Anti-cop activist accused of blowing $75K in donations, failing to pay employee
A nonprofit adjacent to the “Defund the Police” movement and its founder are in hot water after the attorney general of Washington, D.C., accused them of blowing tens of thousands of dollars on luxury trips and services while failing to pay an employee her due.
On Monday, the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia announced a lawsuit against Raheem AI, a nonprofit dedicated to so-called police reform and accountability, and founder and executive director Brandon Anderson.
‘My office will not allow people to masquerade behind noble causes while violating the law, cheating taxpayers, or stealing from their workers.’
Since 2021, Anderson has allegedly spent $75,000 in Raheem AI donations “for his own personal use,” the AG press release claimed. His lavish expenditures allegedly included $40,000 in high-end vacation rentals, $10,000 for a trip to Cancun and other “personal travel,” $10,000 on designer clothing, and even $5,000 in emergency veterinary bills.
Meanwhile, the Raheem AI board of directors apparently did little to stop these questionable alleged splurges. For one thing, since 2020, the nonprofit has not had a separate treasurer to manage finances and oversee spending as required by law, the press release claimed. The board also allegedly “failed to implement any measures to oversee the organization’s finances, including Anderson’s corruption.”
Finally, Raheem AI apparently had only one D.C.-based employee — a deputy director whom the New York Post identified as Jasmine Banks — but failed to pay her “tens of thousands of dollars in earned wages,” the press release said. The organization also allegedly compelled Banks to sign a noncompete clause, even though such clauses are illegal in D.C. for employees like Banks who made less than $150,000.
In filing the lawsuit, the D.C. attorney general hopes to dissolve Raheem AI, recover the misspent funds and Banks’ alleged lost wages, and prevent Anderson from leading any D.C. nonprofit ever again.
“Brandon Anderson misused charitable donations to fund lavish vacations and shopping sprees, and the Raheem AI Board of Directors let him get away with it,” Attorney General Brian Schwalb said in a statement.
Schwalb’s statement also indicated that the police reform demanded by Raheem AI was a “noble cause” but that the organization had used it to shield itself from proper oversight.
“My office will not allow people to masquerade behind noble causes while violating the law, cheating taxpayers, or stealing from their workers,” he said.
Anderson did not respond to the Post’s request for comment regarding the lawsuit.
‘Individual expenditures are easy to mischaracterize without the burden of context.’
Banks, who no longer works for Raheem AI, told the New York Times back in August that she now believes that Anderson and his organization may have been a “con” job all along.
Anderson, who supports abolishing the police, founded Raheem AI in 2017, initially to create an app where victims could report police misconduct and later to provide an app alternative to calling 911.
The organization is also obsessed with race, promising to “equip black, brown, and indigenous community crisis responders with the tools, training, connections, and funding they need to provide care,” according to the press release.
Anderson claimed he named the organization after a boyfriend who died in Oklahoma in 2007 during a “routine traffic stop.” Anderson alleged that the cop involved in the incident had a history of violence. However, the Times was unable to identify any homicide victim in Oklahoma with the name Raheem or any case of alleged police brutality in the state that matched Anderson’s description.
Banks claimed she came to suspect that Anderson had never actually experienced police-related violence after he declined to join a group of survivors. “He wouldn’t engage with other impacted family members. I would invite him all the time, and he just wouldn’t do it,” she said.
Anderson told the Times that the accusations lobbed by Banks and others were “rife with untruths” but did not provide any specific examples. He also acknowledged that his plans for Raheem AI have been a “failure.”
“It’s easy to assign failure to one cause or another in hindsight, and individual expenditures are easy to mischaracterize without the burden of context,” he said in a statement. “The bottom line is simply that it didn’t work, and as the leader of that effort I share most of the blame.”
The Raheem AI board has recently “ceased operations” and placed Anderson on leave, the press release claimed.
As of Tuesday morning, the organization’s website, Raheem.org, currently purports to be “under construction.” An archived version asserted that “getting killed by police is the sixth leading cause of death for young Black men in America.”
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