GOP Frontrunner Being Sued for Fraud Over For-Profit Investment University
In May of 2005, Donald Trump founded Trump University. You could attend online, make friends, buy a tee shirt, and even supposedly make a lot of money in real estate. You could also pay Trump up to a reported $35,000 to learn to get rich, just like Trump did. (Actually, you can’t learn to be born wealthy.)
After pressure from the Attorney General of New York, Eric Schneiderman, Trump changed the name to The Trump Entrepreneur Initiative, since Trump University isn’t actually a university and you actually have to be a university to call yourself a university.
“In 2014, a judge ruled that it was undisputed that [Trump] never complied with the licensing requirements,” Reuters reports, adding that a “New York appeals court on Tuesday revived a fraud claim the state attorney general brought against Trump University, a for-profit investment program.”
The New York Daily News also reports today the “New York appeals court has denied his bid to to toss out a lawsuit that charges his Trump University was a fraud.”
“In a unanimous ruling, a four-judge panel of the state Appellate Division said the state Attorney General’s office is ‘authorized to bring a cause of action for fraud’ — despite the bloviating billionaire’s claims to the contrary.”
According to prosecutors, “although Trump University speakers represented that the three-day seminar would teach students all they needed to know to be successful real estate investors, the instructors at those three-day seminars then engaged in a ‘bait and switch,’ telling students that they needed to attend yet another seminar for an additional $5,000 in order to learn more about particular lenders.”
It also charged they “repeatedly deceived students into thinking that they were attending a legally chartered ‘university'” and “intentionally misrepresented, through advertisements and oral misrepresentations, that prospective students would be taught by successful real estate ‘experts’ who were ‘handpicked’ by Mr. Trump when, as alleged by petitioner, not a single instructor was actually handpicked by Mr. Trump.”
Trump did not respond to today’s news, but yesterday posted this tweet:
American Future Fund, a “multi- state issues advocacy group,” posted three ads featuring people explaining their experiences with Trump University. Here’s one of the ads:
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