Misuse of funds and the end of a career at Campus Pride

An anonymously dropped envelope was found on the front counter of White Rabbit Books on Friday, December 15. 

The office of Qnotes shares the same single story building with the White Rabbit retail store at the corner of Central Avenue and Louise Avenue, just on the edge of the Plaza-Midwood neighborhood. At some point the store’s clerk on duty had stepped away briefly, leaving no one to address who the courier might have been or provide any description. 

Inside the manila mailer: a collection of documents that included email exchanges, excel spreadsheets of financial activity and two legal documents.

Copies of emails contained names of board members for Campus Pride, attorney Lee Robertson and Campus Pride CEO and one of the original founders, Shane Windmeyer, also known in Charlotte and throughout the southeast as drag performer Buff Faye. 

According to the text in the copied emails, Windmeyer readily admitted he had made a number of bookkeeping errors in 2023 and was requesting help from his current board of directors, most all recently appointed, to rectify the situation.

“I became aware of mistakes I made in the 2023 expenditures a couple of weeks ago,” Windmeyer wrote in an email dated November 17. “November 3/4 roughly. This first started with CashApp transactions in August that continued until the end of October. I then identified further mistakes I made in error with Zelle and PayPal that I had rendered. I would like to ask to meet with the BOD to discuss the following that I outlined below further so you can consider the best actions.”

In the outline that followed, Windmeyer explained his discovery of the errors and his inability to maintain a committed system of accounting and bookkeeping, as well as staff to handle such actions he felt he was ill-equipped to keep in order. His lack of skills with finance and use of the aforementioned cash transfer apps, he maintained, along with health issues he was facing, all contributed to his improper use of and documentation of funding.

According to included out-of-court settlement documents prepared by Robertson and agreed upon by Campus Pride board of directors and Windmeyer, the terminated CEO of Campus Pride agreed to repay a sum of $100,000 to the organization for his misuse of Campus Pride funds.

That’s a generalized outline of what the documents contain and how they came to be in our hands.

Campus Pride Board President Candis Cox agreed to speak with Qnotes, although the responses she offered were limited by the constraints of the previously prepared agreement. When asked if Windmeyer had been terminated and if the documents left at Qnotes were, in fact, authentic, her reply was simple and direct: “Yes,” Cox said.

A particularly unsettling point made in the documentation refers to the settlement amount in question, which asserts that $100,000 is adequate compensation, given that investigation into the possibility of additional misuse of funds could be “too costly.” 

In a document titled Employment Termination Agreement, section 4. Admissions of Liability, part a. Misappropriation of Campus Pride’s Resources, Windmeyer signed off on and agreed to the following statement: 

Windmeyer admits that, in 2023 during the course of his employment with Campus Pride, he misappropriated Campus Pride’s financial resources. Windmeyer admits that he did so through a variety of methods, including by using Campus Pride’s credit cards and cash to pay for numerous unauthorized personal expenses, including but not limited to, personal travel, drag pageants and other personal expenses. Windmeyer acknowledges and admits that during his employment with campus Pride he misappropriated substantially more than $100,000, but that calculating the actual amount misappropriated by Windmeyer would be timely and expensive. As a result, Campus Pride and Windmeyer agree that Windmeyer shall be liable for misappropriation of $100,000. Windmeyer acknowledges that such a misappropriation is a violation of his duties and obligations to Campus Pride.

Consider the following from the Campus Pride website:

“Founded in the Fall of 2001 and launched a year later in October of 2002, Campus Pride started as an online community and resource clearinghouse under the name Campus PrideNet. The original partners were M. Chad Wilson, Sarah E. Holmes & Shane L. Windmeyer. In 2006, Windmeyer expanded the organization’s outreach efforts and became the 501c3 educational non-profit organization known as Campus Pride.”

According to the organization’s website, Windmeyer has been involved with Campus Pride for over 20 years, taking the lead to turn the organization into a non-profit five years after it was established.

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Obviously, questions remain that are significant. Given Windmeyer’s long-term involvement with the organization, admission of inability to properly expend finances and lack of organizational accountability and documentation, why was the amount of $100,000 settled upon as being adequate? With no research into previous years’ activities, essentially dating back to the beginning of the 21st century, and especially when taking into consideration Windmeyer’s own admission in a settlement document of liability in which he “acknowledges and admits that during his employment with Campus Pride he misappropriated substantially more than $100,000” why was this not handed over to state and/or federal authorities?

Cox’s response: “I cannot comment on that.”

What will be done with the $100,000 once it is paid in total? Without Shane Windmeyer and only a fragmentary revolving door board of directors and a small staff, what will become of the organization and the staff that remains?

Cox confirmed that the two remaining employees would be paid. As for the future of Campus Pride, she offered, “It will continue. The organization is assessing its needs and how to move forward.” 

Embezzlement and corruption in financial corporations and nonprofits is far from uncommon and has reportedly been swept under the carpet on multiple occasions for non-profits in the LGBTQ+ community. This particular incident, however, is the first such case in the LGBTQ+ community that an individual, or individuals, apparently deemed the amount of fraud so egregious they made the decision to leak the information to the press.

When Cox was asked why criminal charges were not being filed against Windmeyer and whether or not he had paid any portion of the $100,000, she offered tersely: “I am not able to comment on any internal employment matters. As of today, all of the requirements of the contract have been met.”

Several attempts were made to contact Windmeyer for comment through multiple phone numbers, but all calls went unanswered.

Since this story originally broke, it has been the subject of intense debate in the community and through multiple social media platforms. Under the advice of the organization’s attorney Lee Robertson, Campus Pride Chair Candis Cox and Co-Chair and Treasurer Christopher Bylone requested an additional interview to share further details regarding the process the board went through to reach the decision they felt was best for the survival of the organization.

Cox and Bylone are relative newcomers to Charlotte and were officially elected to the Campus Pride Board just this past fall.

“None of the board has been [in place] for over a year,” Cox explained. “The board is made up of six people. Four of the six joined in September and October, so this is basically an entire body of people … learning this information at the same time. There was no one on the board there long enough to have even known anything. There was no transfer of knowledge or powers. As chair I had access to nothing. Christopher had access to nothing.”

“It is my understanding that sometime around the beginning of January of 2023 … the previous board basically vacated and there were no officers,” Bylone offered. “The chair had left, the vice chair and treasurer had all vacated the board. So when I came on and when Candis came on, the transfer of knowledge we were getting came from Shane. We were relying on Shane to give us factual information.

“When I was given the treasurer of Campus Pride email account, it was empty. There was no organizational history there. I had no access to files. I had to request information. [No] previous emails, nothing was in the email account.

“Being a new treasurer, I was trying to get up to speed to find out what the finances were of the organization. I did not initially have suspicions about the blatant misuse of funds,” Bylone explained. “I had questions about spending the money in the correct way, so I was asking questions about ‘should we be spending money on this, or should we be spending money on that.’ It wasn’t initially questions about misuse of funds.

“So I had two meetings with Shane, between the October board meeting and the November board meeting, to deep dive into the finances. One of the things I had asked for was access to the bank accounts and to our QuickBooks. There was an initial hesitation from Shane about giving me access to those things. But I persisted, as treasurer, in saying that I needed access to those.

“Through those two meetings we came to an agreement on how we were going to be presenting the 2024 budget to the board. We were going to give the board a preview on the November 14 board meeting, so they had time to see the 2024 budget, digest it, ask questions [and] so that we could approve the budget at the December meeting going into the new year.

“In that meeting I presented the budget the way Shane presented it to me … the board started asking why we were spending money on office space [and] why was the expenditure shown on internet services so high. Shane got really agitated in that meeting, which kind of caused me to raise my eyebrows and think, ‘why is he throwing me under the bus?’

“By that time I also had access to the bank account. So I started looking at everything in the bank account, and I came across a transaction that was for a payment that was made at RAIN Gay Bingo. I was there. Not as a representative of Campus Pride, but with my employer. Buff Faye was there as Buff Faye. Buff Faye also sponsored one of the games, however there was a charge to the Campus Pride bank account at Gay Bingo, where Campus Pride had no involvement. At all. That raised my suspicions and it made me wonder why is there a $250 charge at gay bingo, when Campus Pride as an organization had nothing to do with Gay Bingo, so I started conducting my own audit for the finances of 2023 and started finding things that were concerning, and kept being concerning.

Following the November board meeting, Bylone called Cox and voiced concerns about Windmeyer’s behavior and what he had discovered in the bank account records.

“We need to talk,” Bylone said to Cox. “I am concerned. I don’t know what I’m looking at, but I am concerned. We started to dive in deeper into the finances and kept saying this doesn’t look right and this doesn’t look right. We then decided we had a problem on our hands. So I said ‘we need to put a firewall around this,’ because it could get really bad really fast.”

At that point, Cox and Bylone made the decision to reach out to Robertson, who has served as an attorney for multiple non-profits. After extensive conversation, an emergency meeting of the board was called and Bylone requested complete access to all financial records. Windmeyer was compliant and supplied what information he said he could, although no records were reportedly accessible prior to January of 2022 because Windmeyer had moved his account from one bank to another. A review of Windmeyer’s submissions from just 2023, confirmed that he had misused the aforementioned $100,000.

Robertson advised the Campus Pride board that a forensics audit would be the best option to use moving forward to get an idea of what was going on, but an initial retainer fee was $20,000 and Campus Pride’s bank account had only $2,000.

“We had no idea how much money was going to come in from Giving Tuesday, or where any other financials were going to come from,” said Bylone. “So after that time we decided, on the advice of our attorney that we [could] not move forward with the forensic audit because we didn’t know how much it would ultimately cost us.

“Hindsight is 20/20, but we [used] the facts we had at the time to make an educated decision of what we were going to do so that Campus Pride as an organization could potentially move forward.”

On the advice of Robertson, the board came to the decision to terminate Windmeyer and was advised to try and reach a settlement over the $100,000.

“[Robertson] basically said cut your losses and try to figure out what you are going to do with the organization going forward,” Bylone recalled.

Cox and Bylone worked through the Thanksgiving weekend to draft a separation agreement that included repayment of the $100,000.

“We didn’t even know if he [Windmeyer] was capable of repaying that,” Cox recalled.

“But we decided that, not knowing if he had $100,000, we would terminate his employment and that he would have to pay back $100,000, and we would come to an agreement on what that repayment plan would be,” Bylone continued. “As long as he repaid it, there wouldn’t be any other actions because at the time, we didn’t know what else to do. We just knew that he could no longer be leader of Campus Pride.”

To date, Cox has confirmed, Windmeyer has made one payment of $50,000, by check.

Still, the question remains, why were state or federal authorities not contacted for such a sizable amount, especially considering the many years Windmeyer had been with Campus Pride and his admission of misuse of a much larger total of funds during that time?

“We’re not lawyers,” Bylone said. “We asked them if we should contact the police, but we were told that admission of guilt is not substantiated evidence. Lee [Robertson] was advising us on what we needed to do to protect Campus Pride as an organization, because at the end of the day our responsibility – as the board – is to Campus Pride. His advisement was to stop the hemorrhaging of the money and [because] Shane had admitted he was not capable of carrying out the duties of executive director and has misused funds, terminate him.

“The way the promissory note was written,” Bylone contended, “was that as long as he paid the $100,000, we wouldn’t do anything else to him because he was at least making restitution to the organization.”

“We would not seek any further damages from him,” Cox concluded. “We can’t speak for what the government can and can’t do.”

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