Sean Penn didn’t have to do any of this. His biggest supporters and detractors can agree on that. A little over a year ago, his party at Soho Beach House, a private club in Miami Beach, was the hottest event at Art Basel, the annual international fair. The beachfront venue was packed with around 200 of the actor-turned-activist’s friends and acquaintances, including Leonardo DiCaprio, pop star Anitta and Delphine Arnault, heir to the biggest fortune on Earth. Later in the evening, Anitta sang Girl From Rio, and a charity auction raffled off NFTs and an Andy Warhol sketch. All told, the party raised $1.6 million for Penn’s nonprofit, CORE Response, that invitations and promotional materials said was earmarked for its Covid relief efforts in Latin America. A CORE employee involved in the fundraising says Anitta hosted the event on the condition that some of the money would go to her home country of Brazil, the only place in the region where CORE had any Covid relief programs of note around that time. The backdrop for the event was a massive map showing where CORE promised to put the money to use.
Besides being a fundraiser, this was a sort of victory lap for Penn’s nonprofit. During the pandemic, CORE transformed with incredible speed from a Caribbean-focused disaster relief charity with around a dozen employees into the de facto Covid response team for Los Angeles. It raised close to $200 million; put 3,000-plus people on its payroll, more employees than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and co-ran the testing site at Dodger Stadium, among the largest in the US. Through the pandemic’s darkest days, CORE administered millions of tests and vaccines and saved lives. When the delta variant ebbed, it wound down much of its ground-level staffing in Los Angeles and other US cities and started looking for new challenges. The Latin America fundraiser shows how it has struggled to find clear new footing and stick to it.
CORE didn’t direct any of its Art Basel haul to the region until almost six months later, according to internal documents viewed by Bloomberg Businessweek. During staff conference calls, Chief Executive Officer Ann Lee, who runs CORE’s day-to-day operations, repeatedly said the nonprofit could use the funds for other projects instead, according to three employees on the calls. (Like most of the 38 current and former employees Businessweek interviewed for this story, they spoke on condition of anonymity because they’ve signed confidentiality agreements, because they’re afraid of retaliation or both.) Current and former employees say they had to spend months pushing their bosses to send the money as promised before Chief Operating Officer Jérôme Lebleu sent an email outlining how it would be used in Brazil. In a September interview, Chief Business Officer Matt O’Connell said the money raised at Art Basel went to work on Covid response in Rio de Janeiro. But internal documents show that CORE shut down its last Rio vaccine sites the day before the fundraiser.
