Andrew Kerr writes for the Washington Free Beacon about an inconvenient fact for the Black Lives Matter organization.
Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors resigned from the embattled charity in 2021, but the charity suffered from the excesses of her tenure well into 2023, according to a copy of its latest tax return obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Under Cullors’s leadership, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation doled out massive contracts to her friends and family, purchased a $6 million mansion in Los Angeles in 2020, and financed the purchase of an $8 million mansion in Canada in 2021. By the end of its 2023 fiscal year, the tax forms show, Black Lives Matter saw the $80 million windfall it raked in during the George Floyd riots of 2020 diminish to under $29 million as it hemorrhaged cash fulfilling lingering contractual obligations to Cullors’s associates.
Those individuals include Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’s only child, whose art firm Trap Heals received $778,000 from Black Lives Matter in 2023 despite performing no work for the charity that year.
A Black Lives Matter source told the Free Beacon that the payments to Turner’s firm in 2023 were for work it performed hosting a concert series in early 2022. Black Lives Matter said in a statement Turner no longer works with the charity.
Other staffers from the Cullors era received massive payouts on their way out of Black Lives Matter. Former Black Lives Matter director of operations Raymond Howard and a consulting firm run by his sister, Danielle Howard, received a combined $1.1 million in payments in the group’s 2023 fiscal year.
The group also disclosed two separate six-figure settlement agreements to unnamed former employees in its 2023 financial statements. A former Black Lives Matter board member received $400,000 as part of one settlement agreement, and an unnamed former employee received $335,000 in another settlement. Black Lives Matter told the Free Beacon it would not comment on “confidential HR and legal matters.”
