Shaun King comes under scrutiny over botched news organization


Black activist journalist Shaun King’s latest costly flailing venture has renewed accusations about his handling of the funds he’s raised in the name of social justice, according to a report Tuesday.

King — a former New York City newspaper columnist who gained national fame during the Black Lives Matter movement — all but botched his recent online attempt to recreate abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s newspaper The North Star while the venture pulled in between $60,000 and $625,000 a month, depending on various figures King gave, the Daily Beast said.

King is now trying to raise money online for a “daily video news broadcast” — something he’d pledged under his struggling North Star venture and already supposedly raised money for, the outlet said.

The move has led critics to again question what King does with the money he raises, the site said.

King has never had any civil or criminal charges filed against him involving any of the ventures, the Daily Beast noted.

But that hasn’t stopped some former North Star employees from using terms including “liar & a fraud,” “really shady f–king business” and “self-sabotage” when describing their dealings with King, the site said.

“Shaun and the word ‘accountability’ should never appear in the same sentence,” former North Star Editor-in-Chief, Keisha N. Blain wrote in a tweet thread after leaving the company, the site said. “So many people warned me about him and I didn’t listen.”

King did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.

But he told the Daily Beast in emails that his problems with The North Star stem from the fact that he tends to bite off more than he can chew.

“When we launched The North Star, virtually every advisor I had insisted that we should not do written articles, podcasts, and video news at the same time,” King wrote to the site. “I just knew we could do it. They were right.”

As for questions about where the money goes that his ventures take in, King has said he has “never received, held, touched, managed, or even had access to any money I’ve ever raised,” according to the report.

He told The Daily Beast in 2015 — the same year he started and then shut down his activist organization Justice Together — that his accusers “need to understand that failure is not fraud.”

At the time, he separately said he refunded all of the online donations he received for Justice Together.

But there were at least two donations totaling $27,500 to the organization that were not refunded, according to the donors, the Beast said. King did not respond to questions about the issue, the website said.

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