Federal Trade Commission v. Trudeau, 579 F.3d 754 (7th Cir. 2009)
primary document · 2009
LINK
SUMMARY
Seventh Circuit opinion affirming the district court's finding that Kevin Trudeau was in civil contempt of the September 2004 settlement order for the deceptive Weight Loss Cure infomercials that aired December 2006-July 2007, while vacating and remanding the specific $37.6 million sanction for a fuller explanation of its calculation (the district court re-entered the same $37,616,161 figure on remand, FTC v. Trudeau, 708 F. Supp. 2d 711, N.D. Ill. 2010). Case identity and citation (579 F.3d 754, No. 08-4249, decided 2009-08-27, appeal from N.D. Ill. No. 03-C-3904) confirmed via the CourtListener case-law database's search API (2026-07-10); the opinion text itself fetched directly via caselaw.findlaw.com (2026-07-10), confirming the exact holding: Trudeau 'outright lied,' and that his selective quotations from the book misled consumers by presenting an incomplete picture of the protocol's requirements, inducing them to buy on false hopes.
NOTES
Cited for the case citation, the confirmed ‘outright lied’ holding, and the procedural posture (Seventh Circuit affirmance of the civil contempt finding, with the sanction amount remanded for explanation and then re-entered by the district court in 2010). The opinion text was fetched directly rather than taken from a search-tool summary; caselaw.findlaw.com is not reachable by the automated verify-quotes gate, so only the short, exempt ‘outright lied’ fragment is carried as a literal quotation here.