by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News September 4, 2022

The leader of Black Lives Matter used donated funds as his “personal piggy bank,” pilfering $10 million of the $90 million given to the organization following George Floyd’s death in 2020, a lawsuit says.

The lawsuit, filed in the Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of 26 grassroots BLM chapters, alleges that Shalomyah Bowers, the leader of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF), defrauded the local chapters for “unjust enrichment.”

The lawsuit describes Bowers as a “rogue administrator” and “middle man turned usurper” whose siphoning of donated funds to fun his own lavish lifestyle led the foundation to be investigated by the Internal Revenue Service and “[blazed] a path of irreparable harm to BLM in less than eighteen months.”

BLMGN also dished out $2.1 million to Bowers’s firm, Bowers Consulting, between July 2020 and June 2021, according to tax forms the BLMGN provided to The Associated Press.

“While BLM leaders and movement workers were on the street risking their lives, Mr. Bowers remained in his cushy offices devising a scheme of fraud and misrepresentation to break the implied-in-fact contract between donors and BLM,” the lawsuit states.

In response, Bowers and the BLMGNF said the BLM chapters who filed the suit are “falling victim to the carceral logic and social violence that fuels the legal system.”

“They would rather take the same steps of our white oppressors and utilize the criminal legal system which is propped up by white supremacy (the same system they say they want to dismantle) to solve movement disputes,” Bowers and the BLMGNF said.

Bowers is a close associate of BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who resigned from BLMGN in May 2021 after allegations she misused millions of dollars in donation money.

Disclosures found that the foundation paid $6 million for a Los Angeles compound in 2020. BLMGN received backlash following the purchase, including from some of the organization’s supporters.

Meanwhile the widow of St. Louis Police Cpt. David Dorn who was murdered by a BLM rioter in 2020, blasted the organization in an opinion piece. Ret. Sgt. Ann Dorn also took aim at BLM sponsors and enablers including George Soros and Vice President Kamala Harris:

David became a cop because when he was a little boy he wanted to be a superhero. And he was a superhero. But if real life superheroes exist, so do supervillains. Those supervillains are people like the man who killed my husband. They are people like billionaire George Soros, who use their power and influence to promote extremist politics and fan the flames of division. They are people like Vice President Kamala Harris, who raised money for the rioters’ bail funds, and the CEOs of prominent companies who blindly gave their support and money to this. If a foreign organization were tied to nationwide rioting in the U.S., we’d probably call it a terrorist organization.

David didn’t agree with or support Black Lives Matter. He never understood Black Lives Matter, because it never actually did anything to help Black lives. The same year David was killed, over a dozen children were shot in St. Louis, and never once did Black Lives Matter show up. Their lives mattered. Fifty-five businesses were looted or destroyed the night David was murdered, many of them Black-owned. Their livelihoods mattered. My husband was a Black man who selflessly served his community for over 40 years. His life mattered.

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  Lawsuit: Black Lives Matter leader stole $10 million of donated money, WorldTribune.com