Denise Brown is back.
The sister of Nicole Brown Simpson is on Nightline tonight, interviewed by Diane Sawyer.
Give me a freakin’ break.
The subject is admirable: domestic abuse. Denise wants to warn young women about the perils of it. She’s written a book about, cashing in once again on Nicole.
She also indicates that she’s in touch with Nicole’s kids with OJ Simpson. As far as I know, she’s not.
But Sawyer, usually savvy, lets it go. She doesn’t seem to get what Denise’ s grift has been all these years.
She’s traded on Nicole avariciously. The Nicole Brown Simpson Foundation was eventually shut down because of financial impropriety. Read this link.
And read this story, too.‘
The publicist who sold this interview — let’s say, rather, pitched — really deserves a raise.
Here’s what I wrote on Foxnews.com on October 2, 2000:
10.3.00: Questions About Nicole Brown Simpson Charity
After this column’s investigation one year ago, you would have thought the Nicole Brown Simpson Foundation was going to get its act together. Wrong.
New government filings for 1999, just recently made available, show that the charity set up in Nicole’s memory by her family is still up to some shady business.
The organization reports that in 1999 it took in $49,000 from public donations.
But it also reports that it paid an almost equal amount — $45,000 — to its staff. The staff includes Denise Brown, Nicole’s sister, chairman of the foundation. She received $17,845 in salary last year. Another $28,000 went to unidentified staff.
In contrast, the Foundation gave away a paltry $3,500 in grants and allocations to battered women’s organizations. The organization’s statement of purpose is to “provide funds to organizations that shelter and protect families caught in the crisis of family violence.”
The organizations listed as recipients of this largesse are the Deschutes County, Ore., Domestic Violence Council ($1,000), Women Helping Women ($500), Phoenix Crisis Center ($500), YMCA ($500), Haven House ($500) and Community Law Center ($500). No addresses or specifics are given for the donees. (A spokesperson for the Deschutes Council verified they had received $1,000, which was used to fund a local conference on domestic abuse. No one from the Nicole Simpson Foundation participated in it.)
However, the Nicole Brown Simpson Foundation spent $16,366 on their own “office expenses” including such non-specifics as “reimbursements,” “outside service” and insurance.
Additionally, the government filing reflects that the Foundation began 1999 with $70,574 in assets and ended the year with $3,063 in the till. This would suggest that nearly $67,000 went to non-charitable pursuits since the group lists only that $3,500 in donations.
They also managed to rack up a $7,000 phone bill and $26,000 in “occupancy” or rent. This means they spent twice as much on phone calls as they did on allocating grants. Maybe they should have used postcards, or pigeons.
Monday was the fifth anniversary of the criminal court decision in the Nicole Brown-Ron Goldman murder trial, which left O.J. Simpson a free man. Since then, the Brown family — which was known to sell pictures of Nicole to the press and once offered her wedding video for sale over an 800 number — has maintained the Foundation in Nicole’s memory.
But last year this column first reported that the Foundation took in about $85,000 in 1998 and paid out only $6,000 to charities. Denise Brown was forced to concede that she was pulling down close to $50,000 in salary. At the time Brown said that the 1999 forms — not yet filed — would reflect a change in the way the Foundation did business.
The foundation’s Web site, by the way, boasts that after Fox411’s story last year, the group “has received a clean bill of health from the attorney general’s office of the state of California. This is very good news for the Foundation, its supporters and victims across the country.” It’s unclear whether they mean the Foundation’s victims, or the victims of domestic abuse.
