RV dealer and relentless self-promoter Gigi Stetler, 62, was arrested this past week by Florida state officials and charged with theft of state funds. According to charging documents, Stetler’s parent company, RV Sales of Broward, had “collected and failed to pay a minimum of $471,447.35 in sales tax” from RV sales at her dealership, Planet RV in Pompano Beach. The charges carry a maximum penalty of 30 years’ imprisonment.
Two things about this incident stand out. The first is that the allegedly unpaid taxes were collected from May 2019 to June 2023, a four-year span that raises the obvious question: is anyone staffing the Florida Department of Revenue? Did no one notice a sudden change in tax payments from an RV dealership that has been around for decades? Why is a state government fixated on drag queens, Mickey Mouse and blastocysts apparently incapable of performing one of the most rudimentary governmental functions, that of ensuring timely tax collections? (Oh, right.)
The second is: WTF?
How is it that Gigi Stetler, one of the most storied—some might say notorious—RV dealers in the country, is once again in the headlines, and once again for reasons that as easily provoke condemnation as sympathy? Reviewing her history, one is struck by the near-biblical scale of her tribulations, as if to give Job a reason for good cheer. Yet it’s also safe to say that Stetler will milk her latest setback to the hilt, further burnishing her image as an indomitable survivor. That’s just how she rolls. And while some might view her as merely another hustler, others will see only a gutsy warrior standing up against malignant forces trying to tear her down because she’s a woman, she’s mouthy and she’s been beating the boys at their own game.
If there’s one thing about which most everyone can agree, it’s that Gigi Stetler holds herself in high regard. The blurb for her 2009 book, “Unstoppable: Surviving Is Just the Beginning,” says it all: “Gigi Stetler is a complex and inspirational woman— a single mother that didn’t finish the tenth grade who became a queen of the male-dominated RV industry, presiding over the $18 million a year RV Sales of Broward as the first female founder or owner of an RV dealership in the country; she has redefined the climate of the RV industry. A Motivational Speaker, Author, Entrepreneur, Business-woman, Accomplished Equestrian, Designer and Life Coach, Gigi has become an inspiration to women everywhere.”
The book itself hardly matches the hype—of the scant handful of readers’ reviews on Amazon, several include the suggestion that she should have hired herself an editor, or at least a proofreader—but it does set the tone for the persona she’s cultivated ever since, starting with her oft-repeated claim of being the stabbing victim of a homeless man she’d tried to help. Yet despite 21 wounds, 200 stitches and doctors warning her she’d lose the use of her left arm, Stetler went on to battle a sexist industry, repeatedly tangled with the industry’s 800-pound gorilla, Marcus Lemonis, and took down General Electric in a successful breach-of-settlement lawsuit that a jury decided in just four hours.
“I showed up with my stilettos and my pony tail and my big brilliant ideas,” Stetler recalled for the Miami Herald in 2017, describing her first RV dealer association meeting, in the mid-1980s. Those ideas included catering to young families, not just retirees, and opening her dealership 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week instead of keeping bankers’ hours. Her all-male peers responded with, “Little girl, you need to go home and bake cookies.”
Fast-forward a couple of decades and Stetler was riding high, claiming $20 million in annual sales, when she tangled with Lemonis in a complex dispute involving an RV campground and dealership that she was operating at the Winter Equestrian Festival in Wellington. When the property owner refused to renew her lease after 16 years and instead gave it to Lemonis’s company, Camping World, she opened a small competing campground nearby and rented RVs at half of Camping World’s rates. And after she was banned from the festival grounds, allegedly in retaliation, Stetler also filed a protest with the U.S. Equestrian Federation—the festival’s governing body—which found in her favor, fined the the property owner and ordered that Stetler be allowed back on the festival grounds.
Playing into that decision were emails that Camping World officials had sent to the property owner, complaining that Stetler was undercutting their prices and upsetting their business. One of those emails declared that “stopping her would go a long way,” presumably toward making Lemonis happy.
That was in 2009, and Stetler and Lemonis have been at each other ever since. She sued him for allegedly ruining her business, he sued her for trademark infringement. Other lawsuits began piling up, typically over financial disputes. And as her woes mounted Stetler began reinventing herself, leaning in to her “unstoppable” image to become not just a plucky woman in a man’s world, but a champion of the little guy. Or girl.
“I’m a warrior. I was stabbed 21 times and left for dead. There’s nothing that hasn’t happened to me in my life,” she told RVBusiness.com in 2019, shortly after she created a new business, The RV Advisor. “So many times, people have tried to kill me physically, mentally, emotionally, and everything. But I don’t play the victim card. . . . I’m the underdog, and I feel that consumers are underdogs. Somebody has to speak for them. Somebody has to speak up—like Erin Brockovich spoke up for the people with bad water.”
The RV Advisor, a membership-based organization supposedly modeled on Angie’s List, was advertised as a certification service that would vet RV dealers for the buying public. “I know everything they could be up to. I know everything about everything in this business. They can’t hide anything from me,” she told RVBusiness. “So, I want them to be afraid of me. I want a dealer to be able to tell a consumer, ‘Oh, you’re an RV Advisor member? Here, let me take care of you.'”
The concept proved an instant winner—with some. Football legend Dan Marino, reportedly a long-time acquaintance of Stetler’s, quickly aligned himself with the brand, appearing in its promotional material with the explanation that “RVs have always been present in my life.” RVtravel, an independent online RVing magazine, announced it had joined forces with Stetler “to promote her messages/services,” which by then included the sale of extended warranties, RV insurance and emergency road service. “This woman will fight for you, I strongly believe,” publisher Chuck Woodbury assured his readers. Memberships, at $25 apiece, began rolling in.
Who wasn’t wowed by Stetler’s crusade were the dealers Stetler was supposed to evaluate—not when she wanted to charge them $350 for an on-site inspection of their premises, and certainly not at a time when RV sales had shot through the roof and would-be buyers were lining up in unprecedented numbers. “I’ve been calling them and sending them emails to get them certified, but they don’t want to be certified because business is too good,” Stetler conceded to RVBusiness. “They don’t want to be accountable.” But if she could get a million members, Stetler added, that would turn the tide—“Do you know how much power we would have in the industry?” Not to mention, of course, the $25 million war chest that would create.
Just a couple of months later, Stetler’s RV-related career may have hit an all-time high, as she and her company won an eight-day court battle with General Electric Commercial Distribution Finance. The case dated back to 2008, when GE erroneously repossessed her entire RV inventory and almost put her out of business. Now, more than a decade later, Stetler was quick to proclaim her triumph in various media, including a lengthy article on her website headlined, “The Day Gigi Beat Goliath,” but in none of the accounts was there a mention of what she actually got out of the ordeal. Still, it made for good press.
And then things started unraveling.
First came the pandemic, which must have stressed Stetler’s finances. A year after that, in March of 2021, her RV dealership building and its contents—including several RVs—was declared a total loss following a blaze so intense firefighters could mount only an exterior attack. That disaster came just four days after Lemonis had filed his trademark infringement suit, and apparently other lawsuits already were swirling around her: one, filed earlier this year over allegations of financial misdealing, cited a 2023 Broward court determination that Stetler had been “employing such [fraudulent] schemes for years” and had been sued “numerous times for identical” misconduct, including swindling customers.
Meanwhile, RV Advisor’s claim to represent the underdog became increasingly tenuous. A cost comparison earlier this year of six RV roadside assistance plans by Fulltime Families, an Amazon-related service, ranked RV Advisor’s as the most expensive, starting at $289 a year—ironically, more than four times as much as Good Sam’s basic plan. RV Advisor’s annual membership fee, now $29, has been decried as “sizzle with little beef,” with little to show for it beyond an opportunity for RV Advisor to sell other products—including “Gigi’s Personal Services,” featuring the same outdated headshot as shown above and a $350 price tag.
(That’s actually a bargain compared to the deal offered on Stetler’s side hustle, a life-coaching website, under the screaming headline, “Today is the day you become unstoppable.” There you can buy a gold package, which includes a customized coaching seminar of two two-hour sessions “with Gigi Stetler and a small group of people” (?), which she values at $3,895 but can be yours for just $2,500. The sessions are designed “to make you and your group UNSTOPPABLE.”)
Then there’s Planet RV itself, which rates a middling 3.7 stars on Google reviews and basically has only two kinds of ratings: five stars and rave reviews of Stetler’s service, and one-star complaints about broken promises, misappropriated funds and months-long waits for transfer of ownership papers. Her customers love her or hate her, and there’s little middle ground. Stetler, meanwhile, has said that the negative reviews have been planted by her competitors and that she’s never heard of or met some of the supposed “customers.”
Like a Rorschach inkblot test, Gigi Stetler’s life and relentless self-promotion provide ample room for differing interpretations of her character. This latest chapter, as we see how she responds to the sales-tax theft charges, only adds to the inkblot’s complexity.
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