The Southern Poverty Law Center built one of the most powerful fundraising machines in American politics on a single promise: send us money, and we will destroy hate groups.
Federal prosecutors say some of that money went to buy KKK robes and recruit new members for their neo-Nazi group.
That is the federal indictment against Heidi Beirich, who spent two decades at the SPLC and rose to lead its Intelligence Project — the division that decided which organizations got branded as hate groups, a designation that has ended careers, defunded nonprofits, and gotten conservative groups banned from payment processors and social media platforms.
Beirich, it turns out, was allegedly sharing a home and a bank account with a man embedded in a neo-Nazi organization.
The indictment alleges that between 2007 and 2023, more than $4 million in SPLC donor funds were secretly funneled to people inside extremist organizations — not to expose them, but to fund their hate. The money went toward purchasing Ku Klux Klan robes and materials used in cross-burning ceremonies. Some of it went to recruit new members into those same groups.
So the anti-hate group was literally paying to manufacture hate across the country. Got it.
Beirich's partner in this scheme was also her romantic partner. He had infiltrated the National Alliance, one of the oldest neo-Nazi organizations in the United States. The SPLC paid him more than $1.2 million over the course of their relationship. Prosecutors say $140,000 in SPLC funds moved through the bank accounts they shared between 2015 and 2021, some of which Beirich used for her own personal expenses.
The SPLC's pitch to donors and financial institutions was that their money was being used to dismantle extremist groups. Court documents describe a very different reality — that the money was used "to fund violent, racist and extremist activities."
The Intelligence Project under Beirich produced the SPLC's famous Hate Map, which brands organizations across the country as hate groups. That designation has been cited by federal agencies, corporations, and major media outlets. Banks have used it to close accounts. Tech companies have used it to ban users. Employers have used it to justify firing people.
The woman who spent twenty years deciding who qualified as a hate group was allegedly paying a neo-Nazi's bills and buying his organization's ceremonial robes.
Beirich joined the SPLC in 1999 and left in December 2019. She did not step away from the hate-fighting business. She went on to co-found the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism — another nonprofit dedicated, by its own description, to combating extremism.
She is scheduled to be arraigned on August 19. Her attorney says the charges are politically motivated and she is innocent.
The investigation was opened in 2018 under Attorney General Jeff Sessions and expanded in 2019 under Attorney General Bill Barr. An original indictment against the SPLC was announced in April 2026. Last week's superseding indictment added Beirich's name.