(LifeSiteNews) — The executive director of a major LGBTQ+ nonprofit that exists to make sure homosexuality and transgenderism are promoted in TV, movies, print and online media — and aggressively punishes those who resist the organization’s dictates — appears to be living an indulgent, extravagant lifestyle funded by donations.
The organization, GLAAD, is both a media watchdog and LGBTQ+ enforcer. In 2021, GLAAD played a significant role in pressuring Facebook to permanently ban LifeSiteNews because of its truth-telling reporting concerning LGBTQ+ issues, using LifeSiteNews’ coverage of the government’s tyrannical COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine policies as a pretext.
In recent years, GLAAD has focused much of its attention on promoting transgender “rights,” including controversial monstrous interventions for transgender children. GLAAD has also been outspoken in its support of boys and men who identify as females participating in girls’ and women’s sporting competitions and asserts that banning men from women’s sports is “dangerous.”
According to a lengthy New York Times exposé published Thursday, GLAAD chief executive Sarah Kate Ellis’ spending habits likely violated IRS rules as well as the company’s own policies.
Various media outlets described the NYT’s findings as everything from a “damning report” to a display of “Outrageous greed of LGBT charity.”
The Times reviewed expense reports, receipts from January 2022 through June 2023, as well as tax filings, audit reports and other financial documents that revealed a pattern of over-the-top, extravagant spending by Ellis and others at GLAAD, all on their donors’ dime.
Ellis, a lesbian who is ‘married’ to a woman, was found to have:
- Paid nearly half a million dollars to rent a chalet for just one week while attending the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland in 2023.
- Sought reimbursement for more than 30 first-class flights.
- Charged $60,000 for airfare and accommodations for herself and GLAAD’s chief operating officer, Darra Gordon, to attend the Cannes Lions advertising summit in France.
- Billed GLAAD $18,000 to remodel her home office, including the addition of a chandelier.
- Expensed a $15,000 three-week summer cottage rental at Provincetown, a popular Cape Cod resort catering to LGBTQ+ clientele.
- Paid $3,900 for car services while in Washington, D.C. for just two days, including $1,000 for an SUV that picked her up at the airport, took her to the White House, then dropped her off at her hotel, a distance of about seven miles.
Not only were Ellis’ lavish spending habits at her donors’ expense scrutinized by the Times, so was a generous pay package afforded her in her 2022 renegotiated employment contract.
Ellis is paid a base salary of $441,000, with bonuses tied to her fundraising performance that could earn her up to $1.3 million per year. When she renewed her contract in 2022, she received a $150,000 signing bonus, and is promised a $225,000 “farewell appreciation bonus” that she’ll collect at the end of her tenure in 2027.
“Such perks, luxurious business travel and large pay packages might be commonplace at a for-profit company. But legal experts said they were inappropriate for a nonprofit organization with about 60 employees that, in exchange for being exempt from federal and state taxes, must ensure that executive pay is reasonable and aligned with the charity’s mission and the intent of donors,” NYT journalist Emily Steel wrote in her shocking report.
The GLAAD exec’s spending is apparently also at odds with the organization’s own rules, which stated during the period the NYT examined that all employees fly economy, use public transportation whenever possible, and keep costs at a minimum.
“Some GLAAD employees were upset when they encountered executives’ globe-trotting Instagram photos and as word spread that Ms. Ellis often flew first-class — especially since employees said they faced scrutiny over minor violations of the group’s expense policy,” Steel recounted. “One employee who expensed a cup of coffee was chastised for taking money away from the L.G.T.B.Q. cause and had to reimburse GLAAD, according to a former employee.”
Ellis’ pattern of spending is “a potentially abusive use of charitable funds that would be surprising and insulting to a lot of their donors,” according to Michael West, a New York Council of Nonprofits attorney. “It appears she may have fallen into the trap of excess.”
The pay and perks that Ellis receives look “much more like a pay package of a for-profit executive and less like that of a person directing a charity,” said Brian Mittendorf, an Ohio State University business professor who specializes in nonprofit accounting.
“It’s quite a generous package,” David Samuels, an attorney who previously helped oversee tax-exempt organizations in the New York attorney general’s office, told the NYT. “Is this a proper and reasonable use of the charity’s assets?”
While GLAAD collects small donations from individual contributors, the organization also enjoys large volume funding from an array of well-known organizations that are on board with GLAAD’s promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism.
Among its top corporate “partners” are The Walt Disney Company, Netflix, P&G (Procter & Gamble), Comcast/NBC Universal, Frito Lay, Sony Music and Sony Pictures, Hyundai, Amazon Studios, Delta Airlines, Kellogg’s, American Express, DOW, Coca-Cola, and the NBA and WNBA.
“Our work has never been more urgent, because the LGBTQ community is under increasing attack,” Ellis insisted in a statement to The Daily Mail.
“Politicians, extremists and even mainstream media outlets are undermining our efforts for equality and pushing dangerous narratives about our community,” Ellis said.
“We won’t stop fighting for acceptance,” she promised.