Meet the Trump University Teacher at Center of Class-Action Suit

His relationship with Trump University headquarters was limited to occasions when they would provide him with a list of prospective student-buyers. “I wasn’t really connected with the office, with the exception of them sending me a list of new students,” Lignell says.

He would call each student up, run them through a list of questions, and they would agree to meet in a particular city on a specific date for three days of one-on-one mentorship as part of the $35,000 “Gold Elite” program sold by Trump University.

He would assemble and introduce students to their so-called power team. “The relators, the brokers, the rehabbers, that sort of thing. Not only introducing them, [but] submitting offers on properties and then following up when those offers are accepted, or if they’re not, continue to submit offers until they are accepted,” he says.

Lignell typically made $5,500 for these three-day sessions, not including expenses like airfare, accommodations and food. (He says that fee was dropped to $4,500 shortly before he left the program.)

One such three-day “mentorship” Lignell provided is the subject of one of the two lawsuits against Trump U., Makaeff v. Trump University. Tarla Makaeff filed suit in 2010 claiming Lignell “engaged in misappropriate conduct and misadvised her regarding a property in Las Vegas in which he had a personal financial interest.”

Makaeff, who has asked to pull out of the suit, accused Lignell of “fraudulently and illegally alter[ing] the real estate documents she had previously signed at the escrow office.”

Lignell, for his part, blames the students for failing to properly utilize the tools the seminar provided. The people he encountered at Trump University were similar to those he recognized from the seminar circuit: desperate and searching for answers.

“People become seminar junkies and they go from one after another after another,” Lignell says. “They are going to seminars looking for the magic bullet where the magic bullet is actually doing the work, and they don’t do it.”

Lignell pushes back against accusations that the program preyed on the elderly and uneducated. “Of course we’re not preying on anybody. It’s just marketing, and people that show up, show up,” he says.

Most students, he insists, were not elderly, but rather in their 40s or 50s — the kind of person “who has realized that their job isn’t gonna take them through retirement like they had planned. They have to make a change and some of them are going off the cliff,” Lignell says. “There are people that, voluntarily, make that decision that maybe they shouldn’t have, but they did because they saw the cliff coming and they just [decided], ‘Well, I’ve got to do something, and I’ve got to do something now.'”

“Maybe some people are looking down the road and they’re saying, ‘I’ve only got $50,000 left, and to give you $35,000 seems like it would be a big mistake,’ but then their thought process changes and they say, ‘I’ve only got $50,000 left, I’m going to go broke in six months anyway. What’s the difference to be broke in two months and take a chance at changing my life?'”

The problem, for many former Trump University students, is that taking that chance didn’t pay off. According to two people familiar with the case, only 12 out of 7,000 students have opted out of the class-action suit; most of those are testifying for the defense.

For his part, Lignell says, “I thought we had a reputable company.”

As for the election, Lignell says Trump wasn’t necessarily his first choice, but once he clinched the GOP nomination “he became my only choice because I wouldn’t vote for Hillary under any circumstances.”