I’ve written for years about Madonna and her often crazy charitable donations. She has given a lot to the phony baloney Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles, for example.
But now she’s done an actually great thing. As she pledged in April of 2020, Madonna actually stepped up and donated $1,000,0000 to Bill Gates’s Philanthropy Partners to accelerate vaccine creation, production, and distribution. She made an announcement about in April 2020, but there was a lot of other noise going on at the time.
Now the donation has turned up in her 2020 tax filing for her Ray of Light Foundation.
Yes, she did give Kabbalah $150,000. But Madame X also gave away another $850,000 to a few other organizations including needy ones in Detroit and its environs, and to groups like V Day in San Francisco, which organizes against violence toward women.
In 2019, Ray of Light made donations of around $1 million to the same groups. But adding the $1 million to the Gates group basically doubled her annual give. It’s easy to make fun of Madonna, especially when she was making strange posts on Instagram during the lockdown. But kudos and thanks for the Gates contribution. And she actually did it, she wrote the check. And never mentioned it again.
IN the new issue of The New Yorker, Paul McCartney tells the story of how he wrote “Eleanor Rigby.”
