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Last Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel approved a proposed $25 million agreement that would settle a multitude of fraud claims brought against Trump University, the now-defunct sham education venture that preyed on the business dreams of thousands of Americans. The announcement ended what had become one of the President's higher-profile headaches, but that case was just one of many legal fights in which Trump and his business interests have become embroiled over the years—some of which remain in progress even while he sits in the Oval Office.
To be fair, every president gets sued a lot—if not because of their own conduct, then in their official capacity in a seemingly-bottomless stream of handwritten civil rights lawsuits brought by federal prisoners, some of which have merit and some of which make extremely detailed allegations about the White House's unreported employment of space aliens. But Trump is unique among the country's roster of chief executives in that over the course of his pre-White House career in real estate and reality television and professional wrestling and bulk meat and a host of other ventures, he has had plenty of additional opportunities to sue and be sued. A recent sweep conducted by USA Today found that the President and his businesses have been involved in a mind-bending 4,095 lawsuits over the past few decades.
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The sheer volume here is impressive, but we wanted to take a closer look at the circumstances of these cases to see just what kind of battles our esteemed Commander-in-Chief has decided to wage. We searched publicly accessible records databases for federal courts and courts in New York and Florida for cases, both pending and resolved, in which Trump and/or one or more of his many business interests were named as a party. Here is just some of what we found.
In Palmer v. Trump Model Management, Alexia Palmer brought a class action suit against a Trump-owned modeling agency, alleging that it recruited models to come work in the United States on H-1B visas but failed to pay them as promised. (Donald Trump despises foreign workers, I suppose, unless they're hot lady foreign workers.) The complaint states that in the company's visa application, they pledged to pay Palmer and her peers $75,000 a year, but after the agency deducted fees, expenses, and mandatory cosmetics kits, Palmer says she received, for three years of work, a paycheck for $3,880.75. The court dismissed Palmer's case last March, finding that she hadn't alleged enough facts to make her legal case, and also had failed to file the mandatory administrative complaint with the Department of Labor before suing in court.
Paulette Askew was a 64-year-old woman who was a pit manager at a Trump-owned casino in Atlantic City. After two decades on the job, she exercised her rights under the federal Family Medical Leave Act to take time off from work and attend to an unspecified illness, according to her complaint in Askew v. Trump Entertainment Resorts. On her first day back at work, she was fired. She alleges that although the casino's human resources department explained that she was being terminated for disciplinary- and performance-related reasons, she had never received a write-up or a negative review during the her 20-year tenure at the company, and had called out of work exactly zero times in the previous year. The casino settled with Askew in March 2014 for an undisclosed amount.
In 2015, the President filed a lawsuit opposing the trademark renewal application of Trump Your Competition, a small Internet marketing firm, arguing that their longtime use of this business names—which he had not previously opposed—allowed them to profit off his name and likeness. (Feel free to consult a dictionary, and also to look for yourself.) However, the case, Trump Your Competition, Inc. v. Donald J. Trump, came grinding to a halt when Trump refused to appear for a deposition in the lawsuit that he had filed, presumably because he was too busy running for President of the United States. In a one-page order, the court sided with Trump and agreed he wouldn't be required to testify. His lawyers haven't prosecuted the case since, perhaps because they have, um, bigger fish to fry these days.
You might remember this one. A few weeks after Trump kicked off his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, Univision announced it would nix its plans to show the then-Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant. Although Univision had paid only $13.5 million for the pageant's broadcast rights, Trump sued for $500 million in Miss Universe v. Univision, alleging that the move was "a thinly-veiled attempt...to suppress Mr. Trump's freedom of speech under the First Amendment as he begins to campaign for the nation's presidency." (As everyone who has taken high school civics could tell you, private parties don't really infringe on First Amendment rights, but whatever.) Trump and Univision settled for an undisclosed amount last February.
After Trump bought what had been the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club and Spa in Jupiter, Florida, his newly-minted Trump National Golf Club Jupiter allegedly refused to pay back the refundable membership deposits of former Ritz-Carlton members who wanted no part of the newer iteration of the club. The suit, Hirsch v. Jupiter Golf Club, claims that Trump also kept sending former members new bills for club dues—and collection demands, when those dues went unpaid—even after assuring them that they would no longer be on the hook. The court sided with the plaintiffs and awarded them some $5.7 million in damages. Trump's lawyer have announced that they'll appeal the result.
Michael Jackson—no, not that one—worked as a dealer at the Trump Marina Casino in Atlantic City for more than two decades before undergoing surgery in 2010 for an unspecified illness, as details in the complaint in Jackson v. Trump Entertainment Resorts. When he returned to work, the complaint asserts that he presented medical documentation requesting, as a "reasonable accommodation" under the Americans with Disabilities Act, that he be allowed to sip water and chew gum while on the job. Jackson's superiors allegedly granted this request at first, but denied it less than a year later without explanation, and they fired him shortly thereafter when Trump sold the Marina to a new owner. The casino fought the case, and a Florida jury found in favor of Jackson, awarding him $340,000. The parties settled the case shortly thereafter.
This one might ring a bell, too. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued the Trump Organization for telling a host of alleged lies to hopeful New Yorkers who believed that they were paying Trump's handpicked experts to teach them his secret real estate investment strategies. (The wildest detail from the complaint in New York v. Trump University: Trump U speakers allegedly urged participants to request higher credit limits for the undisclosed purpose of ensuring that participants would have sufficient credit so they could buy the more-expensive "Trump Elite" program when it was pitched to them.) Despite swearing that he would never do so, the President agreed to settle this case and two other Trump University lawsuits—one of which was the one that the then-candidate claimed that Judge Curiel couldn't fairly adjudicate because he is "Mexican"—for $25 million just two days before he was sworn in.
Summer Zervos was a contestant on the fifth season of The Apprentice, and a few years after she was "fired" from the show, she claims that she asked to meet him for a business lunch. He allegedly countered by inviting her up to his office, and, despite her protestations, kissing her multiple times on the mouth. The lawsuit, Zervos v. Trump, asserts that a few weeks later, he again invited her to meet with him while he was in Los Angeles. His security team brought her to Trump's hotel room, where he allegedly tried to kiss her and press his crotch into her while breaking out his grossest pick-up lines ("Let's lay down and watch some telly telly," the complaint alleges he told her.) Trump has asked the court to dismiss Zervos' suit because, he argues, he's immune from being sued in state court while in the White House.
When Kashiya Nwanguma protested at one of Trump's campaign rallies just over a year ago, she alleges that she was subject to racist and sexist epithets, and when the candidate—referring to the small pockets of protestors scattered throughout the event—told supporters to "get 'em out of here," she asserts that she was pushed and struck by white nationalists in attendance. The complaint details similar incidents both at that rally and in other cities, where Trump did things like promise to pay his supporters' legal fees and express nostalgia for the "old days" when protestors would be "carried out on a stretcher." Nwanguma argues that Trump intended this comments to incite riots and cause violence. Just last week, U.S. District Court judge David Hale denied the President's motion to dismiss in Nwanguma v. Trump, finding that the his First Amendment rights didn't protect his "get 'em out of here" comment, which, Judge Hale opined, was “stated in the imperative; it was an order, an instruction, a command” to his devotees.
Although the Paint Spot, an independently-owned store in Miami, sold nearly $150,000 worth of product to the Trump National Doral Golf Resort, the resort shorted the store on the bill by $32,612.26. Their rationale for doing so, according to the complaint in The Paint Spot v. Trump Endeavor? It had "paid enough." (This is just one example of Trump's vile practice of refusing to pay contractors some part of the agreed-upon price, knowing that his considerable wealth allows him make a "take it or leave it" offer to small businesses, which may need the cash and/or lack the resources to wage a lengthy legal battle to recover the full, promised amount.) The store won, and when it asked the court to order the resort to reimburse $150,000 of the store's legal fees, the judge awarded nearly twice that amount. Trump's legal team has announced that it will appeal the case. That's right—the sitting President of the United States is in court right now to answer for his refusal to pay a dang paint store.
Again, Donald Trump is the first businessman President in modern history, which means that one would expect to find him involved in more lawsuits than, say, a community organizer-turned-state senator from Illinois. Employment disputes, for example, are hardly unique to Trump's corporate universe. Also, it's important to remember that these lawsuits make allegations, which means that the aggrieved party's version of events should not be taken as gospel and, as noted above, some of these matters were ultimately resolved in Trump's favor. But even when compared to his peers in the industry, Trump has proven to be a prodigiously litigious guy. USA Today took a look at the legal dockets of five other well-known real estate scions, and found that the President and his businesses have been involved in more lawsuits than all of them combined.
Thanks to the hilariously incompetent rollout of his long-promised Muslim ban, it took only a few weeks for President Trump to end up in court—where he lost, and lost again, and lost again. But long before his administration started piling up these high-profile Ls, the president and his business interests were seasoned veterans of the litigation game, battling it out with unpaid contractors, fired employees, sexual harassment accusers, and other ordinary Americans just trying to go about their business. What this all means, if anything, probably depends in large part on how you already feel about Donald Trump. But for a man who has cast himself as a benevolent savior of this country, and who has promised so loudly and vociferously to make America great again, he sure has spent a healthy chunk of his life pissing people off.
