Trudeau FTC Fine Tops $37 Million

WASHINGTON—Apparently, $5 million wasn’t enough to clear the slate, as infomercial marketer Kevin Trudeau has now been ordered by a U.S. district court judge to pay more than $37 million for violating an FTC order. While Trudeau was ordered in August 2008 to pay more than $5 million to FTC and banned from producing or publishing infomercials for three years, neither FTC nor Trudeau was pleased with the outcome. So in November, the judge upped the fine to $37,616,161—the amount consumers paid in response to his infomercials; Trudeau’s request to reconsider this ruling was denied.

The history between Trudeau and FTC is long and tangled, dating back to a 1998 lawsuit filed by the federal agency, which charged Trudeau with making false and misleading claims in infomercials. He was charged in 2003 with violating the court order that settled the 1998 lawsuit by making claims about the cancer curing properties of Coral Calcium Supreme in a series of new infomercials, and subsequently found in contempt of violating an injunction barring him from making such claims. That case was settled in 2004 with the payment of $2 million in consumer redress and a ban from infomercials.

The most recent settlement stems from charges Trudeau violated the 2004 order by misrepresenting content from his book, “The Weight Loss Cure ‘They’ Don’t Want You to Know About.”