Shaun King’s nonprofit amassed millions of dollars in donations in the months following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, while its signature project to review and redress prosecutorial injustices in three major U.S. cities floundered—and while King himself and his associates raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. …
The 2020 tax filings The Daily Beast received show King earned a salary of $104,167 as the Grassroots Law Project’s executive director during the group’s first 12 months. But the group’s representatives told The Daily Beast his compensation has since swelled to a quarter-million a year—or, around twice the median compensation for nonprofit executives. The organization’s representatives maintained this income was lower than some other groups with a criminal justice mission.
The documents also show the nonprofit paid $135,486 to the Social Practice, a consulting firm that handles the group’s financials and which is based out of a box in the same San Francisco mail drop as the Grassroots Law Project itself. The Daily Beast previously reported that the Social Practice was also on the payroll of Krasner’s D.A. campaign at the same time the prosecutor got in trouble with Philadelphia authorities for coordinating with King’s PAC and failing to report it.
As The Daily Beast also previously reported, the Social Practice’s co-founder Becky Bond serves as treasurer of that exact same PAC—called the Real Justice PAC—which she co-founded with King. Bond and future Grassroots Law Project co-founder Lee Merritt were also part of the “financial review board” that produced a 2019 report apparently intended to address questions about the fate of millions of dollars King had raised for various social justice causes.
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