Tom Brady’s Bizarre Defense of Alex Guerrero

Photo via AP

Three days after Boston magazine published an investigation into Tom Brady’s business partner, best friend, and fitness guru Alex Guerrero, Brady was grilled about the story’s revelations on WEEI’s Dennis and Callahan program. In a sprawling and at times bizarre interview, Brady dodged questions about what he knew of Guerrero’s past and when he knew it—but repeatedly defended both Guerrero and his methods.

Among the highlights:

• Brady admitted he’d used NeuroSafe, a product that claimed to prevent concussions, claims that the Federal Trade Commission found had no scientific basis and about which the agency expressed “serious concerns.”
• Brady also claimed that TB12—the sports therapy business venture he runs with in partnership with Guerrero, headquartered at Patriot Place—has had “incredible success” in treating “lots of people” with concussions.
• Challenged about how he could support Guerrero when the trainer had been accused of “quackery,” Brady attempted to turn the tables by describing several tenets of Western medicine and nutrition that he finds strange. “When you say, ‘This sounds like quackery,’ there’s a lot of things I see on a daily basis in Western medicine that I think, ‘Wow, why would they ever do that?’ I think there’s a lot of things that are the norm of very systematic that really don’t work.”

As Boston reported last week, the FTC sued Guerrero for a late-night infomercial in which he suggested that his supplement, Supreme Greens, could cure cancer. Guerrero later agreed to a settlement with the FTC that imposed permanent restrictions on him from making outrageous medical claims. But years later, the agency found that he was marketing a product called NeuroSafe, which he and Brady claimed could safeguard athletes from concussions and other head injuries, and help them recover faster from such injuries. In 2012, the FTC investigated but declined to bring action against Guerrero for NeuroSafe, but only after Guerrero stopped selling the product and agreed to offer refunds to anyone who’d purchased it.

On Monday, WEEI’s Kirk Minihane pressed Brady on whether he was aware that—as Boston first reported—Guerrero claimed, in an informercial for Supreme Greens, to have conducted a study in which only eight of 200 terminally ill patients died while under his care. (Guerrero later admitted that no clinical study actually existed.)

“We’ve talked about several things as it relates to that, and he dealt with that,” Brady said. “I mean, that’s part of his life and that’s something that happened 13 years ago… Nutritional supplements and FTC regulation, and all those types of things, there are a lot of gray areas.”

(To be clear: there were no gray areas noted in Guerrero’s case, according to the FTC’s settlement. Guerrero’s lifetime decree demanded that he never again refer to himself as a doctor or a doctor of oriental medicine, and that he cease making outrageous claims about any supplement or product.)

Later in the interview Brady added, “I think there’s things [Guerrero] wished he would have done differently. I think that’s part of growing up and understanding that there’s certain things that happen in your life that you do and you wish you didn’t do certain things.”

According to Brady, Guerrero distributed NeuroSafe and “really liked what it was about. And he said, ‘Look, you’re gonna get hit in the head, and if you do get hit in the head, at least you want to try to do something proactively to try to prevent things that may or may not happen to your brain.”

As Boston reported Friday, in the FTC’s letter to Guerrero in 2012, the agency said it had investigated NeuroSafe and found no scientific basis for “extraordinary” claims that the drink would have any impact on preventing concussions or recovering from traumatic head injury.

Regardless, Brady stuck by Guerrero throughout Monday’s interview. He preached the need for people to eat better and attacked American’s dietary habits:

“You’ll probably go out and drink Coca-Cola and think, ‘€˜Oh yeah, that’s no problem.’ Why? Because they pay lots of money for advertisements to think that you should drink Coca-Cola for a living? No, I totally disagree with that. And when people do that, I think that’s quackery. And the fact that they can sell that to kids? I mean, that’s poison for kids. But they keep doing it.”

He then went on to criticize Frosted Flakes.

“We believe that Frosted Flakes is a food,” he said.

When the hosts circled back to Gurrero’s claims surrounding cancer, Brady continued to defend Guerrero and said he has “never been wrong” in the time they’ve worked together. As proof, Brady pointed to his outstanding career. “I have tremendous belief with Alex and what he’s accomplished with me.”