable media attention for himself by hollering about how he had been cheated by GIN and fooled by Kevin's grandiose promises (though Abe himself had tried to cheat the system); and former GIN marketing huckster Peter Wink. (In early 2013, Coldwell and Wink formed their own version of a GIN scam, the ill-fated IBMS Masters Society, which is still limping along, though noticeably Winkless).

Meanwhile, Kevin Trudeau
had been in legal trouble with various government agencies for many years because of his deceptive/fraudulent marketing practices. (This was after he had served a couple of years in a federal prison for credit card fraud, back in the early 1990s.) The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in particular had had its eye on him for a very long time. He'd been to court numerous times, had been fined, had paid fines, had signed consent orders in which he promised to cease his deceptive practices, and had repeatedly violated those orders.

At the time Trudeau launched GIN, he was in pretty deep, with a multi-million dollar fine and a civil case and later a criminal case looming over his head. In fact many of the millions of dollars that gullible GIN members were pouring into the GIN coffers were going straight to Trudeau's lawyers. Much of the rest of it was going towards the noble cause of subsidizing Trudeau's lavish lifestyle.

But it is important to know that both the civil and the criminal cases centered on Trudeau's deceptive marketing for a diet book, The Weight-Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You to Know About. It was this matter specifically that ultimately resulted in a criminal contempt conviction and his ten-year prison sentence. It had absolutely nothing to do with Kevin Trudeau "messing with" loony Lenny Coldwell.

The ten-year sentence was decided upon by the judge who presided over the criminal case, Ronald Guzman. Judge Guzman had originally wanted to sentence Trudeau to 20 to 25 years in prison, based upon federal sentencing guidelines that took into consideration Trudeau's two previous felony convictions and the size of the fraud in the diet book case. (These sentencing guidelines were carefully explained in numerous court documents and also reported in the media at the time.) Judge Guzman eventually agreed with prosecutors, however, who claimed that a ten-year sentence would be sufficient since nobody who bought the diet book was financially ruined simply by having bought the book. In other words, and it can't be stressed enough: LEONARD COLDWELL HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH KEVIN TRUDEAU'S TEN-YEAR PRISON SENTENCE.

No doubt Coldwell provided information to authorities that may have helped nudge the cases along, but so did countless other people. Back in the pre-trial days, the FBI was visiting ex-GIN members and former GIN principals left, right, and sideways. I even got a call from the FBI during the post-trial, pre-sentencing phase, and I have never been even remotely involved with Trudeau or with GIN, except to blog about them. In the end, though, Trudeau received a sentence that was far less than the maximum allowed by law and than the presiding judge had originally wanted to impose. If Lenny wants to take credit for Trudeau's prison sentence, he needs to accept responsibility for its relative leniency.

* * * * *

So that's the story, in a nutshell (emphasis on the "nut" part), about what happened between Leonard Coldwell and Kevin Trudeau. Trudeau is in prison not because he "messed with" Coldwell but because he thumbed his nose at various authorities who had been trying for years and years and years to get Trudeau to stop scamming consumers. And for a few years, Coldwell himself was complicit in Trudeau's scams. Moreover he is still, to this day, selling GIN CDs on his IBMS web site (at $99.00 a pop!). So he is anything but a hero in the Kevin Goes To Jail narrative. 

But it's not surprising that Coldwell would try to inflate his own role in this narrative -- he has a long history of grossly exaggerating his own significance, after all, not just about his "accomplishments," but specifically regarding GIN and Kevin Trudeau as well. So I think that it's important for those who want to know the real history to search for answers outside of Coldwell's social media fever swamps.

And I think it's also worth pointing out that despite all of the time and energy Coldwell has put into denigrating Kevin Trudeau, he will never have nearly as many fans as Trudeau has, and will never enjoy anything even close to
the level of hero worship that Trudeau, even though he's been imprisoned for years, continues to inspire. I am pretty sure that at some level Lenny knows that, and it must be galling.

Bottom line: I don't think that Kevin Trudeau has very much to fear from his former "personal physician in Europe."



Thursday, June 04, 2020

America burns while Caligula brandishes (upside-down) Bible



Being at a (relative) loss for words over the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the tone-deaf, totally inappropriate, and even fascistic responses from #NotMyPresident Donald John Trump and his administration, I thought I'd let late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel do the talking. The embedded video (here's the direct link) is from Kimmel's June 2, 2020 show.

Trump's Bible photo-op stunt -- which philosophy and religion professor Alan Levinovitz
likened to idolatry -- has drawn fire from religious leaders across the board, and even earned Trump a rare rebuke from Pat Robertson, one of his most faithful evangelical sycophants. I hope this comes back to bite Caligula in his fat orange butt again and again as we draw closer to the US presidential election.

Meanwhile, I am proud to see the response from Houston, the former hometown of both Mr. Floyd and myself. I wish I could join the protesters and mourners, but I was and am there in spirit. Probably the most lasting contribution I'll make will be to add yet another verse to my ever-growing national anthem, O Trumpistan. It hardly seems adequate.

My heart goes out to the family and friends of George Floyd, and to the family and friends of the all-too-many innocent people
who have been murdered by "law" enforcement thugs simply or primarily because of the color of their skin.