DeRay began his op-ed, and the promotion of the op-ed, by focusing directly on my fundraising and literally calling me a thief.

Let me be clear here: fuck you, DeRay, for saying such a thing. I don’t say that lightly. You are literally accusing me of a crime. Stealing from families or fundraisers is not just shady, it’s a felony. Do you remember the couple that said they were raising money for a homeless man, but it turned out they were spending it on themselves? They are literally in prison right now — sentenced to over 10 years in prison.

Never, have I ever stolen or spent a single penny from a fundraiser or family or cause or charity and not a single person on earth says otherwise. You are literally making this up. Doing so is libel. It is misinformation. It is a lie. It damages my actual life. If you called me a thief to my face, we would fight. You wouldn’t understand all of the effort and energy I’ve put in to raising funds for families and causes and campaigns because you don’t do it yourself. Your world and your work primarily revolves around you.

I’ve had countless families and activists and organizers reach out to me this week saying they begged you to help them in their times of need and you didn’t even respond. I include a few of those below. They said you flat out refused to share their fundraisers when they were desperate for support. You’d be hard pressed to find a single family whose case of police violence or bigotry was widely known where I was not one of the primary fundraisers for them, including the following 30 families I’ve supported:

Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Monroe Bird, Corey Jones, EJ Bradford, Stephon Clark, Chikesia Clemons, Botham Jean, Terence Crutcher, Antwon Rose, DaQuan Huey, L’Daijohnique Lee, Hannah Williams, DeAndre Harris, O’Shae Terry, Symone Marshall, Darwin Oliver, Charleena Lyles, Joshua Upshaw, Natalie Romero, Gregory Hill, Nia Wilson, Crystal Mason, Radazz Hearns, Chad Merrill, Pedro Hernandez, Bianca Roberson, James Means, and so many more.

I actually don’t think you helped us in a single one of those. You never do.

In each of those fundraisers for our people, I was one of the primary fundraisers — if not the primary fundraiser — and worked my ass off to raise financial support and awareness for these families. Each and every one of those families or their attorneys openly says so right here in the report. Many of those names won’t be familiar to DeRay, but I know them, know their families, know their attorneys, and take great pride in knowing that in their most difficult moment, we were able to give them some measure of relief.

I never claimed to have raised every dollar accounted for in the report. The report repeatedly states that I helped raise the funds. Many times the families say in the report that I was the primary fundraiser for them. And I was.

I have an email list of nearly 500,000 people that I have built since 1999. I regularly emailed my base about supporting these fundraisers. And they are some of the most generous people in the world. I shared the fundraisers, sometimes obsessively so, dozens of times on Twitter and Facebook. We included many of those links here. My posts were normally the most shared, most viewed, most clicked posts about these fundraisers. We checked. And I shared them until we hit a goal the family or attorneys set for me. Sometimes I’d take off of work to just push the fundraisers all day and night. I would miss deadlines and assignments and precious time with my family doing so. And I have paid a personal and professional price for it.

Never, did I have access to a single one of those funds and not a single family or attorney says otherwise — it’s just you and Twitter — in an echo chamber — insisting that you know better than these actual families. Shame on you. Again, stealing from a single one of them would be a crime. Not a single one of them has ever said this has happened. Not a single fundraising platform has said it has happened. It’s literally just Twitter.

2. DeRay released his op-ed moments before the Diamond Ball as if he had a new beef, or new findings, or something new to say, that just could not be held back, but then spent the first half of his Medium article detailing the finances of a short-lived project I launched from 2014.

I have been organizing people and projects for my entire adult life. I turn 40 on Tuesday. I’m a grown ass man. I’ve been organizing virtually non-stop for 23 years.

In 2014, after the murders of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Ezell Ford, John Crawford, and Tamir Rice, I saw a trend. I still see it to this day. I saw millions upon millions of frustrated people, all over the country, and all around the world, who wanted to do something about police brutality and injustice in the United States, but they didn’t know what to do or how to do it. Our collective outrage was ON TEN, but our collective organizing just wasn’t. Local organizing was sometimes strong, but the outrage was next level. So I wanted to find a way to organize complete strangers, online, and leverage them for both online and offline actions. It was a beautiful concept. I still love it and we do a version of this now with Real Justice and with our Flip The Senate campaign, but on a much smaller scale.

But I simply could not find a way to do it, without trolls, white supremacists, and impostors finding their way in as well. Trust me, I tried again and again and again. Over 50,000 people signed up to volunteer. I split them into states. With large states, I split them into cities. With college students I split them into campuses. And at first, I thought it was going to work, but as conflicts began to arise in city groups, or state groups, or college groups, it became almost impossible to manage.

I tried to get people to jump through some identity verification groups, and it helped some, but I would literally see things I was posting in private groups we formed later posted on white supremacist message boards.

Mind you, I did all of this for free, never receiving a salary or income for it, while I was working full time for Daily Kos and later for The New York Daily News. And I just could not manage it well.

Between the demands from my family and my actual places of employment, it became too much for me to manage, and I shut the whole operation down. It was a very difficult decision. I worked for hundreds of hours to pull it off, but just had not accounted for the complications that followed. I was deeply concerned about people’s safety and did not want anyone nefarious who had invaded the groups to eventually be meeting with people in their own homes. I consulted countless advisors before shutting it all down, and everyone agreed that the work was a great idea that was nearly impossible for me to execute. We also agreed that the potential safety risks were just too high.

We hardly raised any money whatsoever for these efforts and returned every single dollar that was ever given online. 100% of it. We did not file taxes for the organization because every dollar that was given online was returned.

When we produced this financial report 2 weeks ago, Stripe, who was the original payment processor, confirmed that every single donation that was given online was returned the same month the organization was shut down in 2015. That total was $15,580 combined from 2014 & 2015.

A single donor gave $10,000 to help partially cover the monthly costs of our email services and website. For instance, my monthly email services this month alone from MailChimp were $2,880.

This literally accounts for every dollar mentioned by DeRay that was ever raised. This is not new. This was in the report. It represents a microscopic bit of the funds I have raised, but it was well-accounted for years ago.

Justice Together did fail. It is true. I spoke about this at great length four years ago. It was an experimental idea, launched in good faith, that I simply could not effectively manage. I privately owned this failure and I publicly own the failure today.

The lessons that I learned from those early failures in 2014 & 2015 are the very things that make the work I do now at Real Justice, at The North Star, at The Action PAC, and with our Flip The Senate campaign so effective.

I do not manage the finances for any of those organizations. I do not manage the day to day staff of those organizations. I do not create the FEC reports or budgets or P&L statements for any of those organizations; instead we have hired brilliant, experienced women and men who do that work as well as anybody in the nation.

From my failures in 2014 & 2015, I have simply learned that while I am a gifted starter and a tenacious fundraiser, that I must be just one small part of a larger team that shares the load.

All of the projects that I am a part of, and the primary fundraiser for, now have a combined staff of nearly 40 people and they are the most diligent, skilled, compassionate teams I have ever been a part of.

I don’t know how else to say this, but I earnestly, sincerely apologize to every single person who was disappointed by the failure of my organizing in 2014 & 2015 with Justice Together. I said as much back then. I’m saying it again now. I meant it then. I mean it now. I have never been slow to apologize where I have done wrong. Quite the opposite.

3. DeRay says “the numbers don’t add up” and in doing so suggested the people of Standing Rock are committing fraud.

From DeRay:

If you take the total amount listed in the statement and match it against the numbers in the actual fundraisers that have been linked to, there are two different amounts. For instance, the Dakota Access Pipeline — Cash item listed in the August 30th statement is at $388,000 but the link listed has the amount at $378,402. This is one of many misattributions in the report.

DeRay did little to actually help the people of Standing Rock. I spent nearly two full months of my life raising funds and direct aid for them. Chase Iron Eyes, who was born there, and is one of the most respected leaders there, partnered with my efforts there and wrote a beautiful statement about our work. I helped to raise $378,402 in cash here for the people of Standing Rock in one online fundraiser. In his letter, Chase Iron Eyes stated that the total raised was $388,000. Some of the donations were given offline. That’s it. That’s the discrepancy DeRay suggests is fraud. We then raised over $2 million in direct aid for Standing Rock that was sent there as well. It was an enormous undertaking.

DeRay, seeing that the fundraising page says $378,402, but that Chase said $388,000, used this as weird chance to suggest fraud from Standing Rock. The $9,598 difference there was just money raised apart from the online fundraiser. Again, I had no access to any of those funds. It’s not an example of bad math, or money not adding up, or fraud.

DeRay never reached out to Chase Iron Eyes to clarify this, but instead threw him under the bus. It’s awful. But again, clarity was not DeRay’s goal here.

4. DeRay said that The Action PAC paid for Facebook ads to support the promotion of the fundraising report that issued and that doing so was some type of fraud.

It was $3 and was done so in error. It was stopped immediately when it was discovered. It was reimbursed immediately.

5. DeRay says that the 72 page financial report on my fundraising claimed to cover 2013, but left out financial data for funds I raised from 2013.

This is a lie. The report clearly and repeatedly states that it covered every fundraiser I participated in from August of 2014 after the murder of Mike Brown until August of 2019 when the report was issued.

Here is the first paragraph from that report. Look at the first sentence of the first paragraph where it clearly states the timeline of the report.

I publicly raised funds for hundreds of causes online in every year of my life from 2007 forward. The public report was for my fundraising from 2014–2019 and repeatedly stated that.

What’s wild is that our team literally said to each other when we issued the report that even though all of the public accusations were for funds raised during the Black Lives Matter Movement, that as soon as we issued it, someone like DeRay would say, well, what about 2009 or 2011 or 2013?

The report stated that I never received any income for my fundraising from 2014–2019 other than my $50,000 per year salary from Real Justice.

DeRay said this is a lie. It is not.

I don’t know how much clearer we can be than saying the report was not about 1979–2013, but was about 2014–2019. That’s the range we chose because that’s what the public accusations were.

6. DeRay erroneously stated that I raised funds in 2016–2017 for a project we called The Injustice Boycott and never accounted for it.

From DeRay:

Shaun began the Injustice Boycott in December 2016, on the 61st anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as a coordinated effort to boycott cities that engaged in practices against the interests of people of color. He fundraised for the organization, as people noted that they donated. Needless to say, the organization did not accomplish any boycotts, sustained actions, or have any recognizable impact. Nearly 80,000 people joined the mailing list for the initiative, but there were no boycotts. The Injustice Boycott does not appear at all in the most recent accounting offered by Shaun King.

DeRay told multiple lies here. He confuses his lack of knowledge of our work for lack of work. First off, The Injustice Boycott was never an organization and we never raised funds for it. DeRay says the accounting for it has disappeared. Again, we never raised funds for it.

It was a grassroots, people driven project designed to help support work in Standing Rock, which we mentioned above — we raised over $2 million in support for Standing Rock; New York City — to pass legislation called Raise The Age, which actually passed, and I received awards for; and in Seattle to help the city council there pass legislation banning the local government use of banks or funds that supported private prisons or the fossil fuel industry. That legislation passed.

I am immensely proud of what the project accomplished. It should be noted that Heather Heyer, who was later killed in Charlottesville, was a part of this team.

7. DeRay says that when I am challenged on these fundraisers that I default to blaming white supremacists or trolls or conservatives.

That’s because the three initial lies that I was stealing from families impacted by police violence literally came from white supremacists and have continued every since.

Days after the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, I began raising money for the family through a fundraiser that they set up. The same day I began sharing it, white supremacist trolls started saying that I was stealing money. I was genuinely stumped. You have to almost go back in time to that moment. The movement was new. I was already a well-known leader, but having people say I was stealing the money threw me for a major loop. Of course, I never had access to the account or the funds. But I had the peace of mind of knowing that I worked hard to support the family. I did so more than once.

Fake articles and tweets saying I stole money from the family of Eric Garner spiraled so far out of control, that my dear friend, Erica Garner, posted this.

Over and over again the family of Eric Garner including his children, his wife, and his mother, all of whom are my personal friends, have had to post online and speak to people offline to refute these lies. In 2014 & 2015 it was literally just white supremacists and ultra conservatives posting these lies. Then it became moderate white folk, then liberal white folk, and then liberal Black folk, sometimes spreading the exact memes and fabrications that first started with white supremacists. The same thing happened to the first fundraiser I promoted for the family of Tamir Rice. The attorneys for his family address that here.

8. DeRay said that I previously stated I only raised $15,000 for Bree Newsome, but later stated I raised more.

From DeRay:

In 2015, Shaun defended himself against claims that he misappropriated funds from those meant for Bree Newsome. He wrote, “In total, $125,705 was raised from 4,943 people. Shaun estimates that his efforts were probably responsible for somewhere near a relatively small $15,000 of the total amount raised.” But now, in the latest “report” he takes credit for 100% of those funds raised.

First off, please notice that in 2015 I was having to defend myself against lies that I stole funds raised for Bree Newsome — another complete fabrication. Again, I never had access to those funds. This previous statement was about $15,000 from wealthy donors who wrote me privately to pledge to give to her. They did give her these funds. I then shared her public fundraiser with my donor list and across my social media, to help raise the additional amount raised.

Here is her attorney, Todd Rutherford, about the fundraiser for Bree and another of his clients. (As a sidenote, I also helped to arrange for Todd Rutherford to represent Bree.)

“Shaun was an essential driving force behind each of these fundraisers for a young student assaulted by a police officer in her school and the activist Bree Newsome after she took down the Confederate flag in South Carolina. Shaun never, for a single moment, had access to the funds, the accounts, or the websites that my clients used to raise the funds. He did the work for the love of it. I was honestly surprised to see how much time and energy and effort Shaun put into those fundraisers. He never asked for or even hinted at receiving anything in return. My clients simply would not have raised that much money had Shaun not pushed so hard for them.”

9. DeRay listed fundraisers, including a large one for RAICES Texas, a leading immigration advocacy group, saying that I did not help with the fundraiser.

This is a lie. I did not want to disclose this publicly, but two staffers from RAICES are literally administrators on my Twitter and Facebook pages. They post at will without ever needing approval from me. I trust and love them. One is my dear friend, Erika Andiola, Chief of Advocacy, for RAICES. Here is a statement from Erika. I am not paid for this, but do it for the love — mainly because I know I have a larger platform than they do and I know they understand the immigrant rights movement far better than I do. Here is her statement. DeRay left that out.

Shaun King has been incredibly supportive of all the work I’ve done in the immigrant rights movement, including these fundraisers. I can also speak on behalf of RAICES and assure anyone that we have never paid you for your support. We’re very grateful for all your help regularly sharing actions, events, and fundraisers on all of your platforms. Appreciate you brother, Erika Andiola, Chief of Advocacy, RAICES

10. DeRay erroneously stated that I worked to silence the Black queer activist Clarissa Brooks.

This is a lie. This past January, Clarissa tweeted the following:

When Clarissa Brooks asked if people were going to “hold me accountable” for money I raised for Cyntoia Brown — then asked if that money was going to disappear as well, two lies were told.

I never raised money for Cyntoia Brown. Didn’t even know she had a fundraiser. Never had funds for her to keep in the first place. It was a fabrication that seemed to have started with Clarissa Brooks. This notion that Clarissa was just asking a friendly question about funds I raised is wrong. I never raised funds for Cyntoia Brown to be held accountable for them. She then asked a rhetorical question about other funds I’ve raised for families that have disappeared. Again, this has literally never happened.

I never aimed to silence Clarissa, or anyone for that matter, but it was very important for me that she delete her false accusation and then publicly retract it by stating that it was erroneous. It was. It caused actual damage to my life. After she posted it, and it was retweeted, people screenshot it and posted it across social media, people made their own statements about it, all demanding that I give Cyntoia Brown’s family the money that I raised for them. To this day I still have people ask me about this money, but I never raised it. All we asked for was a retraction. Period.