Shaun King, The Appeal and The Non-Profit Industrial Complex.

There’s been a lot written about Shaun King and his various money-making ventures over the last few years, but the specific details have remained murky. I’m about to shed some light on them. I’ve spoken to a number of former staff members of The Appeal, an online criminal justice publication (@theappeal), and they had A LOT to say to me that they were either too scared to share publicly themselves or they just couldn’t share for fear of being sued, because they signed NDAs.

You might not have heard of The Appeal or realize that it is connected to Shaun, because they don’t promote the connection, but if you follow Shaun on Twitter or Facebook, you will see that sometimes almost his entire feed is posts from The Appeal. There’s a reason for that. The Appeal pays Shaun King $2,500 a month for access to his Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Now, you’ll remember that back in 2019, Shaun released a glossy 79-page brochure on his finances that purported to include every source of his income. It didn’t make mention of that monthly payment, even though Shaun was receiving the payment at that time. And in fact, at least one of the people who signed off on that report had personal knowledge of that. That person: Rob Smith. How did Rob Smith know? Because Rob Smith is Executive Director of the Appeal.

(Here is where I should take a little detour to explain that The Appeal has been through a number of iterations. It had its beginnings in The Fair Punishment Project, which was created by Rob Smith and affiliated with Harvard Law School. The Fair Punishment Project looked at criminal law issues, in particular the death penalty. Shaun King was officially a “writer in residence” of the Fair Punishment Project, but the organization was run by Rob Smith. Josie Duffy Rice (now president of The Appeal), who went to law school with Rob Smith, also worked as a strategist for The Fair Punishment Project.

There were whispers of financial impropriety and the Fair Punishment Project became disaffiliated with Harvard and was folded into what became known as The Justice Collaborative in 2018, a criminal justice advocacy organization. The Appeal was the media arm of The Justice Collaborative. Only in the last month did the entire Justice Collaborative decide to rebrand itself as The Appeal.)

Now, I should point out, The Appeal is not the only organization/person, Shaun allows to access his social media accounts. Others who have access are Real Justice PAC, S. Lee Merritt, Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, Patrisse Cullors and Erika Andiola. It is not clear whether they have any sort of payment arrangement with Shaun, similar to that which exists with The Appeal, but they do have the same access.

How does the access work? Shaun set up a TweetDeck system so that various people from The Appeal (and the above-mentioned people and organizations) could tweet from his Twitter account, without having his password. The people from The Appeal who have access are Rob Smith, Josie Duffy Rice, Matt Ferner, Ethan Brown, Jay Willis (a close friend of Josie Duffy Rice) and at various times, maybe one or two other trusted director-level people. On Facebook, the same — but it works by people being granted administrator privileges to his account. On Twitter, sometimes, The Appeal will simply retweet their content. Sometimes they will write tweets in Shaun’s voice, quote-retweeting their content. Other times, they will write tweets in Shaun’s voice about political campaigns promoted by The Justice Collaborative (now re-branded as The Appeal). If you see tweets on Shaun’s page about proposed legislation, for example, it was likely written by one of the people mentioned above.

As I said, The Appeal does not promote their connection to Shaun King. But the people who run The Appeal are very much intertwined with the other organizations of which Shaun King is a part. For example, Rob Smith, for a long time, ran Real Justice PAC. The Appeal and Real Justice PAC have similar agendas in that they are both focused on promoting the progressive prosecutor movement. (The Appeal, initially, was intended to be editorially independent from The Justice Collaborative. When Josie Duffy Rice and Matt Ferner took over in 2019 it became a propaganda arm of The Justice Collaborative.)

It is important to understand that in many ways Shaun King is just the face of Real Justice PAC and GrassRoots Law Collective and the various other non-profit organizations with which he is involved through Rob Smith. Rob Smith says this quite openly. In the case of Real Justice PAC, the $4000 approx. a month they pay Shaun is essentially just paying for access to his mailing list of 1 million people. That mailing list generated $ 2 million dollars in revenue for Real Justice PAC in 2019.

The NorthStar is different. That is Shaun’s project by himself. But these other PACs — they’re run by people affiliated with Rob Smith. Hold Shaun accountable. But hold all these faceless people behind the scenes accountable too.

In the case of The Appeal, 90% of traffic to their website comes from Shaun King’s Facebook and Twitter.

The Appeal workplace is described by former staff members as toxic. They say Editor in Chief, Matt Ferner, and Senior Editor, Ethan Brown, as well as Rob Smith, were verbally abusive, and that President, Josie Duffy Rice, was complicit in the abuse, not only because she was aware and did nothing, but because she promoted all three of these individuals on her personal Twitter page. It was so bad, they say, that every single women reporter, editor and director was fired without reason, forced out or resigned in the last two years.

They describe a culture rife with hypocrisy, for example, where Josie Duffy Rice described herself as an abolitionist on Twitter while running an organization whose specific mission was to promote the progressive prosecutor movement; where she would direct that posts from Shaun’s account be written in a way that sounded “natural not contractual” and asked staff members to delete personal tweets that upset donors, but claimed online that The Appeal was run on a shoestring budget and needed donations.

The grifter game is real people. Don’t let yourself be played.