Peter Brimelow, founder of the vehemently anti-immigrant website VDARE.com, is being persecuted.
That’s what he’s been telling followers, anyway. In a video posted on X last July, Brimelow announced his resignation and the suspension of VDARE, claiming the organization “has been murdered by New York State Attorney General Letitia James,” who “is quite obviously aiming at suppressing our speech.”
One might be forgiven for finding Brimelow’s speech odious: “Hispanics do specialize in rape, particularly of children. They’re very prone to it, compared to other groups,” he claimed, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, while speaking at a 2017 conference in reference to Donald Trump’s claim that Mexico was sending rapists across the southern border. (VDARE once sued the New York Times for defamation—unsuccessfully—for reporting, among other things, that the SPLC had designated VDARE a “hate group” based on its rhetoric and Brimelow’s ties to white nationalists.)
But the lawsuit James’ office filed on Wednesday, after more than three years of investigation and court skirmishes over the AG’s unfulfilled requests for information, doesn’t dwell on Brimelow’s ideology. Rather, it accuses him and his wife, Lydia Brimelow, along with VDARE Foundation—the tax-exempt nonprofit that has supported the website (and the couple’s legal defense fund)—of misusing charitable funds.
The lawsuit claims the Brimelows—who have been championed by Trumpworld figures including Tucker Carlson, Ed Martin, and Stephen Miller—improperly funneled more than $2 million worth of VDARE’s assets to entities controlled by the Brimelows or their family members. These include the Berkeley Castle Foundation, which Lydia established in West Virginia in 2000, and a now-defunct Connecticut company, Happy Penguins, that the couple owned. (Though originally based in Connecticut, and more recently West Virginia, VDARE is registered as a New York nonprofit.)
The Brimelows have also, the suit alleges, repeatedly failed to submit the state financial filings required of all nonprofits—or submitted untruthful ones. Finally, the AG’s office accuses VDARE, which collected nearly $15 million in tax-deductible contributions from 2019 through 2023, of soliciting donations after declaring itself inoperative last year.
To that point, an online fundraising campaign launched by Lydia Brimelow on the donation portal GiveSendGo—which describes James as “a lawless political activist bent on destroying Donald Trump”—shows $52,000 raised on a $100,000 goal, including more than $2,000 in the past month. (“Let’s keep our culture,” one donor, who gave $200, wrote in the comments section.) The funds “will be received by VDARE Foundation,” the page promises. “Please donate today to help VDARE.com defend ourselves from this existential threat.”
As I’ve written previously, the rules determining what qualifies as a tax-exempt (thus taxpayer-subsidized) charity in America are wildly permissive—VDARE being just one example—as are the laws governing foundations and donor-advised funds. But state and federal governments do place restrictions on nonprofit corporate governance to discourage founders from enriching themselves. “VDARE’s board was limited only to the Brimelows, their family members, and close associates, a structure that enabled years of unchecked self-dealing,” James’ office writes in a press release announcing the lawsuit.
In 2020, according to the release, the Brimelows used $1.4 million from VDARE’s coffers to purchase a castle in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Officially, it was to host the charity’s offices and conferences, “but the Brimelows promptly moved their family in and then orchestrated a series of transactions transferring ownership of the property to companies they owned or controlled.” The AG’s statement goes on to claim that “these arrangements, structured by Lydia Brimelow’s father, were rubber-stamped by a board dominated by the Brimelows.”
The couple’s next move, the lawsuit alleges, was to create what’s known as a leaseback scheme, wherein VDARE paid rent to the Brimelows’ other entities to use the castle and property. These payments, along with loans from VDARE to another company Lydia created, called BBB LLC, enabled the Brimelows to “extract hundreds of thousands of dollars from VDARE,” the lawsuit alleges, while the charity’s stacked board rendered its review of any such transactions “meaningless.” (Mother Jones has reached out to a lawyer representing VDARE, seeking the group’s response to the allegations.)
The AG’s office confirmed to me that its investigation commenced in June 2022 after its lawyers became aware of reports raising questions about the group’s 2020 purchase of the Berkeley Springs Castle, which has divided the local community. When its lawyers then looked at public records related to the transactions, they came across what they felt was strong evidence of self-dealing—that’s the unlawful use of a public charity to enrich its owners or officers.
The Brimelows tried to thwart the investigation, the lawsuit alleges, by ignoring subpoenas, withholding records, and forcing James’ office to go to court to obtain even basic documents: “VDARE has been held in contempt of court twice, owes tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid fines…and still refuses to comply with court orders,” the AG’s statement reads.
On their fundraising page, the Brimelows cast the AG’s investigation as political retribution: “After 25 years of battling Cancel Culture to publish nonprofit journalism on the negative effects of mass immigration in defense of the Historic American Nation, VDARE.com is faced with a crippling pincer attack: overwhelming legal costs AND the canceling of our credit card processing.”
Yet as legal scrutiny increased, the AG further alleges, the Brimelows accelerated their efforts to shift assets away from VDARE by increasing the monthly rent on the castle from $6,000 to $33,000, releasing Brimelow-controlled entities from more than $1 million in mortgage obligations, and transferring VDARE’s remaining castle shares to “a for-profit company believed to be controlled by Lydia Brimelow’s father.”
In an echo of the successful legal action James filed in 2018 against the Donald J. Trump Foundation, the VDARE lawsuit seeks restitution and penalties for the alleged charitable abuses and the rescission of any unlawful transactions—including transfer of the castle’s ownership. It also calls for the official dissolution of VDARE Foundation and asks the court to permanently bar the Brimelows—as the New York Supreme Court barred Trump and his three grown children—from serving as officers, directors, or trustees of any New York charity or soliciting charitable contributions in New York state. A receiver also would have to be appointed by the court to disburse VDARE’s remaining assets—just $150,000 at the time Brimelow announced that his website was calling it quits—to “legitimate charities.”
Although the courts have shown little patience for the Brimelows’ claims of martyrdom, the couple found a sympathetic ear in Tucker Carlson, who shares their embrace of the Great Replacement Theory, the notion that white Americans—real Americans—are being supplanted by people of color in a scheme orchestrated by “globalist” elites.
For Trump admirers who come under legal scrutiny, it’s de rigeur to cast their prosecution as political retribution—see January 6. This grievance has been a recurring element of Trump’s playbook, even as his own Justice Department actually—and openly—targets his foes for their misdeeds, real or imagined. But nobody has produced evidence of Letitia James doing so. In the real America, sometimes people just do questionable things and end up accused of crimes.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.