Judge rules on Trump footage

Unaired footage from when President Donald Trump appeared on Celebrity Apprentice should be handed over to entrepreneurs who claim they were ripped off when Trump and his children repeatedly endorsed a troubled multilevel marketing company on the reality-TV show, a federal judge said.

It would be the first time outsiders would get a chance to view at least some parts of the reality TV show that weren’t publicly broadcast. There have been numerous unsuccessful efforts to get access to the footage, including by actor Tom Arnold’s TV series The Hunt for the Trump Tapes.

U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield in Manhattan on Thursday advised Hollywood studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to find a way for the plaintiffs to see hundreds of hours of recordings from two episodes in which the principals of the marketing company, ACN Opportunity LLC, were on-set guests.

Trump and his three oldest children were sued in 2018 for their roles in promoting ACN from 2005 to 2015 with Trump suggesting people could invest in the company’s desktop video phone with little or no risk. The service was quickly eclipsed with the advent of smartphones and the plaintiffs claim they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars by putting their faith in the Trumps.

Trump and his children have denied wrongdoing, while the president called his past endorsements of ACN “puffery” that no reasonable investor would have relied upon.

The hearing took place a day after Schofield denied the Trumps’ attempt to move the case to arbitration. The judge criticized the Trumps for seeking arbitration only after using the court system for months to gain access to documents from the plaintiffs.