Copyright New York Post
Embattled BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors and her wife have dissolved their consulting business and sold their joint LA home, while she’s dropped her spouse’s name, The Post can reveal. Details about the personal moves surfaced as the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation that Cullors helped found is reportedly in the crosshairs of the Department of Justice for possibly defrauding its donors out of tens of millions of dollars during the country’s 2020 racial-justice protests. It isn’t yet clear who the feds are eyeing in the probe, but subpoenas and at least one search warrant were issued in recent weeks, sources told The Associated Press. Cullors abruptly resigned from the organization in 2021 amid widespread scrutiny over her lavish lifestyle and million-dollar real-estate buying binge. Among the properties that raised eyebrows was a sprawling Toronto mansion bought by M4BJ, a Toronto-based non-profit set up by Cullors’ wife Janaya Khan and other Canadian activists, in 2021. Black Lives Matter transferred millions of dollars to the Canadian charity to purchase the property, records show. Cullors — a 42-year-old artist who says her work focuses on “the trauma of being Black in America, and also our resilience” — did not respond to a Post request for comment Friday, nor did Khan, who is in her 30s. The status of the pair’s personal relationship is unclear. Cullors, who has a son, wed Khan in 2016. But they dissolved their LLC, Janaya and Patrisse Consulting, in 2023, and Cullors is no longer using “Khan” as part of her hyphenated last name, as she had been. Khan also transferred her portion of their joint $1.4 million-plus home on Topanga Canyon Road near Malibu in California to Cullors before the property was sold September 2024, according to public records. Cullors has meanwhile apparently been focusing on her art. She held her “debut solo show’’ — “Between the Warp and Weft: Weaving Shields of Strength and Spirituality’’ — in Los Angeles last year, according to her Web site. It included knives and scythes adorned with shells and textiles “to create what Cullors refers to as ‘a sanctuary of reflection and empowerment,’ ” her site says along with photos of the displays. “A lot of the work that I’ve done has been around the trauma of being Black in America, and also our resilience,’’ she wrote in a blurb about the gallery exhibit. “We don’t have the cultural right to protect ourselves … but what if we create spiritual objects of protection?” The self-described “abolitionist” — who grew up in a housing project in Los Angeles’ Van Nuys neighborhood — helped co-found BLM in 2013 and went on to spend six years as its executive director. In the years that followed, Cullors embarked on a real-estate buying binge — snapping up four high-end homes for $3.2 million, property records showed. She kick-started her buying spree in Los Angeles in 2016 when she snapped up a three-bedroom home in Inglewood for $510,000 – just a few years after the civil-rights movement she started from the #blacklivesmatter hashtag started gaining global momentum. Cullors went on to purchase a four-bedroom home in South Los Angeles in 2018 for $590,000. She also bought a three-bed home just outside Atlanta, Ga., in 2020 for $415,000 – complete with an indoor swimming pool and “RV shop” that could cater to small aircraft repairs, records show. She sold that in 2020. She then added the $1.4 million homestead in Topanga Canyon, just a short drive from Malibu, to the mix in early 2021. Cullors reportedly splashed tens of thousands of dollar on renovations to the posh pad. At one point, Cullors and Khan were even spotted in the Bahamas looking for a unit, a real-estate source previously told The Post. It is unclear if they ever snapped up a property at the island retreat. It wasn’t immediately clear where Cullors is currently living, although she appears to still be in LA. Cullors and BLM both faced a wave of criticism when it publicly emerged the organization had “secretly” purchased a swanky $6 million LA mansion in 2020. At the time, Cullors insisted the property was purchased by BLM to serve as a meeting venue and campus but later copped to throwing at least two parties there – including her son’s birthday soiree and one to celebrate President Joe Biden’s inauguration. “I look back at that and think, that probably wasn’t the best idea,” she said after news of her private parties blew up. Still, she denied suggestions she had ever lived at the six-bedroom property — or taken advantage of it for personal gain. In 2022, BLM Foundation leaders confirmed that some donor money had been used to purchase the $6 million pad. Separately, public records also showed BLM transferred millions of dollars to the Canadian charity run by Cullors’ wife to purchase a mansion in Toronto for $6.3 million in 2021. That purchase only fueled growing concerns of the activist group’s lack of transparency in its finances. When Cullors announced her resignation, she insisted it had nothing to do with the backlash that her buying frenzy had sparked. “I’ve created the infrastructure and the support, and the necessary bones and foundation, so that I can leave,” Cullors said. “It feels like the time is right.” “Those were right-wing attacks that tried to discredit my character, and I don’t operate off of what the right thinks about me,” she added. She said, at the time, that she was leaving to focus on a book and TV deal. But Warner Bros Television Group secretly ended a multi-platform deal with Cullors in 2023, The Post revealed at the time. No shows were ever produced under the deal — despite Cullors saying she’d planned dramas, comedies, documentary series and animated programming for children. Cullors also has a number of books to her name, including a 2018 memoir titled “When they call you a terrorist” and 2022’s “An Abolitionist’s Handbook.” -Additional reporting by Jared Downing in LA
