The highest-paid employee of the national Black Lives Matter group is Paul Cullors, the brother of the charity’s embattled co-founder Patrisse Cullors, new filings reveal.
Paul Cullors is the head of security at BLM’s $6 million Los Angeles mansion, secretly purchased with donor funds in October 2020. Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation identified Paul Cullors and BLM Operations Director Raymond Howard as the two employees with the “greatest compensation” in its Washington state charity registration application filed on May 11.
BLM did not disclose in the filing how much it paid Paul Cullors, and it’s not clear if he was paid more, less, or the same as Howard. BLM has not yet released its IRS Form 990 financial disclosure that would contain that information.
Paul Cullors’s inclusion on the list of BLM’s highest-compensated employees indicates he is paid more than dozens of other people who reportedly work with the charity. He is also one of three known members of Patrisse Cullors’s immediate family to have worked at BLM’s Los Angeles mansion.
“While my brother is the head of security, and my mom and sister did work at the property, there are also dozens of people who work in the organization that are black folks and are doing amazing work,” Cullors told the Associated Press on May 9.
Paul Cullors also provides security services for Patrisse Cullors’s personal properties, according to encrypted group chat communications obtained by New York magazine. The chats showed Patrisse Cullors paid her brother with her own personal funds for the work he performed at her personal residences, the magazine added.
However, the revelation that Patrisse Cullors’s brother identified as one of BLM’s two highest-compensated employees raises concerns that she may have used the charity, which claimed to have received $90 million in 2020, to subsidize her personal security costs, said Tom Anderson, the director of the Government Integrity Project at the National Legal and Policy Center watchdog group.
“Reportedly accessed Signal messaging exchanges show Paul Cullors supervises physical security at all of Patrisse’s private residences. That, coupled with this new revelation that Paul is one of the highest-paid employees of Black Lives Matter Global Network, is more proof Patrisse may have crossed the line on self-dealing,” Anderson told the Washington Examiner.
BLM will be required to report in its IRS Form 990 financial disclosure the names of the consulting firms it paid over $100,000 between July 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021.
Patrisse Cullors and the two other individuals who sat with her on BLM’s board of directors before she resigned in May 2021 were closely tied to or controlled consulting firms that claimed to do business with BLM.
The father of Patrisse Cullors’s only child, Damon Turner, runs Trap Heals, an art company that was formerly BLM’s “lead developer of the art & cultural efforts,” business records show. BLM’s political action committee also paid Trap Heals $150,000 to co-produce an election night livestream in November 2020 mired with technical problems that experts said should have cost a fraction of the price to produce.
Patrisse Cullors herself owns a consulting firm called Janaya and Patrisse Consulting, through which she received payments upward of $20,000 a month in 2019 from Reform LA Jails, a Los Angeles-based jail reform group Cullors used to lead.
Howard, the BLM operations director who sat on the charity’s board in 2020 and 2021, used to state on his LinkedIn account that he was the finance and operations manager of New Impact Partners, a Dayton, Ohio-based consulting firm owned by his sister. A website for New Impact Partners also named BLM as one of its clients, but the reference was removed from the site in late January after the Washington Examiner asked BLM about its relationship with the firm.
The third BLM board member, Shalomyah Bowers, runs a consulting firm called Bowers Consulting, which lists BLM as a client on its website. Bowers has been the treasurer for numerous organizations run by Cullors, including Reform LA Jails and BLM PAC. He still sits on BLM’s board, according to the charity’s recent filings submitted to Oklahoma, Florida, and Washington.
Patrisse Cullors and Howard are no longer on BLM’s board, according to BLM’s latest filings. They were replaced by Cicely Gay and D’Zhane Parker, two activists with close ties to Patrisse Cullors.
BLM’s Florida registration offers clues to what the group may disclose in its upcoming Form 990 filing.
The charity said it received $79,644,709 in the “immediately preceding fiscal year,” which appears to be in reference to the time frame from July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021.
BLM also disclosed just one major program accomplishment in its Florida registration: “Creating space for black imagination and innovation and centering black joy.”
Scott Walter, the president of the conservative Capital Research Center, previously said BLM’s sole program accomplishment sounds like a reference to its $6 million Los Angeles mansion.
“That phrase looks like just a fancy way to say, ‘We bought mansions for parties and forgettable YouTube videos,'” Walter previously told the Washington Examiner.
BLM did not return a request for comment.
Reporting from The Washington Examiner.
