Steve Brill has taken Donald Trump, and the media, to school with new revelations about a distinctly dubious Trump higher education venture, Trump University.
The journalist-entrepreneur unveiled in Time magazine early Thursday an investigation into five-year-old, ongoing litigation involving the now shuttered Trump University. The gambit attracted about 7,000 consumers into paying $1,495 to $34,995 “for courses where, as the promotional material put it, Donald Trump’s ‘hand picked instructors’ would teach them Trump’s ‘insider success secrets’ of how to invest in real estate.”
The crux of the San Diego-based litigation, in which Trump comes off as a snake oil salesman, is this, writes Brill in the paid-subscriber-only piece:
“The snake oil or adulterated juice that Trump is accused of selling has to do with Trump University, a series of adult-education classes offering Donald Trump’s real estate investing methods and secrets. At its core, the accusation is that the name was deceptive on both counts: there were no distinctive Trump methods or secrets actually provided. And despite its use of terms like professors, adjunct professors and tuition, it was never a university. ”
In the course of the piece, Brill reveals how Trump signed checks from the university to himself but claimed it was a charitable venture and wrote scripts for his “professors” to claim to students they had dinners recently with Trump even though they concede in depositions those were lies.
In addition, the university chief conceded in court that Trump had zilch to do with picking the “professors,” despite claims to the contrary in marketing materials; Trump’s lawyers essentially argue that the deceptions were of no consequence; and a wide array of individuals, including retired police officers and teachers, were screwed financially.
Trump talked openly to Brill about the litigation but seemed to make himself look worse rather than better.
But Brill also discusses at length how the press has portrayed the litigation over the years. In the process, he chides a basic “he said/she said” paradigm that has accorded equal weight to Trump’s defense than the apparent facts on file in the dispute.
When I asked Thursday about a long section about press coverage, he said, “Rather then simply take down quotes from both sides, I decided to read all the evidence in the court files myself, all tens of thousands of pages of it. When there’s that much material, hiding behind the false equivalency of simply presenting equal amounts of quotes or snippets from ‘both sides’ is not real reporting. ”
Brill inspected press coverage of the case and discerned Trump’s “two-pronged strategy for defending himself.
“First, attack the attackers: the lawyers on the plaintiffs’ side are ‘known scam artists,” he told me, and New York Attorney General Schneiderman is a “known light-weight” who, Trump alleges, behaved unethically.” (He also sued an early plaintiff for slander, resulting in that case being thrown out by a judge and the woman awarded $790,000 in legal fees).
The second gambit is to “develop an alternative set of facts and then sell the narrative around them relentlessly. Thus, Trump’s answer so far to reporters’ inquiries about the suits is that, as he told me, ‘98% of the students that took the course gave it rave ratings.'”
Brill explodes that claim by detailing how Trump’s implicit reference is to questionnaires that he asserts were filled out by their student customers. His lawyers have argued that even if one contends that Trump University wasn’t really a university and didn’t really disseminate Trump’s own real estate methods, the students did believe they got something out of value.
Plaintiffs’ lawyers refute Trump’s claims that the questionnaires were credible and that students only changed their positive views after lured by those lawyers into joining the litigation against Trump.
“Those kinds of arguments lend themselves to a he said/she said debate,” writes Brill in Time. “Accordingly, stories about the dispute have for the most part quoted those suing Trump and then Trump or his defenders citing the 98% satisfaction surveys.”
He then discloses how court records underscore far more revealing facts that are not in any dispute.
For example, one Trump executive testified that the 98 percent claims were taken from 10,000 surveys of customers. But he also said there were 7,611 tickets sold to Trump University programs, while 80,308 individuals attended at least one of 2,000 free, 90-minute preview sessions.
Brill confronted Trump with the obvious inconsistency: How could he have 10,000 “rave” surveys from paying customers if there were only 7,611 of them? Doesn’t that suggest that those showing for the free preview sessions must have filled out those questionnaires? If so, what really was the relevance of their responses, given that the crux of the suit involves those who paid and felt cheated by Trump.
Trump told Brill he wasn’t really familiar with the numbers. A Trump lawyer later suggested that satisfied students must have filled out more than one survey and that, as best he understood matters, only paying customers filled them out.
Brill then noted that Trump and associates have pushed their 98 percent claim aggressively and even established a website about it, posting the surveys there. Brill’s own review quickly disclosed that people attending the free sessions filled out multiple surveys.
But another inarguable fact undermines Trump’s take and, thus, the essential “he said/she said” coverage of the dispute: the company has issued 2,144 refunds to 6,698 people who attended the $1,495 three-day program, or a total of 32 percent.
“That a third of the customers demanded refunds is hard to reconcile with a claimed 98% satisfaction rate, especially since the mass of plaintiffs now suing claimed that they, too, wanted refunds but were, they claimed, told they could not get them because they did not ask for them within 72 hours of the first day of participating in a program,” writes Brill.
“Similarly, the refund rate for the $34,995 program, which according to the lawsuits was tougher on giving money back, was 16%. If at least 31% of one group and 16% of the other were so instantly dissatisfied that they immediately demanded refunds, how could 98% have been satisfied?”
