Who's Afraid of LaDonna Humphrey part 10

Ladonna Humphrey: I have really two careers. Really? I have this true crime career.

Speaker: If you want to call it true crime, I mean, that seems a little cheesy, but you know what? You know what I mean? And then I am also an executive director for a sober living home, which I'm equally equally passionate about. Lana Humphrey is talking with Jason Blair on the Silver Linings Handbook podcast about balancing her thirst for fame with her day job running a nonprofit.

Ladonna Humphrey: it's an interesting mix. You know, People think, wow, why do you do both? Why don't you just choose one? And I say, why do I have to choose one? Why can't I do both? That's always my answer.

Speaker: we've mostly talked about LaDonna Humphrey's controversial career as a true crime personality, but we haven't even explored LaDonna Humphrey's failed histories of running non profits. Every charity organization she's led has either lapsed in financial reporting or has completely fallen apart. So, how did LaDonna Humphrey fall into non profit work? Let's play more of that clip from the Silver Linings handbook podcast

Ladonna Humphrey: And my personality really is. What I said earlier is like, I'm, it's all or nothing for me. And so there were issues that I was extremely passionate about.and I would write about it and that really then spilled over into me.

Speaker: Wanting to pursue journalism as a college student, and then I really honed my craft and really decided that for me, I wanted to get out there and tell the hard stories and uncover, you know, um, Those things that other people didn't want to write about and that was really what I thought I was going to do with my life that I was never going to marry and that I was just going to be a reporter. But that's not the way that life worked out. That's just not, you know, you don't take account for falling in love and then starting a family and doing all those things that kind of sidetrack you from those things that you first fell in love with. I didn't end up. Becoming this hard nosed reporter, I ended up actually kind of being driven down a different path, so to speak, pulled down a different path. You know, my faith, I speak openly about that. To me, it's, you know, God put me on a different path. Transition to Nonprofit WorkLaDonna Humphrey: And so that's been nonprofit work for me. I want to, to go where God calls me. so that's what we're going to focus on today. LaDonna Humphrey's nonprofit work, her apparent mishandling of funds and accusations of harassment made by the people she's claiming to help. I'm Javier Leyva and this is Pretend. Stories about real people pretending to be someone else. INTROTalking about the inner workings and financial oversight of a non profit could be a real snoozer. Lots of numbers flying around, taxes, yuck. But let's not forget, Al Capone was infamous for orchestrating the St. Valentine's Day massacre and countless other murders. However, he was never convicted of those crimes. Instead, it was tax evasion that ultimately led to his downfall and conviction. Trying to outsmart the IRS is a fool's game. But yes, that does not stop certain non profits from doing so. You see, non profits are highly susceptible to fraud. Partly because many organizations have small staffs and lack internal controls. Many people who start non profits, especially the small ones, lack financial expertise. And in the case of LaDonna Humphrey's organizations, they don't have any internal controls or conduct regular audits. So let's talk about her first venture spearheading a nonprofit. Let's bring them home is an organization co founded by LaDonna Humphrey and her podcast co host, Amy Smith. they claim to offer services for families with missing loved ones.

Lets Bring Them Homeladonna Humphrey: I had founded an agency called let's bring them home and we offered support, um, services and we acted as a liaison with law enforcement to families that had missing adults.

Speaker: There's not a whole lot out there about the organization. Let's bring them home.or the cases that they've worked on. the only case I'm aware of is the time that they offered a reward tip on the Morimori case. And we all know how that went down. It turns out that there was no reward money, no documentations of where that money was coming from. Or any notification that the reward had expired. Yet, years later, true crime author James Renner published a blog claiming that LaDonna rescinded the reward after three months Due to odd behavior from Maura Murray's father, Fred Murray.

Ladonna: And so I just want everybody to understand that, um, we had to rescind the reward because there was some odd behavior.

Speaker: We actually voted to rescind the reward because we could not agree to Fred's terms, which were he wanted us to send him the tips, um, and not send them to law enforcement first. We, um, hope that the Murray family is able to finally move past this situation, accept the truth of what happened and move forward. I've never seen a victim's advocacy organization go after a family that they're claiming to help this hard. Let's bring them home was a colossal failure. Just take one look at the IRS website. In nine years of their history, LaDonna's nonprofit Let's Bring Them Home only reported financials twice with the IRS. In 2009 and in 2011. both years they claimed to have brought in less than 50, 000. The Moura Murray reward offer was 75,000.

Ladonna: it wasn't actually cash in the bank. Back then you were actually allowed to have an insurance policy.

Speaker: But even if they did have an insurance policy for the Maura Murray reward, as they are now claiming, surely they had to have some collateral to back up the insurance. For organizations like Let's Bring Them Home with weak financials or high risk profiles, Collateral requirements could be 50%, sometimes even the full amount. Anyway, it doesn't matter because Let's Bring Them Home is no more. the non profit was revoked in 2016 for failure to file. But before it collapsed, Let's Bring Them Home had one more brush with controversy. Meet Kim Pasqualini KYM PASQUALINIIn 1994, Kim Pasqualini started the National Center for Missing Adults. The organization was the first congressionally funded national database matching unidentified remains with missing persons reports. It was a big deal. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, The US government asked Kim and her organization to help families find their missing loved ones. After the storm, more than 12, 000 missing adults were reported missing. But that Justice Department funding that was promised never came through. And Kim Pasqualini was left holding the debt. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/all-missing-hurricane-kids-found/) (https://thecrimereport.org/2006/11/03/katrinas-collateral-damage-center-for-missing-adults/) KymPasqualini11475723156: I had 14 employees and one by one, let them go. It was, you know, really heartbreaking time of my life. JavierLeiva21475723156: Yeah, and because you built this thing, you know, this was your, your baby and it helped so many people. And then now you're watching, you know, the ground beneath your feet just kind of crumble, right? KymPasqualini11475723156: Yes. LADONNA ENTERS THE PICTUREit was during this time period where LaDonna Humphrey and Amy Smith stepped up to help. ' we were trying to help her, because I, my heart broke for her because I thought, here's this lady who has poured her whole life into helping other people. What can we do to help her? You know, so we never wanted her organization. audioAmy’siPhone11628143498: here is the thing. If we didn't absorb it, she was done. We didn't want her organization to close. (Kym) Here's Kim JavierLeiva21475723156: LaDonna KymPasqualini11475723156: was the founder and, uh, president of Let's Bring Them Home. and she approached me and she offered to help me continue my mission. By, offering a merger agreement and in that merger agreement,she offered a lifeline to my organization. According to Kim, LaDonna told her that she had secured a 1 million grant from Tyson Foods and they would award it to them on one condition, that their two organizations merge. KymPasqualini11475723156: And so I made the decision without doing due diligence, to go ahead and go with her word. that ended up not being true. you know, with the loss of the company BACKTRACK TO HER DEPRESSION & LOSING MONEY FOR HER ORGKymPasqualini11475723156: facing the loss of the company, that was my baby. it was something that I grew, like one of my children. And, I sunk into a very deep depression and was hospitalized after that. yeah, I was released from the hospital and, and they flew here to Phoenix and so the pressure was on And I ended up signing that that merger and, um, finalizing the agreement in a meeting JavierLeiva21475723156: a day after you've been KymPasqualini11475723156: a day. Yeah. Day after I was hospitalized. JavierLeiva21475723156: Was she even aware of the severity of KymPasqualini11475723156: Yes, she had been aware. JavierLeiva21475723156: did you ask her? Hey, can we hold this off? I'm in the hospital I mean, KymPasqualini11475723156: You know, I, I don't recall how I reacted. Um, and, and that's a sign right there that I was not in the state of mind to be signing a merger contract for my lifeline. like Kim said, she was admitted to the hospital for depression for seven days. We didn't go into details about why she was hospitalized or what happened. Was it a single event? Or was it just the weight of everything? Kim was clearly in a bad place. I asked LaDonna Humphrey about this.

Javier: So going back to Kim for a second, because she was talking about being in a bad mental state when this whole thing was going down. And she was saying that she was hospitalized at the time. And that you we're pressuring her to proceed with a meeting the day after she was hospitalized.

Speaker: LaDonna: 20240515-riverside_ladonna_humphrey_raw-audio_javier_leiva's stud_0016: I know that we flew to Arizona to see her. She may have been hospitalized. I don't know that we would have necessarily known that because we didn't really know Kim. Um, and she met with us

Ladonna: but it was like several months. We'll have to look. to know for sure. It would, I would say it was either several weeks or several months later before the merger happened.

Speaker: Then I asked Amy Smith, the executive director of Let's Bring Them Home, to respond about the hospitalization. audioJavierLeiva21628143498: She says that LaDonna specifically pressured Kim into signing the merger agreement immediately after she was hospitalized. Do you know anything about that? audioAmy’siPhone11628143498: is not even true. I think we found out that she was in the hospital or had just gotten out of the hospital when we met her in Arizona. And. We came to say, what could we do for you? A merger was not even on our lips when we went to meet her. 20240515-riverside_ladonna_humphrey_raw-audio_javier_leiva's stud_0016: I think maybe she had been in the hospital when we first met her. That may have been a possible. She may have mentioned that to us, but we did not actually have a merger for some time after that. It took a lot of back and forth. So no,

Javier: So it was more like a verbal agreement,

Speaker: maybe? 20240515-riverside_ladonna_humphrey_raw-audio_javier_leiva's stud_0016: No, we were just kind of talking through. Is this a possibility? Is this something that you want to have happen? That kind of thing nobody should ever sign a contract right away. I'm sure that in Kim's world, it would make it easier for her. To say those things. Um, I don't have a lot of positive things to say about Kim Pasqualini. Look, it doesn't matter when Kim signed the merger agreement, if it was the day after she got released from the hospital or a few months after. The point is that Kim was in a vulnerable state. Her organization was tailspinning. It was probably going to go under anyway. and LaDonna Humphrey and Amy Smith seized on the opportunity. did they exploit Kim for their own benefit? or were they genuinely trying to save this once great organization? A first of its kind nonprofit that at one point raised $1.5 million a year? We'll never know their true motivations. LDH STRIKES BACK - THREATENING PHONE CALLS / WANTS KYM'S CASE FILESJavierLeiva21475723156: well, first, what happened is I, I, Message LaDonna and said, I'm not going forward with the merger and I started getting threatening phone calls, I had case files. Um, thousands and thousands of case files and six foot cabinets and she wanted those. Kim says that she started receiving phone calls from Bentonville County Sheriff's Department saying that they wanted to talk to her about the stolen case files. Then the Bella Vista police called looking for the files. Finally, Kim says that the county prosecutor called to inquire about the files too. But Kim says that the files weren't stolen. They were with Kim the entire time. KymPasqualini11475723156: I was very protective of them and felt that she was a threat and not trustworthy. Kim filed a civil lawsuit trying to find a way out of the merger agreement. After five years, they finally settled. KymPasqualini11475723156: she kept the name of the organization National Center for missing adults. The trademark. And I kept all of the case files and the data from the hard drive. my, uh, court case wasn't about money. It was about protecting the, the files. AMY'S TAKE ON KYM Amy Smith has a totally different recollection of how this all went down audioAmy’siPhone11628143498: Kym just in the middle of the night just left and went somewhere, took the files with her. And so that's kind of how we. We parted terms on that, so I'm a little bitter, Let's Bring Them Home was mainly funded by me. we paid her. LaDonna and I didn't, we did not get paid. This was not our job. We both had full time jobs aside from Let's Bring Them Home. We put all the money that we ever got, we put back into, let's bring them home and we didn't take a paycheck, but we wanted to make sure that Kim did get money because obviously that was why we were here because Kim had no money KymPasqualini11475723156: It devastated me. I , I ended up staying with an, a friend, an old Vietnam vet. And me and my daughter lived at his house and in a room. it was like starting over So, let's turn our attention back to the central theme of the season, the accusations of harassment against LaDonna Humphrey. when Kim tried to back out of the merger, that's when she says the harassment started. LDH'S HARASSMENT OF KYMKymPasqualini11475723156: um, harassment started, um, soon after I left Arkansas and mind you, I left Arkansas in a hurry I drove from Arkansas all the way to New Mexico in one night and couldn't have left there fast enough, but the harassment started right away. it started with, my. Email account being hacked. She hacked my LinkedIn and changed my entire, all my accolades, Kim says that LaDonna Humphrey single handedly ruined her public perception she says LaDonna hacked into her LinkedIn, changing her LinkedIn job title from CEO of the National Center of Missing Adults. to a stripper.

Kym Pasqualini: that I was a pole dancer and had a picture up of a pole dancer, uh, said I was a cry baby.

Speaker: Kim says that LaDonna replaced her past roles with titles like Meth Addict and other horrible things. I asked Kim to provide screenshots, but she says that she no longer has them. I even checked archive. org to see if I could find it, and no luck. But just because we don't have the screenshots doesn't mean it didn't happen, and vice versa. But it is very important to note that considering all the other allegations made against LaDonna Humphrey. KymPasqualini11475723156: And, that I didn't notice for up to a week or so. my, whole profile had changed so I contacted the attorney and the attorney was able to obtain the IP address from LinkedIn and it just so happened it was from Bentonville, Arkansas JavierLeiva21475723156: LaDonna's own backyard KymPasqualini11475723156: And everything clicked at that point. who else would be trying to hack my email once a week. Kim Pasqualini never fully recovered from all this.

Kym Pasqualini: a church had actually been feeding us because she had stopped paying me. So I was basically stuck in Arkansas, no money, I couldn't leave. So I went to my local churchWhen I got back to Arizona, I mean, basically, we were almost homeless.

Speaker: And came back here was jobless, depressed, and, uh, really suffering. But not all was lost. The database that Kim fought so hard to protect got a new life KymPasqualini11475723156: I ended up giving them to ASU, Arizona State University. And they uploaded all of, every single case file to NamUs, thousands ALL THE LOST GIRLSall the lost girls, um, we founded, um, this nonprofit and we wanted to help cases that, um, were still cold and unsolved. This is Amy Smith again, doing an interview with a local television station after LaDonna Humphrey and Amy Smith absorbed or merged Kim's National Center for Missing Adults, their organization, Let's Bring Them Home, basically fell apart. let's bring them home, lost its tax exempt status in June of 2016. so in 2020, LaDonna and Amy Smith started a new organization, this time called All the Lost Girls. All the Lost Girls offers support to female strangulations. All the Lost Girls claims to offer support for female strangulation cold cases in the U. S We've been working on the Melissa Witt case, um, which is what, you know, started all the lost girls so we got into that and we realized how many cold cases there were out there. Sure. So we're trying to help Um, law enforcement and, um, departments try to solve some of these cases. And so we, we get funds for billboards and DNA testing and anything that they might need to bring that cold case back up to the surface. DNA testing, genetic genealogy, wow. Impressive, right? Unfortunately, I can't find any evidence that they've ever offered such services, and you can check the website for yourself. All the Lost Girls only features one case. That of Melissa Witt. Alicia Lockhart, who at one point was on the board of All the Lost Girls, says that she can't think of a single case where they offered DNA or genetic testing either. Weird, right? Alicia did tell me that they did put up a billboard for Melissa Witt, but none of that other stuff ever happened while she was on the board. All the Lost Girls puts on a conference every year called True Crime Fest Northwest Arkansas. called True Crime Fest Northwest Arkansas. They claim that all the ticket proceeds go to support All Lost Girls. Tickets go for about 175 a pop for the two day event. If she saw a few hundred people attend, that's about 35, 000. Just under the 50, 000 threshold that the IRS requires for non profits to report. so if they're not offering DNA testing or genetic, whatever it was, Where is that money going? Well, it funded LaDonna Humphrey's 2023 documentary Uneven Ground, The Melissa Witt Story. I scrolled past years of the All Lost Girls Facebook page, and the only thing I found is LaDonna Humphrey Submitted the documentary to several film festivals, the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Kansas City Independent Film Festival, the Fayetteville Film Festival. so is this nonprofit really serving the public? Or, is it a piggy bank for LaDonna's media ambition? I'd like to point out that All the Lost Girls had its federal tax exempt status automatically revoked because it failed to file with the IRS for three consecutive years. But they did get their tax exempt status reinstated back in 2023. OASISoasis of northwest arkansasNow, let's skip to the good part. Actually, there's nothing good about what I'm about to tell you. In fact, everything you've listened to so far in this episode was just to get us to this moment. If the previous non profits weren't enough, LaDonna Humphrey decided to up the ante, this time as director of a sober living facility called Oasis of Northwest Arkansas, a halfway house for women in recovery. Hi, my name is Rihanna and Oasis helped me find my worth, prove to myself that I can stay sober without incarceration I struggled many years with addiction and legal problems. I was court ordered to be here Since being here, I've graduated drug court, maintained full time employment, and has restored broken relationship with my children and grandchildren. my name is Caitlin and I'm a graduate of Oasis of Northwest Arkansas. I got out of prison in 2021 and I decided to change my people, places and things. And I just celebrated four years playing Listen, I have no doubt that Oasis of Northwest Arkansas has helped many women get sober. No doubt. But all these clips that I'm playing for you were posted after a petition floating around in the LaDonna Humphrey talk subreddit, claims that the women at Oasis are getting harassed by LaDonna. The petition also claims that these women are living in crowded and unsafe conditions. It also alleges that one of its board members was having sexual relations with at least one resident. And on top of that, it points to signs of financial fraud going on within the organization. That petition with hundreds of signatures was actually taken down by Change. org because someone reported the content as defamatory. But some of these video testimonials on the OASIS Facebook page seem forced, like this one, where you can clearly hear someone who sounds a lot like LaDonna directing the shoot. My name is Desiree and I'm a graduate of Oasis and the stability and accountability helped me turn my life around. Or this one from a former resident who appears to be reading, Oasis saved my life by helping me establish routine, stability, and goals that I have since accomplished. It helped me become a great mother for my children and to get on my feet and able to become a responsible citizen in the world. And when the woman is done, she looks over to her right, almost like she's recording a hostage video. Some of these videos just gush about LaDonna I still rely on Oasis so much and LaDonna so much I am going on 4 years clean thanks to LaDonna Humphrey I've witnessed firsthand LaDonna Humphrey, um, purchasing ladies groceries, um, out of pocket sometimes at that, just to ensure that nobody goes hungry. and LaDonna has helped me in so many ways and she still helps me to this day. LaDonna and Oasis helped save my life. But here's the thing. Some of the women who have recorded these videos or have written testimonials Since the controversy broke out, have reached out to me. Some want me to conceal their identities for their safety. Others want their voices to go public. One former resident admitted that she had agreed to the testimonial because she was worried about her current living situation and that she might have to go back to Oasis. The women who have come forward want one thing and one thing only. For LaDonna Humphrey to step down from Oasis of Northwest Arkansas. Another woman told me that the current residents are being forced to block any and all former members who may be leaking information to me. Next time on Pretend, you will hear from some of these former residents, and we are going to break down the evidence of harassment allegedly happening from inside OASIS. That's next time on Pretend.