Former President Donald Trump notched a huge court victory this week after a federal judge ruled that a group could not file a class action lawsuit against him.
New York City-based U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield ruled that ACN Opportunity LLC, a multi-level marketing firm with whom Trump entered into an endorsement agreement in 2006, had no standing to sue him.
The endorsement agreement, which lasted until 2015 — when Trump launched his first bid for the presidency — came as the then-real estate mogul made hundreds of millions of dollars with his successful business reality shows, “The Apprentice” and “The Celebrity Apprentice.” In addition, Business Insider reported that ACN was one of Trump’s most reliable income streams.
However, the three plaintiffs in the lawsuit claimed that despite Trump’s endorsement, they made very little to no money at all despite taking the training courses for independent business owners. They argued in their suit that they were unaware the company paid Trump millions to endorse its programs.
Schofield, in her ruling, noted that it would not be possible to define a class of individuals who were harmed by Trump’s backing of the company because people could be influenced by a number of factors to purchase a produce or service, including their individual inquiries into the company, additional marketing materials, and what others may have told them.
“The majority of the content on the Opportunity Discs [promoting the company] portrayed testimonials from various successful IBOs, highlighting how ACN has enabled them to have, for example, a relaxed work life, expensive cars, and large homes,” the judge’s ruling explained.
“The nature of Trump’s alleged misstatements also raises individual questions of whether any given putative class member believed the statements and therefore relied on them,” Schofield added, going on to point out that “the record evidence shows that some IBOs knew or assumed Trump was a paid spokesperson.”
Also, the judge, an Obama appointee, said that statements that Trump made about the company, that it was a “great opportunity” and that ACN had a “proven track record” of “creating millionaires,” could be viewed as regular advertising promotions and not purposeful misrepresentations.
Besides denying their motion to create a class-action suit, Schofield told the plaintiffs to submit briefs by early next week arguing why their claims shouldn’t be severed from the others and transferred to individual jurisdictions in the appropriate federal courts in California, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, where they live.
Trump, meanwhile, took to his Truth Social platform to offer his view of the decision.
“Today we had a Total and Complete Victory against Far Left Lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, on her ridiculous ACN Class Action Suit, yet another Election Interference Case,” he wrote.
“It was ruled that there can be no Class Action, and Certification was denied!” he noted further.
Kaplan represented E. Jean Carroll in her defamation civil suit against Trump in May. Carroll claimed that Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s. She also won a defamation claim against him in September; Trump has claimed that he didn’t even know Carroll.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, a Clinton appointee, ruled that Trump defamed Carroll by denying in June 2019 that he had sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s and by accusing her of lying about the incident in order to promote her book. Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million for the sexual assault by a jury in a civil case in May.
“Kaplan also rejected Trump’s claim that any damages awarded to Carroll, who is seeking $10 million, should be reduced because the earlier verdict covered some of them and she did not deserve to recover twice,” reported Reuters of the ruling.
Kaplan wrote that the “jury found that Mr. Trump knew that his statement that Ms. Carroll lied about him sexually assaulting her for improper and ulterior purposes was false or that he acted with reckless disregard to whether it was false. Whether Mr. Trump made the 2019 statements with actual malice raises the same issue.”
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