TV pitchman Kevin Trudeau avoided a return to the federal lockup Thursday for skipping a court date, but whether the fraudster remains free may just be a matter of time — and money.
Near the start of a daylong hearing at the Dirksen Federal Building, Judge Robert Gettleman found Trudeau in contempt for failing to report to court in the spring of 2022 after he ended his time in a halfway house after serving eight years in prison on a previous contempt conviction.
The judge said he would decide later whether to have Trudeau locked up or impose a fine on top of the $37.6 million he was ordered to pay in 2013 for defrauding people who bought his sham diet book, “The Weight-Loss Cure ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About.”
For the remainder of the six-hour hearing, Trudeau’s lawyers and government attorneys argued over whether Trudeau should go to jail for failing to pay down the millions he still owes on the diet book judgment.
Trudeau made no payments while he was incarcerated, but he put up $1.86 million in recent weeks, the judge said, noting that money came from “gifts” of as much as $50,000 each from members of Trudeau’s “fan club.”
“It’s a lot of money,” Gettleman said. “If it was legitimately raised and not … just from assets that he controls — [because] that would be a real problem— then it does indicate he can contribute to the judgement.”
Federal Trade Commission lawyer Jonathan Cohen was not persuaded.
“He’s just paying us other people’s money,” Cohen said, noting that Trudeau claimed nearly $1 million in salary and bonuses from several businesses, and that “fan club” funds are also financing Trudeau’s legal defense and other expenses.
Trudeau has probably been lying about his assets to the court for a decade or more, Cohen said, noting that a court-appointed receiver charged with assessing Trudeau’s wealth in 2013 could not account for at least $30 million.
Cohen briefly called Trudeau’s ex-wife, Natasha Babenko, to testify about gold bars that Trudeau kept in home safes and safe deposit boxes at banks in downtown Chicago and Zurich, Switzerland.
Trudeau has testified in depositions that the gold belonged to his ex-wife, but Babenko said Thursday that although Trudeau had put safe deposit boxes in her name, she never had access to them.
The first time she had ever seen a gold bar, Babenko said, was when a TSA agent searched Trudeau’s carry-on bag at O’Hare Airport. In the years that followed, she saw Trudeau handling them often at their home in Oak Brook, and once saw him put a box of gold bars into a duffel bag before a spur-of-the moment trip to Guatemala.
“I would see [gold bars] next to the jewelry, see him taking them in and out of the safe,” she said. “It was a very common thing to see, like him smoking a cigar every day.”
From the few million dollars in assets identified by the receiver, the FTC has twice made payouts to around 600,000 people who bought copies of Trudeau’s book, Cohen said, but the checks totaled around $25.
In addition to the $1.85 million Trudeau had raised from his fan club, his lawyer, Giel Stein, said that Trudeau has been making money by organizing and speaking at events, and he could pay back his victims sooner if he were able to travel outside the state.
Trudeau on Thursday agreed to empty his bank accounts of about $200,000, but Stein noted that the pitchman needs considerable income to be able to put on events, pay his taxes and maintain his signature lifestyle.
“The court has now $1.85 million reasons to believe he can [pay] and will continue to do so,” Stein said. “He can raise money by being Mr. Trudeau ... because that’s what people like and they’ll pay for.”
Trudeau will return to court in March for another hearing to determine his assets.
