The organization’s co-founder and her associates may have misused millions of dollars in donations. They need to be investigated.
The organization’s co-founder and her associates may have misused millions of dollars in donations. They need to be investigated.
P atrisse Cullors, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, may be the biggest con artist in America. The late Bernie Madoff couldn’t have gotten away with schemes (indeed, he didn’t) like the ones Cullors and BLM have — all while in the national spotlight. Tax documents released last week point to possible misuse of donations to BLM on an absurd scale. Based on these documents, Cullors and BLM deserve America’s contempt.
Investigative reporting by multiple outlets, including the Associated Press, has shown how Cullors and company spent millions of dollars donated to Black Lives Matter. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, BLM became one of America’s biggest brands overnight. Corporations, organizations, and many on the left were tripping head over foot to throw money into BLM’s coffers. Ordinary Americans made donations, too, because they mistakenly believed it would help African Americans, some of whom genuinely need support. Within seven months, BLM went from owning peanuts to raking in $90 million.
The AP reports that “tens of millions” went to BLM chapters, grassroots groups, and “families of police brutality victims.” But plenty of money went to real estate, consultants, and other expenses. Meanwhile, some local BLM chapters and the parents of slain African Americans, who were promised funding from the group — including the parents of Breonna Taylor and Tamir Rice, whose deaths attracted national attention — complained that they received none. In July 2020, YahNé Ndgo, a BLM Philadelphia activist, led ten local chapters of the group to write an open letter to the BLM board of directors (addressed to Cullors) objecting to the lack of transparency in funding decisions and complaining that the Black Lives Matter Global Network had “disrespected and disregarded” the local groups’ activities and caused “public confusion regarding fundraising.” Nothing changed, and Ndgo and others began leaving the movement.
Donations kept flowing to BLM, however, which remained in the political spotlight. By 2018, the organization was controlled by Cullors, whose two co-founders had left the movement. During Cullors’s sole leadership, BLM was incorporated in Delaware; she became the board’s “sole voting director” and, with her assistant, one of only two employees.
With that power, Cullors directed money to a range of expenses unrelated to activism. As the group’s IRS Form 990 (required of all nonprofits) shows, less than half of its revenue was directed to victims’ families, local chapters, and other programs for black empowerment. The remainder was for the organization’s other expenses — including a $4 million operating budget (for two employees) and a $73,569 flight taken by Cullors on a private jet (later reimbursed once this expenditure became public) — or has since been invested.
Most controversially, the group’s expenses included a $6 million, 7,400-square-foot mansion in the Studio City neighborhood of Los Angeles, which it purchased tax-free because of the group’s nonprofit status. The 1930s-era property — once visited by, among others, Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart — has six bedrooms, a swimming pool, a Jacuzzi, a two-person guest house, a music studio, and parking space for 20 cars. The purchase, from a televangelist, was made through a shell company created by the progressive law firm Perkins Coie. Though BLM claimed it was supposed to be a “housing and studio space for the Black Joy Creators Fellowship” run by the group, the house was kept secret for more than 18 months — known only to Cullors and her immediate staff. It’s unclear whether any black artists or creators have ever gone there.
Indeed, the house’s existence became known only because of an investigative report by Sean Campbell for New York magazine that appeared last month. That report revealed internal memos between Cullors and other friends of BLM about the magazine’s investigation, as well as efforts to “kill the story” and a media strategy to brand the home as a private “safe house” for black leaders from “right-wing media”— a description at odds with the claim that it was a public “studio space.” Though BLM denied it was a personal residence, Cullors had uploaded social-media videos of herself on the property with family, cooking in its massive kitchen and sipping Champagne on the first anniversary of George Floyd’s death. The videos were removed from her accounts after it was discovered where they were shot. She later admitted to hosting her son’s birthday party at the home and a large celebration of the Biden inauguration. Because the IRS prohibits charity property from being used for personal reasons by executives, unless it is commercially rented out, Cullors rented the space — but paid a ridiculously low amount for it. IRS filings showed that, for one event, Cullors paid just $390, while market rents for mansions used as event spaces in the area range from upward of $10,000 per day.
All this, while BLM since 2020 has been calling for the defunding of police and redirecting public funds to low-income African-American communities, gaining nationwide acclaim for its professed goals and actions on behalf of blacks. When other groups focused on helping blacks reached out to BLM for help, they sometimes received no response. Pastor Corey Brooks, of Project H.O.O.D., a group combating gun violence on the South Side of Chicago, told New York magazine that they “never received a dime from Black Lives Matter” under Cullors. He claimed that they “haven’t given to grassroots organizations serving black communities.”
We do know, however, that six people benefited from BLM’s expenditures: Cullors; her son’s father, Damon Turner; her brother Paul; her mother; and her best friend, Shalomyah Bowers. Over the past year, BLM paid Turner’s for-profit clothing company, Trap House, nearly $1 million for “media and design” work, as well as $150,000 from the Black Lives Matter Political Action Committee for unspecified work on “criminal justice reform,” according to Campbell. Cullors’s brother received $840,933 through his company, Cullors Protection LLC, for private security work, despite his having no experience in the field (he’s a self-taught graffiti artist) and having established the company only in July 2020. It made him among BLM’s highest-paid contractors. Campbell reported that Cullors’s mother was employed at the Studio City property as a “cleaner,” while Bowers received $2.1 million in consulting fees out of BLM accounts. Cullors reportedly even paid herself $120,000 in previously undisclosed consulting fees, despite being the sole executive member of both her consultancy and BLM.
It would not take special powers of insight to think that Patrisse Cullors misused the organization’s funds and its nonprofit status for personal purposes. This money could have gone to real organizations doing real work across the country. Activists worked hard to build up a global reputation for BLM that Cullors used to fundraise for her extravagance.
When confronted about her actions, Cullors has tried to justify them by brazenly criticizing BLM’s donors. She recently said that the original $90 million raised in 2020 was “white guilt money” and was donated “too fast for BLM to properly handle.” Apparently, BLM’s donors are now responsible for Cullors’s mishandling of their cash. All of this is separate from other controversies — her buying multiple mansions worth millions of dollars across the country and in the Bahamas, which seems to clash with her being an avowed Marxist and opponent of private property. It’s still unclear where she earned the money to buy them. After these revelations, she resigned from the organization but remains closely affiliated with it.
What is clear: Cullors should be seen as a crook, and Black Lives Matter as a disgraced organization whose financial corruption now dovetails with their intellectual and moral corruption. As a 501(c)(3) organization, BLM is legally barred from using donated funds for personal use, an act that carries civil and criminal penalties. It’s time for both Cullors and BLM to be investigated on these grounds. For the high life, they must pay the price.