A federal grand jury in Montgomery has charged Heidi Beirich, the woman who ran the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate-group operation for most of two decades, in the Justice Department's criminal fraud case against the nonprofit. Beirich, 59, of Palm Springs, California, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to three conspiracy counts, which makes her the first individual defendant in a case that until this month named only the SPLC itself.
Trial is set for October 5 in Montgomery. Beirich denies everything and so does the SPLC. An indictment is an accusation and nothing more, and both defendants are presumed innocent unless a jury says otherwise.
What the second superseding indictment actually charges
The grand jury returned it on August 11 and it was unsealed the next day. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Alabama, it charges Beirich and the SPLC with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to submit false statements to a federally insured bank, adds Beirich to a money-laundering conspiracy count the SPLC already faced, and hands the SPLC one more count of concealment money laundering.
The case is United States v. Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc., No. 2:26-cr-00139-ECM-KFP. The docket now runs to fourteen counts, and Beirich is named in counts 1, 8 and 13, the three conspiracies. The SPLC is named in all fourteen and pleaded not guilty to every one on August 19. Beirich waived her personal appearance, and her lawyer Michael Proctor entered her plea by video on August 25.
Official record
The August 11 filing is docketed under seal (Doc. 115), so the operative public document is the superseding indictment returned June 2, 2026, in the same case. It runs 21 pages and does not name Beirich. It describes the same conduct through a placeholder, "Employee-2," identified in paragraph 15 as "the person who would become Director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project." Page 6 is where that description becomes the allegation now charged.
"Employee-2 oversaw payments of donors' money to the Fs, including F-9. Employee-2 was also in a romantic relationship with F-9. During this relationship, Employee-2 and F-9 shared a house and two bank accounts. Between 2015 and 2021, approximately $140,000.00 in donors' money flowed from the SPLC operating account, through the Tech Writers account, and was ultimately deposited into the joint bank accounts held by F-9 and Employee-2." — Superseding Indictment, Doc. 51, pp. 6–7
Read or download the full 21-page superseding indictment (PDF) · view the docket on CourtListener · case file at the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse
That same page puts the payments to F-9 at more than $1.2 million during the charged period and says the $140,000 came to roughly 66 percent of everything ever deposited into the couple's joint accounts. Fox News Digital, which obtained the 26-page August filing, and CBS News both report that it makes those allegations against Beirich by name.
Almost every outlet called her the SPLC's former CFO. She wasn't
CNN broke the arrest on August 12 in a story still filed at the URL exclusive-splc-fraud-cfo-charges. Same woman, same indictment, same docket, same morning, so yes, that story and this one are one case. What differs is the job title, and the error is instructive.
At the August 12 news conference, Attorney General Todd Blanche called Beirich the SPLC's "former CFO." CBS News reported that he was mistaken, and that the actual former chief financial officer, the original target of an FBI inquiry opened in 2018 under Jeff Sessions, has never been charged with anything. Beirich started at the SPLC as a writer in 1999, rose to run the Intelligence Project, and left in December 2019. Paragraph 15 of the June filing draws that line itself, listing "a person who would become the SPLC's Chief Financial Officer ('Employee-1')" and "the person who would become Director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project ('Employee-2')" as two different people.
The wrong title went everywhere anyway. ABC News ran "DOJ charges former Southern Poverty Law Center CFO with fraud." The Washington Examiner headlined "former SPLC chief financial officer" over a story whose second paragraph correctly calls her director of the Intelligence Project. The Daily Signal did it, and so did the States United Democracy Center, which is filing on the SPLC's side of this case. The Hill and CBS News got it right. The job title is printed on the docket.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, in the federal district where the case was indicted. File photo, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
What prosecutors say the donor money paid for
The introduction to the June filing states the theory in one breath: the SPLC's stated mission "included the dismantling of white supremacy," but "unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance." Prosecutors allege the SPLC paid a numbered network of "field sources" through accounts opened for nine entities that were "never incorporated, had no bona fide employees, and conducted no legitimate business," two of them named Center Investigative Agency and Rare Books Warehouse.
The alleged uses are itemized on page 4: attending and hosting rallies, growing chapters, recruiting members, buying materials for cross burnings and for Klan robes, and covering living expenses so sources could "focus on their extremist groups rather than seeking other employment." Prosecutors allege F-18 was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, the group the SPLC's own Hatewatch blog tied in 2013 to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. They allege two Klan members who asked the SPLC in 2010 for help getting out of the movement were instead offered $1,200 a month to stay in it.
SPLC total revenue and year-end net assets, fiscal 2011 through fiscal 2023, from the organization's own IRS Form 990 filings. Chart built by PatriotAddict from SPLC Form 990 data via ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer.
The hate map was the fundraising engine, and the tax returns show it
Paragraph 14 does its own arithmetic off the SPLC's Form 990s, reporting revenue growth of roughly 233 percent and net asset growth of roughly 230 percent across the charged period. The filed returns, available through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, show the shape: total revenue of $38.7 million in fiscal 2011 against $169.9 million in fiscal 2023, and net assets of $238 million against $711 million. Revenue more than doubled in fiscal 2017, the year of the Charlottesville rally.
Prosecutors allege one paid source, F-37, sat in the online leadership chat group that helped plan that rally, attended at the direction of an SPLC employee, and helped arrange transportation for others. They allege the SPLC then covered the rally heavily and raised money off it without telling donors it had been paying a participant. If a jury accepts that, it is the whole case in miniature.
The defense says retaliation, and a Trump-appointed judge already heard it
Proctor told CBS News his client is innocent and "this case is without merit," adding that the charges "are politically motivated, and Dr. Beirich has been targeted in this case because of the important work she has done to combat hate groups and extremists." Abbe Lowell, defending the SPLC, said the new charge "reflects a desperate government confronting a weak case, scrambling to make something, anything, stick as we approach trial." The SPLC told Fox News Digital that "the actions taken by the DOJ will not shake our resolve."
The SPLC put that argument to the court and lost. On August 7, U.S. District Judge Emily C. Marks, appointed by President Trump, denied its motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution in a 36-page opinion, finding the SPLC "failed to offer some evidence tending to show animus on the part of the prosecutors involved in bringing this case." Her read on both sides deserves quoting: "The parties' briefing is, like much of our modern political discourse, heavy on heated rhetoric, better suited for cable news, or a podcast. It emphasizes noise over substance."
That ruling settles nothing about the facts. Former federal prosecutors told CBS News in April that the indictment does not clearly establish that donors were actually misled or that the banks were deceived into acting. Paying confidential sources is not itself a crime, and the FBI does it, as USA Today noted in April. These charges are about concealment, not the informant program as such.
Why this one lands so hard on the right
For a lot of readers the SPLC stopped being a civil rights group a long time ago. It became the outfit whose hate map put churches and family-policy groups on the same list as the Klan, and whose designations then got picked up by banks and tech platforms. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins made that case in The Christian Post on August 22, recalling that FBI investigators confirmed the gunman who shot FRC building manager Leo Johnson in 2012 picked the target off the SPLC's website. Perkins wants the investigation to run past the SPLC to the institutions that acted on its labels.
Here is the part that has to be said plainly. Beirich has been charged, not convicted, and the presumption of innocence belongs to her exactly as much as it belonged to anyone the SPLC ever labeled. The standard that makes a hate map objectionable, a private list treated as a finding of guilt, is the same standard protecting her now. PatriotAddict made that point on Sunday about the administration's $5 billion threat against the Center for American Progress.
Jury selection begins October 5 before Judge Marks, and motions in limine are due September 14. If the government proves what it has written down, a fundraising operation built on naming hate groups was quietly writing checks to the men who ran them. If it cannot, it will have put a 501(c)(3) and one of its former directors through a federal trial on a theory two sets of former prosecutors called thin from the start. Either answer matters more than the press conference did.
Hero image: the Frank M. Johnson Jr. Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama, the courthouse of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. Photo by DXR, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
