WASHINGTON — Jasmine Banks’ disillusionment started with a credit card bill. She was dedicated to the radical mission of the nonprofit where she worked, that police should be abolished. She reported to the group’s founder, a charismatic activist with a compelling life story: His fiance had been killed by an abusive cop.
Then her boss went on vacation and left her in charge. She saw in the accounting system he had used the nonprofit’s card to pay a $1,536 hotel bill — a big bill for such a small organization. She dug deeper into the nonprofit’s bank records and found much more that concerned her.
Mansion rentals. Vet bills. Luxury clothes.
A stay at a Cancun resort. Banks scrolled back through Facebook to the week that resort bill was paid. She saw her boss, Brandon D.
Anderson, 39, posing in a pool. She sent an email to the nonprofit’s board: “I am reaching out to you regarding a confidential issue that requires immediate attention.” Anderson appeared to have misused the group’s funds — an allegation he denies.
And as a result, his employees were left with a dilemma: They wanted justice. But they had sworn never to call authorities on anyone. Anderson’s nonprofit was small, taking in about $4.
4 million over its lifetime, but his searing story gave him — and his group — an outsize profile. Anderson has told that story in countless interviews and public appearances, and in meetings with potential donors. He told them he had left Oklahoma City to join the Army at 18, serving in Iraq.
After that, he graduated from Georgetown University in 2015. But often, Anderson began his story with what he had lost: “this tall, skinny, big-headed Black boy I first met in third grade.” Anderson said the two of them ran away from home together at about 15, and Anderson sold drugs to survive.
“In 2006, he asked me to marry him,” Anderson said. “It was the happiest day of my life.” Then, he said, in 2007, his partner was slain by Oklahoma City police.
“He was driving a car that the officer said was stolen. The car had never been stolen. In fact, it was the car that me and my partner had saved up to buy,” he said in one interview.
“My partner’s death threw me into two years of clinical depression. The loss of my partner — the killing of my partner by the police — changed my life forever.” Anderson said the officer involved had long been abusive but that nobody had filed a complaint against him, because either the process was too cumbersome or they feared retaliation.
It was a flaw in the system. To fix it, Anderson founded a nonprofit in 2017. Its mission: to build a website that would let people file complaints against police from their phone.
He called the nonprofit Raheem AI. “It’s named after my partner,” he said. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd brought renewed attention to abuses by police and led to a sharp increase in giving to nonprofits focused on criminal justice reforms.
Anderson’s organization received $1.6 million in donations. Nonetheless, Anderson’s complaint system did not work.
His website collected more than 2,700 stories from users about their interactions with police. But the work had little impact because Raheem was unable to solve a technical problem. There are 18,000 police departments in America.
Some accept complaints online, but many require people to make a phone call or go to a police station. Raheem failed because it never offered a one-stop way for users to file their complaints directly with police. But the organization still had money, and Anderson still had access to it.
In early 2021, he used its funds to go on a shopping spree. He spent $2,000 at Bloomingdale’s. Then $2,800 at Bottega Veneta, an upscale Italian clothing store.
After that: Saks, Alexander McQueen and Farfetch. In all, Anderson spent $11,000 in charity money on clothing that year, according to financial records. One employee, who later resigned, questioned these charges, and Anderson said that the group’s board had approved them, according to a copy of the employee’s exit interview.
But all three members of the nonprofit’s board of directors for that year said they had not approved any clothing allowance. “Categorically, no. Not in a million years,” said Phillip Agnew, a board member at the time.
After Floyd was murdered, some philanthropists sought to fund more radical ideas to change police behavior. They wanted a world without police — or, at least, with far fewer of them. In 2021, Anderson said he was building a new app that would help lessen the need for police.
All it needed was money. Cities and nonprofits at that time were experimenting with “alternative first responders.” These might be medics, social workers or psychologists.
They could be dispatched through the 911 system instead of police in response to calls about people in mental distress, or sleeping outside, or using drugs. The idea was to lower police workload and reduce the risk of a fatal encounter. Anderson told donors he would build a network of alternative responders and “liberated dispatchers” to take calls and send them out.
The system would run on a new app. Despite those challenges — and the failure of Anderson’s previous app — donors gave more than $1.3 million.
But the work stalled. Employees found Anderson increasingly hard to reach. Then Banks found the hotel bill and notified members of the board.
At that point, the board consisted of Anderson and two independent members. It was those two whom Banks contacted. They investigated and questioned more than $250,000 in charges, internal documents show.
The two independent board members put Anderson on leave. But when they disagreed about whether Anderson should be fired, both ended up resigning over the deadlock. Only one board member remained: Anderson.
Federal law prohibits nonprofit executives from diverting their charity’s money for their own use. For now, his nonprofit appears legally active but functionally dead. Several donors pulled their funding.
Three employees were left out of work. This spring, as the nonprofit unraveled, employees and former board members also began to look into the backstory that Anderson told about how he became an activist: the death of his partner in Oklahoma in 2007. Who was Raheem, and why didn’t anyone know more about him? Seeking to verify Anderson’s account, the The New York Times examined records kept by the Oklahoma state medical examiner and the Tulsa World news organization, which has tracked police killings in the state.
The Times found no evidence of the killing that Anderson has described. No homicide in Oklahoma involved a man named Raheem, nor did any match the particulars of the officer-involved death Anderson had described. As bitter as the experience was, the nonprofit’s former employees believed they should not report Anderson to any government authority.
“Brandon is a masculine-presenting Black person. And the way that police treat masculine-presenting Black people is terrible,” said Nancy Mariano, who had been a software engineer at the nonprofit. “Even if Brandon committed a crime, I don’t want Brandon to die,” Mariano said.
“So I don’t want to put Brandon in that position.” Banks felt that way too. Then she reconsidered.
She decided she wanted to get her unpaid back wages, so she emailed the District of Columbia’s attorney general. In her reasoning, she was not calling the law. She was calling for help.
Her case was referred to a part of the office that investigates nonprofit fraud. It can bring lawsuits or refer a case for criminal prosecution. Those investigators wanted documents that she had.
It had bothered Banks that Anderson had escaped any reckoning for what he had done. She handed over the documents. “Do I have personal guilt? That’s an interesting question,” she said, and paused for a long time.
“No.”.
