By Ray Stern
Terri, no!
That cherubic face. The mommy image. The craft show. It all makes me wonder: What's a nice, local gal like Terri Ouellette doing making commercials for a scoundrel like Kevin Trudeau?
Ouellette has made a name for herself over the years as the self-fashioned "Craft Queen" who appears on the Channel 3 [KTVK] show Good Morning Arizona. Now that name is being tarnished by her appearance in one of Trudeau's slimy infomercials.
A local New Times reader recently ratted out Ouellette as having appeared in an infomercial that pimped Trudeau's new book. A minute of Googling turned up a March article on an anti-infomercial site that mentions her.
Trudeau's a real piece of work, apparently. A marketing scamster of the first stripe. He served two years in prison in the early 1990s for fraud. A few years ago, the Federal Trade Commission banned him from promoting or selling almost any product with an infomercial.
An exception to the ban allows him to hawk the books he writes. But the books have gotten him in trouble, too. The chairwoman for the New York State Consumer Protection Board says in a 2005 bulletin that Trudeau's book about natural cures for disease is a fraud "from cover to cover."
In an infomercial for Trudeau's newest book, "Debt Cures," Ouellette plays the moderator of a fake talk show. She kicks off the ad with the ridiculous statement, "I'm Terri Ouellette, and as usual we have our regulars on the show today..."
Part of the problem here, as a few minutes on the phone with Ouellette reveals, is that she doesn't know [or want to acknowledge] that there's a difference between a "show" and an infomercial.
"I am not selling anything -- I’m a moderator in this particular show that happens to be an infomercial," she says.
Terri O says her agent approached her with the opportunity to do the gig, and she didn't make a lot of money from it. She says she was aware of Trudeau's past, but it didn't matter because she believes she was working for the "production company," and not Trudeau himself.
"I did not do his infomercial, and I really want you to be clear with that," she says. "This is not his infomercial."
She goes on to say that, "Kevin Trudeau had nothing to do with the production company."
That company, she says, works for the Web site www.debtcures.com. When told that the Web site bills itself as "Kevin Trudeau's Debt Cures," Ouellette seems perplexed. If Trudeau was really behind the infomercial, she says, "then I was duped."
Maybe it's true that poor, sweet, naive Terri O is yet another victim of ripoff artist Kevin Trudeau.
Or maybe her denials and excuses are just part of the act.
