BLM paid co-founder Patrisse Cullors’ graffiti artist brother $800K for ‘security’
A co-founder of Black Lives Matter used more than $800,000 in donations to pay her brother for “security services” for the charity even though he seems to mostly work as a graffiti artist.
Patrisse Cullors, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, paid a company controlled by Paul Cullors $840,993 in fiscal 2020, according to the group’s federal tax filings, which cover the period July 1, 2020, to June 20, 2021.
It’s the first time BLMGNF has filed with the IRS since receiving more than $66 million in donations in October 2020.
In July 2020, Paul Cullors, a self-taught graffiti artist, founded the security company Cullors Protection LLC, which received the cash for “professional security services,” the filings show. Around the same time, he was one of two “visiting artists” at a Los Angeles art collective called Crenshaw Dairy Mart, founded by his sister.
At the end of that year, in December 2020, Paul Cullors purchased a suburban Los Angeles home for $637,006, according to public records. The three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow sits on a quiet cul-de-sac in northern LA. There is no storefront or business headquarters for Cullors Protection LLC; the company is registered and operated at Paul Cullors’ home, and it’s unclear if it has any employees besides himself.
Paul secured a loan of $350,000 to finance his purchase of the property, according to public records. In addition, he also secured a loan to install Tesla generators on the property, public records say.
Paul is the eldest of Patrisse Cullors’ three siblings. He has worked as a graffiti artist since 1991, according to a video posted on the Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s website. The art collective and gallery was co-founded by Patrisse in 2019 with a mission to “shift … the trauma-induced conditions of poverty and economic injustice,” according to the site.
Paul and Patrisse grew up with brother Monte and sister Jasmine in an impoverished, multi-racial neighborhood in Van Nuys, Calif., according to Patrisse’s first book, “When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir,” which was published in 2018. When their father Alton left home, it was Paul who stepped in to take care of his younger siblings, she wrote.
“It’s his voice I wake up to each morning when it’s time to go to school and my mother has left already for one of her jobs,” she wrote. “It’s Paul who gets us ready, tells us to brush our teeth and ‘come on, let’s go.'”
As an adult, Paul lived with Patrisse for short periods of time, according to his artist’s profile on the Crenshaw Dairy Mart website. “In 2006, I lived with my sister Trisse,” he writes. “She fortunately had a wall in her backyard. I asked her if I could use the wall for art and she said ‘yes.’ I lived there for a year, then due to the owner raising the rent $500 more a month we decided to move out.”
In addition to the cash paid to her brother, Patrisse Cullors, who is listed as the only board member of BLMGNF on its tax filing, doled out $969,459 to a company controlled by Damon Turner, the father of her young son. The group also paid a company owned by one of its current board members — Shalomyah Bowers — $2,167,894 for consulting work.
Patrisse Cullors resigned from BLMGNF in May 2021, a month after The Post revealed that she had gone on a $3.2 million real estate buying spree, snapping up properties in Los Angeles and on the outskirts of Atlanta. She has since sold the Atlanta property, according to public records. She denied that she used charity cash for her personal real estate purchases.
Calls and emails to Paul Cullors as well as BLMGNF were not returned Tuesday and Wednesday.
Additional reporting by Dana Kennedy
