Being Kevin Trudeau
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| The bestseller "Natural Cures" and its Web site are said to generate about $2 million per week. |
With little regard for the consequences, Trudeau started cutting corners to make even more money.
"When things got tight," Trudeau says, "and cash flow got a little sideways, it became easy to rationalize any decision I needed to make to keep the business going. You think, 'Oh, no one will get hurt.' Your morals and ethics get skewed."
When a credit card company cancelled his card in 1982, for reasons Trudeau feels were unjustified, he retaliated by getting another card using his middle name, Mark. Trudeau insists everything he charged to that card was paid off promptly, but when it was discovered it clearly constituted credit card fraud.
Around the same time, Trudeau bounced seven checks from accounts he had in various banks around the country, constituting seven counts of larceny. Although Trudeau insists the mistake was a simple miscalculation, and there was no intent to defraud ("No one lost a penny," he says."), the crimes earned him 24 months in federal prison.
"When you have a prosecutor who is intent on taking a young, cocky, successful person down," Trudeau says without a trace of resentment, "you can't fight it. There's no defense, so you're going to jail."
Not even his stint at the minimum security federal prison camp in Boron, Calif., threatened his mantra of positive attitude.
"I looked at the experience like being a waiter in a restaurant," says Trudeau philosophically. "You think, 'This isn't what I'm going to be forever, so I'll make the best of the experience.' It wasn't a big, barred facility. I met some nice people. And it was a strong wake-up call to the value of ethics. You simply cannot cross the line."
By the mid-'90s, Trudeau was back in business and as motivated as ever. He could be seen on television with more frequency than Oprah and Judge Judy combined. His infomercials hawked everything from the "Sable Hair Farming System" to "Doctor Callahan's Addiction Breaking System," and from "Action Reading" to "Eden's Secret Nature's Purifying Product."
"When I sell things on TV," Trudeau reveals, "I use a basic philosophy. Generally speaking, if you're in a room with a thousand people of all ages and from all walks of life, and you ask a question, how many will raise their hand? 'How many people want to lose weight?' Ninety percent of the room raises their hand. Good product to sell on TV.
"You ask, 'How many people have met someone, and by the time you're done shaking hands you've forgotten their name?' Ninety percent of the people raise their hand. A memory course is a good thing to sell."
Trudeau parlayed those ideas into successful products, and his business has been booming ever since.
Not that his battles with the government were over. The Federal Trade Commission continually hounded and scrutinized Trudeau for making "false or unsubstantiated" claims in his infomercials.
In 2003, the FTC cited Trudeau's "Coral Calcium Supreme," which, the infomercial claimed, could treat or cure cancer and heart disease. The FTC argued that the claims well exceeded scientific evidence regarding calcium. The case was settled, with Trudeau being fined $2 million and effectively being banned from "appearing in, producing, or disseminating future infomercials that advertise any type of product, service or program to the public."
Annoyed but hardly intimidated, Trudeau responded in 2004 with his self-published "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You To Know About." Since books are protected as free speech, Trudeau is free to voice his opinions ... even in an infomercial.
The book, while selling millions of copies, has been a lightning rod for everyone from the medical profession, to television and radio talk shows, to Web blogs and, yes, the FTC. Trudeau is routinely criticized as the leader of "an infomercial empire that has misled American consumers for years." He's just as often hailed as a "consumer advocate" and "marketing genius."
Trudeau, whose blood pressure and voice never seem to rise, responds with a smile.
"Why is the government so hellbent on suppressing my ability to speak and try to get people to listen to me?" he asks. "Because I'm exposing their fraud.
"Let's compare the hundreds of thousands of people who wrote to me saying they loved my book and it helped save their lives, to the 150,000 people who died after taking Vioxx. They were the ones lied to.
"My point is, I get scrutinized because I'm in a controversial area."
So it comes as no surprise to Trudeau that his sudden and Trump-esque entree into the pool world has also been met with scrutiny, cynicism and trepidation.
"The opening quote in my book is by Albert Einstein," Trudeau points out. "He said, 'Great spirits always get violent opposition from mediocre minds.'"
"When you create something new, like the IPT, the first reaction isn't, 'Great!' It's, 'Witch! Charlatan!' That's what happens. And that's why those reactions don't affect me anymore."
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