METHUSELAH ARCHIVE PRACTITIONERS / KEVIN TRUDEAU
A waist-up photograph of a smiling man with short dark hair, wearing a pinstriped suit and gold tie, standing in a convention-center lobby.
PUBLIC DOMAIN source

Kevin Trudeau

individual · Chicago, Illinois, and Ojai, California, USA
lived:b. 1963
active:1990–2014
type:individual
role:promoter
location:Chicago, Illinois, and Ojai, California, USA
eventual status:publicly_disconfirmed
"There are natural cures for virtually every disease. There are non-drug and nonsurgical methods to prevent and cure almost all illness."
FINANCIAL CONFLICTS
Trudeau was the author and on-air pitchman for the products the case documents. He appeared in the infomercials that sold Coral Calcium Supreme and Biotape directly (Trudeau v. FTC, 456 F.3d 178, D.C. Cir. 2006); he then self-published Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About (Alliance Publishing Group, Aug. 2004), promoted it with infomercials, and directed readers to the paid subscription site naturalcures.com ($9.95 a month or $499 for life, per the New York Times, 28 Aug. 2005). He later produced infomercials for a second book, The Weight Loss Cure "They" Don't Want You to Know About. A federal court found that Trudeau "outright lied" in the infomercials for the second book (FTC v. Trudeau, 579 F.3d 754, 7th Cir. 2009) and, on remand, ordered him to pay $37,616,161 in compensation for consumer losses tied to that book (FTC v. Trudeau, 708 F. Supp. 2d 711, N.D. Ill. 2010). This bundle does not attribute to Trudeau alone every dollar the products generated; infomercial airtime, publishing, warehousing, and fulfillment costs went to other parties.
INTERVENTIONS PROMOTED
EXTERNAL REFERENCES
NOTES

Kevin Mark Trudeau is an American infomercial pitchman and self-published author who spent two decades marketing “natural cures” for disease and weight loss directly to television viewers, outside the medical and regulatory review a licensed clinician or an approved drug would undergo. He had no medical or scientific credential. In April 1991, at 28, he pleaded guilty to two counts of federal credit-card and access-device fraud in Massachusetts, having used false names and Social Security numbers over five years to defraud American Express of $122,735.68 and several banks of a further $5,000; he served roughly 21 months in federal prison, was released in August 1993, and later called the episode a “youthful mistake” (TheSmokingGun.com, 26 Aug. 2005; New York Times, 28 Aug. 2005). Through the 1990s he built and sold multi-level-marketing schemes, including Nutrition For Life International, which Illinois Attorney General Jim Ryan sued over an alleged illegal pyramid structure; Trudeau and the company settled with Illinois and seven other states on 16 July 1996 for a combined $185,000, including $125,000 to Illinois (UPI, 16 July 1996).

Trudeau’s television career proper began with infomercials for Coral Calcium Supreme and an adhesive pain patch called Biotape, both marketed with disease-cure claims the FTC charged as false and unsubstantiated. He then reinvented himself as an author: Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About (self-published, Aug. 2004) became a runaway bestseller promoted through infomercials; an FTC lawyer told the New York Times that the book could still be marketed this way because books are protected as free speech. A second title, The Weight Loss Cure “They” Don’t Want You to Know About (2006), repeated the pattern and triggered the criminal-contempt case that ended his freedom in 2014. His eventual_status is recorded as publicly_disconfirmed: not a quiet fade but a sequence of federal court findings, spanning more than a decade, that his central claims were false and that he lied to sell them. He has been out of federal custody since 2022 and has fully paid the government’s civil penalty (Chicago Tribune, 15 Jan. 2026). The naturalcures.com domain remains live under pages identifying Natural Cures Info LLC as the operator; neither current page consulted identifies Trudeau, and no source in this bundle establishes ownership continuity with his enterprise (NaturalCures.com, “Why Join?” and “Privacy,” accessed 10 July 2026).