A co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, has been in the news regarding the massive bank account held by the organization, and its purchase of a $6 million mansion.
Now her complaint is that Internal Revenue Service forms, like the “990,” “trigger” her.
A report at the Post Millennial explained it was at a recent event in Washington that Cullors said those documents, required for charities, are “triggering” because she thinks they’re being “weaponized” against her organization and others.
The IRS 990 is a basic document that the government requires of charities to provide the public with basic information about the organizations to which they may, or may not, give their money.
“It is such a trip now to hear the term ‘990,’” Cullors claimed during an appearance at the Vashon Center for the Arts. “I’m, like, ugh. It’s, like, triggering.”
She cited the recent explosion of attention on the group over the $90 million in funds raised in 2020, and what it was spent on.
“I actually did not know what 990s were before all of this happened,” Cullors said.
Multiple states have ordered the organization to stop collecting donations for now.
Cullors said the structure “doesn’t seem safe for us.”
“This is, like, deeply unsafe. This is being literally weaponized against us, against the people we work with,” she charged.
She said complete the required forms could put her activists “at risk,” the report said.
And she said a group’s “morale” would suffer if the people in it “are being attacked and scrutinized at everything they do.”
Cullors stepped down from the group in May of 2021 amid scrutiny of her personal finances, and the buying of multiple homes across the country.
And BLM soon may want to be more concerned over its business with the IRS, after a report in the Washington Examiner said a watchdog, the National Legal and Policy Center, filed a complaint over the BLM’s purchase of a mansion, through a middleman, for $6 million in cash.
The deed to the property was purchased in 2020, with the deed transferred to an obscure LLC and the deal concealed from donors for more than a year, “while Cullors stayed at the property for days at a time and used it in multiple videos posted to her private YouTube channel,” the report said.
Paul Kamenar drafted the NLPC’s complaint, and said, in the report, “Enough is enough. The IRS owes the public and supporters of Black Lives Matter a full investigation of the group’s finances, management, and cover-up of the use of its $6 million LA mansion by Patrisse Cullors, even if she thinks compliance with IRS disclosure rules is ‘triggering’ and causes her and her associates ‘trauma.'”
Cullors claimed in an April 5 statement she never lived at the property and that BLM always intended to use it as a place for black artists to “foster creativity,” the report said.
She said the purchase was hidden from donors because the building needed repairs.
The NLPC’s complaint charges that Cullors stayed there overnights on occasion, showing she unlawfully used BLM assets for her personal benefit.
While Cullors now has claimed to have no knowledge of what’s happening with the property, New York Magazine said her family members, brother, mother and sister, apparently have deals to work there.
“The IRS must conduct a full investigation and audit of BLMGNF’s finances and transactions immediately, including examining the minutes of all Board Meetings, thoroughly reviewing their 990-tax return to be filed next month, assessing appropriate civil and criminal penalties, and revoking their tax exempt status if warranted,” the complaint said.
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