A Premier League legend once sued former US president Donald Trump.
While the 78-year-old is currently seeking a return to the Oval office when the US presidential election takes place in November, there was once a time where he was left red – or rather orange – faced after being successfully sued by ex-Everton and Leeds United midfielder Olivier Dacourt.
The former French international, who turned 50 on Wednesday (September 25), spent an impressive season with the Toffees back during the 1998/99 campaign before returning to France to play for Lens. However, a season later Dacourt was on the move again, this time signing for Leeds, where he became a fan favourite.
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He was part of David O’Leary’s young Leeds side with Rio Ferdinand and co who managed to reach the Champions League semi-finals back in 2001. The Whites agonisingly missed out on making the final after losing 3-0 to Hector Cuper’s Valencia on aggregate.
Spells at Roma, Inter Milan, Fulham and Standard Liege would follow before Dacourt hung up his boots – with one of his post retirement investments seeing him invest in Trump’s “Trump SoHo”, which was a luxury hotel project in Lower Manhattan in 2010.
(Image: AP)
Dacourt, alongside a number of other investors, put down $460,400 for a unit which cost a total of $2.3m. However, when the 46-storey scheme failed to materialise, Dacourt and his fellow investors decided their only option to recoup their money was to sue Trump, asserting that they had been defrauded by inflated claims made by Trump, his children and others of brisk sales in the struggling project.
Speaking in 2016, Trump admitted it was a long-held legal strategy, if not a point of pride, to avoid giving in to plaintiffs in court. “I don’t settle lawsuits – very rare – because once you settle lawsuits, everybody sues you,” he said. But on this occasion, settle he did.
(Image: Getty Images)
Trump, who of course refused to admit any wrongdoing, ended up having to fork out the vast majority of the $3.16m in deposits that had been paid for the project. That brought about the end of a criminal investigation, with tough tackling Dacourt and the other claimants notifying prosecutors they would no longer co-operate as part of their lawsuit settlement.
Speaking to FourFourTwo back in 2023, Dacourt said: “Wow, that was a long time ago. As investors we bought some apartments in Manhattan, but there was a lot of trouble with it so we sued Trump because he was the previous owner. There were around 30 of us. Of course, we didn’t know that we were suing the future president of America!”