What Kevin Trudeau doesn't want you to know

It was Reno Rollé who initially urged Trudeau to combine his extensive experience in infomercials with the book business. "I suggested he focus less on hard products, ingestibles, and more on information and newsletters," he says. "That way he could find a safe harbor under First Amendment protections." They teamed up to see if, and how, it would work. "No one knew how a book would behave," he says. "Initially we treated the book as just a product that shouldn't behave differently than a stomach exerciser or kitchen utensils." It's a strategy that paid off handsomely.

"The infomercial business is very standardized," Rollé continues. "You put the product on TV first to create awareness and sell a large number of 'units.' Then, after a period of time, you pull trigger and head out to retail." And once a product hits retail, as "Natural Cures" did just four weeks ago, Rollé says, the industry standard is to sell two to 10 times as many "units" as were sold on TV.

Although Rollé could not give figures about the amount of advertising time being purchased for "Natural Cures," one source in the direct-response industry who asked not to be named estimated that Trudeau is spending a million dollars a week on national cable and could also be spending another half a million on broadcast channels. The source suggested that Trudeau's return from that investment would be about $2 million to $4 million a week. "He's got the formula down and he knows how to trick people," says the source. "And he's got enough money to do it. The FTC can't stop him because the amount they fine him is nothing compared to what he takes in."

Besides reader complaints on Amazon, there's other evidence that buyers of "Natural Cures" are feeling ripped off. Tim Young, an Alabama-based publisher of community maps and local directories, has had trouble for the last four months because Trudeau's marketing company that "publishes" "Natural Cures" chose the same name as his business, Alliance Publishing Group. Young has received hundreds and hundreds of calls about the book from booksellers, distributors and agents -- but mostly from angry readers. "I don't even answer my phone anymore if I don't recognize the number," Young says. "I'm getting all this e-mail from people who are pissed off because they bought the book for cures and there's no real info in the book and they have to go to a Web site and pay money to learn anything."

Trudeau isn't hoping to cash in on only one book, either. A few months before "Natural Cures" was released for retail sale, Trudeau contacted publishing giant HarperCollins about an early-'90s version of his infomercial spin-off "Mega Memory" book, which was on their backlist. HarperCollins has repackaged the book to resemble Trudeau's current bestseller and it will be re-released in mid-August, when "Natural Cures" will certainly still be hot. HarperCollins has also slapped "As Seen on TV!" and "By the bestselling author of Natural Cures They Don't Want You To Know About" prominently on the book's cover.

The FTC's Hippsley told Salon that while her agency will continue to keep a careful eye on Trudeau's publishing activities, the Constitution does offer him protection. "He can put that book out there, and if consumers choose to purchase it, that's lawful. Unfortunately, there are individuals out there whose career is to do consumer frauds."

But some First Amendment experts point out that there are limits. "Nobody has a right to engage in fraud, even when the fraud takes the form of speech," says Richard H. Fallon, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. "What, if any, laws does someone break when [engaging] in false or misleading speech? Generally none, because the First Amendment wouldn't allow punishment for [that]. But one of the exceptions is that false and misleading speech can be prohibited or prevented when that speech is closely tied to commercial activity," he says.

Meanwhile, Trudeau recently filed a lawsuit himself -- against the FTC. In it, he maintains that its September 2004 press release announcing his ban from infomercials contained false and misleading information, implying that Trudeau was banned from all infomercials and didn't distinguish his literary allowances.

Trudeau continues to spin his career as a struggle against the censorship of a vengeful FTC and the tyranny of legal groups that won't let him lie in commercials or bilk consumers. But now, Trudeau is shooting even higher than emulating Ralph Nader. He recently told BrandWeek, "Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez and Gandhi and Martin Luther King" are the figures he looks to for inspiration. We can only hope he has less success than those civil rights heroes.

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