A July 2009 bank statement for Hidden Lake Academy shows a wire from Crow Holdings LLC. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. “You can’t be having secret financial arrangements,” said Mark W. The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. “Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.įact-based, independent journalism is needed now more than ever.

Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica. The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow. Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “ raising him as a son.”

For the previous decade, he had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia.

Update, May 4, 2023: This story has been updated to reflect that Mark Paoletta, a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas who has also served as Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, acknowledged Harlan Crow’s tuition payments.

I Took It Personally by Josmamie Thomas