Benson's Nonprofit Funded the Charlottesville Rally
She was on the board of the Southern Poverty Law Center as it bought white robes and crosses for the KKK
The Southern Poverty Law Center funded an operative who planned and transported people to the 2017 tiki-torch rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, alleges the U.S. Justice Department. This happened during Jocelyn Benson’s tenure as a board member.
Once upon a time, Benson loved to maximize her connections to the Southern Poverty Law Center. When she ran for Secretary of State in 2010, she called back to her time as an undercover operative, sweet-talking Neo-Nazis to gain their trust.
“She begged us to let her volunteer,” an SPLC spokeswoman recalled years ago.
Benson was elevated to dean of Wayne Law School in June 2014. By October 2014, the SPLC wasn’t just an early chapter of Benson’s story, it was a new one, when she joined its board. She stayed until 2019, shortly after taking office as Michigan Secretary of State.
The federal case against the Southern Poverty Law Center covers Benson’s entire board stay and years later, from 2014 to 2023.
“The SPLC also had a field source who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia,” the feds alleged in a superseding indictment that dropped last week. “That field source made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees in order to covertly pay its field sources.”
The feds say the SPLC created “bank accounts connected to a series of fictitious entities” and routed donor money to those accounts, and then to its field sources, who were paid troublemakers.
“The SPLC paid the field sources in order to keep the scheme going,” the feds allege. “The SPLC made a series of false statements related to the operation of the accounts.”
One charge the SPLC faces is wire fraud. The feds say the SPLC took money from donors who thought they were fighting hate groups in America, when in reality the SPLC was funding those groups.
The tiki-torch rally in Charlottesville was portrayed as America heading toward a new civil war, and more than a few media outlets portrayed President Donald Trump as an antagonist. But the feds now allege the events that day were a production staged by the SPLC, not organic.
A woman named Heather Heyer was run over at the Charlottesville rally and died. The man who drove the vehicle was sentenced to life in prison. Two lives were cut short by a rally that would not have existed but for the work of paid SPLC operatives.
Tyler O’Neil wrote the book on the Southern Poverty Law Center. Literally. Hit 2020 book “Hate Won’t Win” notes that SPLC reporters were “covering ‘Unite the Right’ before the riots took place.”
The night of the violence, then-SPLC president Richard Cohen laid the blame at Trump’s feet. Just months into Trump’s first term, Cohen said: “Trump again refuses to take responsibility for a resurgence of white nationalism.”
Cohen argued that Trump “consciously poured fuel on the fire” of racial tension in America. Nine years later, that’s what the feds accuse the SPLC of doing. Not just fueling the fire, but funding the fire.
Though the 2020 book blames SPLC for stoking the tensions that led to Charlottesville, O’Neil never suggested that the center was playing both sides of the fence—funding extremism even as it decries it. That’s a new argument, as of April 2026, resulting from a federal investigation.
Elsewhere in the indictment, the feds allege that SPLC-paid operatives bought crosses and robes for the Ku Klux Klan.
As recently as April, after the initial indictment dropped, Benson’s campaign was still defending the value of the SPLC’s work.
“Jocelyn Benson has spent her career advancing the unfinished work of the civil rights movement and expanding economic opportunity, including helping dismantle white supremacist and neo-Nazi extremist networks responsible for hate crimes across the country," said campaign spokeswoman Alyssa Bradley.
By late May, Benson was telling a different story, trying to minimize her role in the group that appears throughout her memoirs. Now, Benson says her board role was “mostly ceremonial.”
"My role was mostly ceremonial,” Benson said at the Mackinac Policy Conference. “It was mostly attending events and doing other things, like the 50th commemoration of the Voting Rights Act.”
Standing on ceremony won’t be enough to quiet the questions of Benson and her time on board at the SPLC. Benson ducked out from a Detroit TV debate last week, acting as if she had the Democrat nomination sewed up.
But she can’t outrun the questions forever.
