The news just keeps getting worse for Black Lives Matter.
The Associated Press, in what it called an exclusive story published Tuesday, revealed more about what happened to that $90 million that the BLM Global Network Foundation raised for “racial justice” programs.
The foundation was formed in 2013 following the acquittal of Florida man George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. Its prestige and bank account both accelerated following the shooting death of Michael Brown, a black man, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
During the pandemic, even some of BLM’s own activists began asking what happened to the $90 million.
Last month, the public learned that BLM’s donations had “secretly” paid $6 million for a swanky 6,500-square-foot, seven-bedroom mansion in Southern California. The house, purchased in October 2020, was reportedly to be used as a “housing and studio space” for BLM co-founders Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Melina Abdullah, according to the New York Post.
That deal was made a few months after Cullors spent $3.2 million to buy four houses around the country, including one in an LA suburb that is more than 90 percent white.
But the AP’s latest revelation shows how Cullors sopped up more of BLM’s financial holdings.
According to a recent tax filing that covered BLM’s fiscal year ending on June 30, 2021, the foundation paid $970,000 to a “creative services” company founded by a man who fathered a child with Cullors.
The foundation also paid more than $840,000 to a security firm run by Cullors’ brother.
The AP also noted that BLM paid Shalomyah Bowers, the foundation’s board secretary, a person who does much of the administrative work for the directors, $2.1 million in that year. Bowers owns a consulting firm that, the AP reported, provided “operational support, including staffing, fundraising and other key services.”
Attempting to answer critics of the spending, including some within BLM’s own network, the AP reported that the group has doled $26 million to local chapters to support what Bowers called “the work of abolition,” which “would shift the moral tide of this world towards one that does not have or believe in police, prisons, jails or violence.”
That is about 70 percent of what BLM has spent. The group still holds about $42 million in assets.
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