For many years, Naomi Campbell organized Fashion for Relief, a charity fashion show attached to London Fashion Week. There hasn’t been a Fashion for Relief event in years – since 2019, from what I can see. Fashion for Relief supposedly raised money to support charities working in Africa. Well, Britain’s Charity Commission did some digging and they discovered that nothing was as it seemed. Now Naomi Campbell has been banned from “being a charity trustee” for five years, following the Charity Commission’s investigation.
Naomi Campbell has been banned from being a charity trustee after a watchdog investigation uncovered widespread evidence of financial misconduct at the poverty relief charity she founded. The supermodel was disqualified for five years after a Charity Commission inquiry found that Fashion for Relief passed on only a small fraction of the millions of pounds it raised from star-studded celebrity fashion events to good causes.
The charity inappropriately spent tens of thousands of pounds on luxury hotel rooms, flights, spa treatments, personal security and cigarettes for Campbell, while unauthorised consultancy payments running into hundreds of thousands of pounds were made to one of Campbell’s fellow trustees, the commission said.
It found that over a five-year period from 2016, Fashion for Relief raised just under £4.8m from a series of fashion shows but paid out only £389,000 in grants to partner charities once the cost of events and other expenses were accounted for.
Nearly £350,000 was later recovered from the charity by interim managers appointed by the commission and paid to the charities Save the Children and the Mayor’s Fund for London, which reported Fashion for Relief to the regulators four years ago after failing to receive promised payments from fundraising agreements..
Campbell’s fellow trustee Bianka Hellmich, who the inquiry found received £290,000 in unauthorised consultancy fees and £26,000 a year in travel expenses from the charity over a two-year period, was disqualified from being a charity trustee for nine years. Hellmich proposed to the commission to repay the fees and expenses in February 2022 and a repayment plan was agreed with the commission. The full amount was repaid in April 2023. A third trustee, Veronica Chou, was banned for four years.
Fashion for Relief has previously argued that it was not solely a fundraising charity but also a platform that, through its high-profile fundraising events, encouraged donors to give directly to its partner charities and good causes. The commission report, however, reveals that it did not immediately pay Save the Children €450,000 (£375,000) raised at a 2017 fundraising event. Fashion for Relief paid some of the funds, and the remaining money it owed – £147,000 – was eventually paid by Fashion for Relief’s interim managers in January 2023.
The commission’s investigation also had details like Naomi using Fashion for Relief funds to stay at a “€3,000-a-night hotel room” in Cannes. She also used the charity’s funds for “just under €8,000 on spa treatments, room service, purchases of cigarettes and hotel products.” Sounds like she was using her charity as her own personal piggy bank. £4.8 million raised from Fashion for Relief events and only £389,000 in charitable grants? And Naomi was only suspended for five years? She should have been given a lifetime ban for this insane grift.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.