In Chicago, a former member of the Trump Tower Chicago board is taking legal action against the Trump Organization. This individual recently spoke with the ABC7 I-Team in an exclusive on-camera interview.
Onisim Dorneanu disclosed that he directly approached top Trump Organization officials, including one of President Donald Trump’s sons, to address financial improprieties at the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago.
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After raising his concerns, Dorneanu alleged that the organization took retaliatory actions against him, culminating in his arrest in the spa steam room of the building just last month.
In his federal lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in the Northern Illinois U.S. District Court, Dorneanu claims the hotel engaged in wire fraud and a racketeering scheme to defraud investors.
As an ardent President Trump supporter and owner of twelve hotel condo units and four residential condo units at Trump Tower Chicago, Dorneanu said his decision to sue the Trump Organization was not made lightly.
“I love the Trump name, and I thought it would be really nice to be able to invest into the Trump name,” Dorneanu told the I-Team. “I thought about [it] long and hard and the situation kind of shakes me to the core of my values that I have to do this as a Republican, as a conservative that I am.”
According to the lawsuit, Dorneanu said Trump Tower Chicago is in “poor financial condition,” and that hotel management has been “misallocating funds, concealing financial information, misrepresenting expenses,” as well as misleading investors or condo unit owners.
Trump Tower Chicago has yet to file an answer to the lawsuit, and the Trump Organization did not respond to the I-Team’s multiple requests for comment.
Dorneanu said he joined the hotel’s Board of Directors in March 2023, but once he was on the board, he said he was never shown any financial records for the hotel skyscraper.
“We weren’t given any financial information. So, for example, as a Board of Directors to any entity, you always see their profit or loss, or you see some kind of profit, some kind of financial forms. For almost two years being on the board of directors, I have never seen a financial type of form of how much the hotel may profit, how much the hotel lost,” Dorneanu said.
He continued, “To be honest with you, the most exciting thing that we ever took a decision on as a Board of Directors is, ‘What color was the Christmas decorations going to be at Trump Hotel? Was it going to be gold color? Was it going to be silver or white?”
After more than a year serving on the board, Dorneanu said he started expressing concerns over how Trump Tower Chicago’s finances were being managed to hotel management.
“The fact is that I was able to live on site. Most of the investors don’t live on the site, and I was able to look at the operations daily and look at the things, how things were done daily,” Dorneanu said. “That’s one of the things that they realized that they made a mistake having me on the Board of Directors.”
The lawsuit states that between late 2023 and early 2024, Dorneanu was informed by a number of hotel employees that they had “witnessed high-level employees of the Hotel Manager misappropriating the [Trump] Association’s and the room owners’ funds and property for their personal use.”
Fearing his concerns weren’t being treated seriously, Dorneanu said he decided to contact the top executives of the Trump Organization in May 2024 to “relay his concerns” about the hotel manager’s misconduct.
“I’ve talked to Eric [Trump], and I’ve talked to Mark, the CFO, and they came to Chicago to meet with me,” Dorneanu told the I-Team. “He told me at the meeting we had, ‘Listen, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And clearly here it sounds like there’s smoke. So we’re going to look into it.”
“That’s not what happened,” Dorneanu told the I-Team.
Dorneanu’s lawsuit states the company sent representatives to Chicago to conduct its own “thorough onsite investigation of his concerns,” but “the ‘investigation’ had really been a cover-up.”
“They brought in a team of people from New York, and they went into a cleaning mode, like they- everything that we, I’ve ever confronted them with, they cleaned it up,” Dorneanu told the I-Team.
At this point, Dorneanu said his story took a drastic turn.
A member of the Trump Organization sent Dorneanu an email, “demanding that he cease and desist from investigating such misconduct in his capacity as a director, and threatening to pursue legal action against him,” according to the lawsuit.
In his interview with the I-Team, Dorneanu said the company went so far as to send the head of Trump Tower security and an off-duty police officer to follow him and his family to a River North restaurant last August.
Dorneanu provided the I-Team with a photo of the men he said followed him and his family to the restaurant. When confronted with this, Dorneanu said the company told him it was “just a coincidence” that the men were at the restaurant at the same time as him.
“It was a lot of degrading things that were coming down, trying to intimidate me,” Dorneanu said.
By November 2024, Dorneanu said Trump Tower informed him he was prohibited from using the spa, health club and other amenities at the hotel.
Two months later, on Feb. 2, Dorneanu said he decided to use the hotel’s spa steam room to treat a shoulder injury, but the night ended with him in jail.
“My shoulder was really hurting, so I was like, ‘I think the steam would do really good. Relax my muscles a little bit,” Dorneanu said. “I pay on all our units over $50,000 a month in HOA, we pay a lot of money. Those amenities are included in those things… so I pay for these things, why not go enjoy.”
A Chicago police report reviewed by the I-Team spells out the spiraling relationship between Dorneanu and the Trump Organization when Dorneanu was arrested for alleged criminal trespass.
“They handcuffed me and they brought me down, and then we waited in the lobby for other officers to come in” Dorneanu said.
The trespassing charge against Dorneanu was dropped Wednesday in Cook County court with the option to reinstate, according to court records.
A spokesperson for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office said on Thursday, “Prosecutors have 160 days to reinstate charges.”
Dorneanu’s attorney Alex Hess stressed this lawsuit is not political.
“This case is not about [President] Donald Trump, and it’s not political… This is a business dispute, really, a business dispute that you know, somewhat devolved into something more, more personal,” Hess said. “What’s unusual about the allegations of this… is the extent of the retaliation.”
Acknowledging the uphill battle he will have facing the Trump Organization in court, Dorneanu said he’s ready.
“I do have financial information. I do have a lot of pictures, hundreds and hundreds of pictures over time, of mismanagement, of things that happened,” Dorneanu told the I-Team. “I do have lots of proof to plead my case and to show that this is not just an attempt to smear somebody.”
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