A co-founder of Black Lives Matter announced this week she is resigning from her position as the executive director of the organization amid a controversy over multi-million dollar properties she reportedly purchased.
Patrisse Cullors, who has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks for her allegedly improper handling of the organization’s funds, said she felt like this is the right time to depart from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation after nearly six years.
“I’ve created the infrastructure and the support and the necessary bones and foundation so that I can leave,” she told the Associated Press. “It feels like the time is right.”
Reports began emerging in early April that Cullors had purchased several properties, some in excess of one million dollars.
She bought at least three homes, two in California and one in Georgia, totaling more than $3 million.
The report led to demands for a thorough investigation into Cullors and BLM’s financial decisions.
“If you go around calling yourself a socialist, you have to ask how much of her own personal money is going to charitable causes,” Hawk Newsome, the head of Black Lives Matter Greater New York City, which is not affiliated with the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, said at the time. “It’s really sad because it makes people doubt the validity of the movement and overlook the fact that it’s the people that carry this movement.”
Cullors did not deny purchasing the homes, but said she did not use BLM’s funds to buy them.
“I have never taken a salary from the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation,” she said on April 15. “And that’s important because what the right-wing media is trying to say is, the donations that people have made to Black Lives Matter went toward my spending, and that is categorically untrue and incredibly dangerous.”
Cullors has also come under fire for failing to file the required financial disclosures for her “charity” prison-reform group, Dignity and Power Now, and paying her baby-daddy’s company hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts.
