The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation raised just $9.3 million in the fiscal year ending in June 2022—an 88 percent decrease from the year prior, according to records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. In 2020, the organization used the death of George Floyd to a raise a whopping $80 million dollars.
The Black Lives Matter charity used that money to accumulate multiple real estate holdings including the founder, Patrisse Cullors, buying four properties in California and Georgia for $3.2 million dollars. The charity also purchased a $6 million dollar compound in Los Angeles in October 2020 with donor cash, which Cullors used to film videos of herself drinking wine and baking peach cobblers. Black Lives Matter also gave a grant to BLM Canada that was used purchase a Toronto mansion for 6.3 million dollars.
The Washington Free Beacon outlined financial disclosures released in May 2022 that revealed Black Lives Matter paid her brother, Paul Cullors, $840,993 for “professional security services,” a sizable sum for the self-taught graffiti artist with no prior experience as a bodyguard. Paul Cullors went on to purchase his own Los Angeles home for $637,000 in December 2020. Black Lives Matter paid $969,459 to an art firm run by the father of Cullors’s only child, Damon Turner. A consulting firm owned by a Black Lives Matter board member Shalomyah Bowers, a close associate of Cullors, received $2,167,894 for providing management services for the charity.
Black Lives Matters’ troubles began when Cullors’s personal real estate purchases surfaced in April 2021. The two activists who were supposed to replace her never took the job. Black Lives Matter fell so far behind in disclosing its finances to the public that several liberal states barred it from raising funds in their jurisdictions in early 2022. The charity voluntarily shut down its ability to raise funds in February 2022 amid the crackdown.
