Back in spring, headlines of Donald Trump’s scam of a university lit up all over the news after former sales manager, Ronald Schnackenberg, wrote in his testimony, “I resigned from my position in May of 2007 because I believed that Trump University was engaging in misleading fraudulent and dishonest conduct.” He ended his reasoning of resigning with, “Trump University was only interested in selling every person the most expensive seminars they possibly could [afford].”
Schnackenberg gave an example of a 2007 live event in New York City in which he was criticized for refusing to sell a $35,000 Elite program to a couple that was in deep financial waters and would need to use their disability income and pull out a “loan based on equity in his apartment” just to pay the money back. He said, “Trump University reprimanded me for not trying harder to sell the program to this couple.”
Even after Ronald Schnackenberg didn’t sell them the program; another sales person lured them in. “Another sales person, I believe his name was Tad Lignell, talked them into buying the $35,000 seminar after I refused to sell this program to them. I was disgusted by this conduct and decided to resign.”
Day’s later, former Trump University student Sheri Winkelmann went on CNN to speak about her experience at the University. “First of all, I signed up for the three introductory seminar at $1,495 and we were told if by the end of the first day we didn’t want to stay for the 3 days, we could have our money refunded.” Sheri continued, “ I asked the instructor a lot of direct questions and they completely evaded answering them, so I started getting upset feeling that this was not an actual learning seminar, but maybe just an up selling seminar. I tried getting my money back and two other instructors were brought over and basically cornered me telling me that I just didn’t understand the material.”
Winkelmann supported Schnackenberg’s statement by saying, “The second day of the seminars, the mentors who were supposed to be working actually took us outside of the room privately to help us work on our real estate goals and basically had really pressured people into calling their credit card companies to up their credit limit so that they could pay for these seminars.”
Months later, post-campaign trail, Donald Trump’s University launched itself back into headlines today after Trump agreed to pay “$25 million to settle a series of lawsuits stemming from his defunct for-profit education venture, Trump University, finally putting to rest fraud allegations by former students, which have dogged him for years and hampered his presidential campaign,” said New York Times writer Steve Eder.
This, of course, comes to a shock to many; plenty of Trump supporters plagued comment sections and harassed former Trump University students by calling them liars. This news also come as a shock to many more because of Donald Trump’s comments on settling in court, “Probably, I should, but I don’t want to because I give them a great soundbite, but I don’t settle cases. I don’t get sued because I don’t settle cases. I win in court.” I guess things don’t always work out when hundreds (or thousands) of lawsuits are being served on your desk daily.
Comments are closed.