After a federal judge ruled on Tuesday that plaintiffs could not file a class action lawsuit against him, the former president declared a “complete victory.”
According to U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield of the New York City district, Trump engaged into an endorsement arrangement with ACN Opportunity LLC in 2006 to promote its marketing training services for independent business owners.
The following accords persisted up to June 2015, the month he declared his candidature for president.
In the case, three plaintiffs asserted that Trump’s endorsement led them to choose ACN’s products.
One of them claimed she only made $38 over a two-year period, while the other two claimed they made no money from the endeavour.
The plaintiffs said they were unaware that Trump was receiving millions of dollars to support ACN.
According to Schofield, it would be impossible to identify a group of people who were hurt by Trump’s endorsement because people can be persuaded by a variety of things, such as their own research into the business, other 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 said.
“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 continued.
She continued by saying that “the record evidence shows that some IBOs knew or assumed Trump was a paid spokesperson.”
Trump’s claims that ACN was a “great opportunity,” had a “winning business model,” and had a “proven track record” of “creating millionaires” can be considered as ordinary advertising puffery rather than deliberate misrepresentations.
Schofield ordered the three plaintiffs to submit briefs by Tuesday explaining why their claims should not be separated from the others and transferred as individual lawsuits to the appropriate district courts in California, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, where they reside, in addition to rejecting the creation of a class action lawsuit.
Following the judge’s decision regarding Truth Social, Trump tweeted, “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.”