Former employee described Brandon Anderson’s nonprofit as ‘a con from the beginning’

The District of Columbia’s attorney general is suing a “Defund the Police” activist for misappropriating $75,000 in charity funds for mansion rentals, a Cancún trip, and designer clothes.

Brandon Anderson, the leader of an anti-police D.C. nonprofit called Raheem AI, “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 (D.), whose office regulates nonprofits in the district, said in a Monday statement.

Schwalb also sued Raheem AI, seeking to shut down the nonprofit entirely. The attorney general called for Anderson to be barred from leading any other D.C. nonprofit and demanded that Anderson or Raheem AI repay the $75,000, according to the New York Times.

“My office will not allow people to masquerade behind noble causes while violating the law,” Schwalb said.

Anderson, who embraced the “Defund the Police” slogan in 2020, is a longtime advocate for abolishing law enforcement, telling Vice in 2022 that police “reform” doesn’t go far enough. At the time, Raheem AI claimed to be testing an app that “aims to replace 911 emergency calls” and eventually replace police altogether, Vice reported. While Raheem raised more than $4.3 million from progressive groups, particularly after George Floyd’s death in 2020, its “high-tech projects fizzled,” according to the Times.

Suspicion of Anderson’s misconduct surfaced earlier this year. The Times reported in August that former Raheem AI employee Jasmine Banks had discovered credit card records showing that Anderson spent tens of thousands in donations on himself. The expenses included $40,000 on luxury vacation rentals, $10,000 on hotel stays, including for a trip to Cancún, and $10,000 on designer clothing brands, according to the attorney general’s office.

Banks first raised her concerns with the nonprofit’s board, which consisted of Anderson and two independent members. Anderson was placed on temporary leave, but the other two board members later resigned, making Anderson the group’s sole director. Banks reached out to the attorney general’s office about the questionable spending patterns after the nonprofit stopped paying her salary.

While Anderson claimed that the nonprofit’s founding was inspired by Oklahoma City police’s unjust killing of his fiancé, a man named Raheem, a Times investigation found that “no homicide in the entire state of Oklahoma involved a man named Raheem, nor did any match the particulars of the officer-involved death Mr. Anderson had described.”

Anderson did not respond to the paper’s questions about Raheem.

“It hurts my heart to say it, but I think it was a con from the beginning,” Banks told the Times in August.