Infomercial King Avoids Jail Time for E-mail Deluge
May 21, 2010 by admin
Filed under KT In The News
May 21, 2010
Chicago Sun Times
It’s a jail sentence they don’t want him to serve.
Infomercial king and best-selling author Kevin Trudeau, who markets his products as things “They don’t want you to know about,” won’t have to serve a 30-day contempt of court jail sentence because a federal appeals court threw the sentence out Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman had ordered Trudeau to spend 30 days in jail for urging his followers to deluge Gettleman with e-mails as the judge prepared to make a key decision in a Federal Trade Commission case against Trudeau.
That shut down the judge’s BlackBerry and clogged his e-mail inbox in February. Most of the 300 e-mails were “polite and enthusiastic,” the appellate court noted, but some had “threatening overtones.”
“This was an attempt by Mr. Trudeau to harass, intimidate and influence the court,” Gettleman said at the time. But the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the penalty and sent the case back to the judge.
