Al Sharpton provided family members at least $80,000 to work for his social justice organization, National Action Network. In Addition, the organization spent lavishly on travel.
The information comes from recent tax filings reviewed by the New York Post.
“The National Action Network paid Sharpton’s 33-year-old daughter Ashley Sharpton $63,250 last year to do social media work and consulting, and gave $13,750 to his niece, Nikki Sharpton, 45, for special-event work in NAN’s Atlanta bureau, according to the group’s most recent tax filing, which was obtained by The Post,” the outlet reported. “And NAN gave a $5,000 grant to Kathy Jordan Sharpton, 64, the reverend’s wife from whom he separated in 2004. It was listed on the form as scholarship money.”
Sharpton himself took less money than he did in 2018, receiving a 1% raise to collect $327,570 in 2019. He was paid an extra $722,948 in 2018, which NAN said was for years in which Sharpton was not fully paid.
Sharpton’s oldest daughter, Dominique, has been listed as NAN’s membership director for more than a decade yet tax filings do not show her being paid for her work.
It’s not surprising or even uncommon for family members to work for an organization, and the money paid to Ashley and Nikki isn’t extraordinary. The money spent by the organization on travel, however, should raise eyebrows.
As the Post reported, about one quarter of the organization’s expenses in 2019 came from travel and transportation, including $777,623 to a high-end car service called Carey International that the group used to chauffeur employees who worked around the country and even to bring “in dignitaries and talent for the group’s annual conference in New York and regional meetings, and to take victims to rallies or trials,” the outlet reported.
Rachel Noerdlinger, a spokeswoman for NAN, told the Post that 2019 was “a banner organizing year in preparation for 2020” and that travel expenditures had to increase for “voter engagement and registration, work around the census and construction of NAN tech hubs around the United States.”
Another peculiar expenditure the Post found related to Sharpton’s ex-wife. Noerdlinger claimed the money she was given as part of a “scholarship” is paid through her church and apparently paid every year, though the Post found no similar grants in the organization’s tax filings over the previous few years.
Sharpton’s finances have come under scrutiny before. In 2018 he apparently sold the rights to his life story to his own organization for $531,000 so that NAN could then sell the rights to filmmakers. So far it is unclear whether those rights have been sold again.
Sharpton always seems to receive good fortune no matter his actions. In 1998 he was ordered to pay $65,000 in defamation damages to a man he smeared as a rapist as part of the Tawana Brawley rape hoax in the 1980s. Sharpton never paid a dime of what he owed, instead having his debt paid off by wealthy friends.