Trump Magazine Survivor Describes Bounced Paychecks, ‘Living in an Onion Article’

A former receptionist for the now-defunct Trump Magazine says she felt like she was living in a satire when her checks began to bounce.

“It felt like I was living in an Onion article: ‘Luxury Lifestyle Magazine Can’t Pay Its Own Employees’,” Carey Purcell said in an essay for Politico.

She took the job 10 years ago while trying to break into journalism, she said.

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“The first time it happened, it seemed like an accident, or maybe an oversight,” she said of the bounced checks. “The office accountant quickly issued a new payment and covered the fee for the check bouncing. But then it happened again. And this time, the company didn’t reissue a check. Instead, I was handed a brown paper bag filled with hundred-dollar bills to cover for the company’s lack of payroll funds.”

Trump didn’t publish the magazine, but licensed his name to Premiere Publishing Group, a company owned by a magazine vet named Michael Jacobson.

“In the six months I worked there, I never met or spoke with Donald himself, and he never came to the office,” Purcell wrote.

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Five months into her employment, Purcell said, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

“I immediately met with Trump magazine’s human resources manager. Her advice? Get the treatments over with as quickly as I could, because she couldn’t promise medical coverage lasting beyond the next eight weeks,” Purcell said.

She said the office soon devolved into “full-blown dysfunction.”

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“The phones were now ringing off the hook with concerned stockholders demanding to know about their shares in the company,” Purcell recounted. “Then came the creditors. Premiere Publishing, it became clear, owed money all over town. At least once, the electricity was cut off; with no lights to work by, we sat in a circle on the floor like a group therapy session.”

According to Purcell, in September 2007, the company was forced into bankruptcy. “In an effort to keep up the illusion that I worked for a functioning company, I gave Trump magazine two weeks’ notice, only to be informed that my employment had been immediately terminated,” she said.

That meant she lost her insurance, she said.

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“When Trump talks about using bankruptcy law as a business tool… he doesn’t talk about the people that bankruptcy can leave behind,” Purcell said.

“As a candidate, Trump has built his campaign on his success as a businessman, boasting about his successful deals, the jobs he claims he has created and his personal wealth,” Purcell said. “But in the case of Trump magazine, he licensed his name to an inept and irresponsible businessman who broke promises, put its staff out on the street, and left a cancer patient without health care. Almost 10 years have passed since this took place. It has left me hoping that come Nov. 8, Donald Trump will add another item to his long list of failures.”

A spokesperson for Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hillary Clinton's 5 Best Donald Trump Attack Lines (Photos)

• Hillary Clinton has spent the last week criticizing Donald Trump, and we asked experts which of her attack lines might land with voters.

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• 5. "So let's take a look at what he has done. He's written a lot of books about business -- they all seem to end at Chapter 11," Clinton said in a speech Monday, drawing huge applause from her supporters.

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• Politico national politics reporter Eli Stokols told TheWrap that this is a crafty approach, but it could get old.

  “It’s the kind of line that is good the first time because it has a ring to it, it’s kind of clever and she’s sort of saying something with a wink and a nod,” Stokols Said.

  Also Read: Hillary Clinton’s Veep: Here Are the Odds for Each Potential Pick (Photos)

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• “She’s going to make to is to redefine him not as a private entrepreneurial success, but as more of a poster child for some of the bad business excesses. It’s a really interesting strategy,” University of Southern California clinical professor of communications Gordon Stables told TheWrap.

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• 4. “Just like he shouldn’t have his finger on the button, he shouldn’t have his hands on our economy,” Clinton said referring to Trump’s foreign policy ideas and his economic proposals.

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• “It’s about his character… she obviously wanted to highlight that there is something about his disposition or his temperament that basically says, ‘he doesn’t have the patience or wisdom or character to occupy the kind of crisis in the White House,’” Stables said.

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• 3. “I had my researchers and my speech writers send me information” on Trump “and then I’d say, ‘Really? He really said that?’ And they’d send me all the background and the video clip,” Clinton said.

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• “I actually thought that was the most effective thing that you heard from her in terms of articulating this, because it personalizes it, it conveys that she’s someone who is a real person,” Stokols said. "It’s something that some voters will be able to relate to personally and it seemed convincing.”

  Also Read: Hillary Clinton’s Veep: Here Are the Odds for Each Potential Pick (Photos)

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• 2. "I have this old-fashioned idea that if you're running for president, you should say what you want to do and how you'll get it done”

• Stables feels that she could be looking to reach Bernie Sanders supporters that still feel frustrated.

  “There are voters with a different economic critique… there is something they don’t like with the way Trump did business and she’s going directly at it,” he said.

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• 1. "The Chamber of Commerce and labor unions, Mitt Romney and Elizabeth Warren, economists on the right and the left and the center, all agree: Trump would throw us back into recession," Clinton said.

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• “Clinton is defining the campaign on her terms… she’s positioning herself to make the argument she’s going to make in November. Trump is still fighting to define and differentiate what to say. He ran a very smart campaign to defeat the other Republican primary competitors,” Stables said.

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• If you enjoyed this, check out Donald Trump’s 5 best Hillary Clinton attack lines.

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Experts break down which of her attacks might be most effective

Hillary Clinton has spent the last week criticizing Donald Trump, and we asked experts which of her attack lines might land with voters.

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