For more than two decades, the name Medea Benjamin has been inseparable from the image of a woman with a bullhorn, standing at the front of anti-war protests, interrupting congressional hearings, and demanding that American power be questioned. She is the co-founder of CodePink, a group that has become one of the most recognizable protest organizations in the country, and she has been a fixture in progressive activism since the days of the Vietnam War. But behind that public persona lies a quieter, more complicated story of money, family, and the machinery of political influence. A Fox News Digital investigation has peeled back the curtain on that machinery, revealing that Benjamin’s own family foundation, a private charity called Arc of Justice, poured nearly $3.2 million into CodePink itself, and spread more than $24 million across a vast network of left-wing activist organizations over the course of 20 years. The foundation, once known as The Benjamin Fund, is worth over $54 million, and its grantmaking has touched nearly every corner of the American progressive movement, from legal advocacy and grassroots organizing to anti-war campaigns and progressive media. Now, with the foundation facing regulatory trouble in California, a quiet leadership shake-up, and a stated plan to change course, the full scope of its money and influence is finally coming into focus.
The centerpiece of the investigation is the financial relationship between Arc of Justice and CodePink, a group Benjamin co-founded with Jodie Evans, the wife of Shanghai-based tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham. According to the foundation’s complete IRS filing history, Arc of Justice began funding CodePink in 2009 and issued grants to the organization across 15 tax years through 2024, totaling $3,195,280. That sum is more than twice the roughly $1.33 million CodePink received from Singham’s own network, which a previous Fox News investigation linked to at least $278 million in funding for organizations promoting pro-China messaging. But CodePink was only the largest activist beneficiary. The foundation also directed about $2.05 million to Global Exchange, an anti-war and social justice advocacy group Benjamin co-founded with her former husband, Kevin Danaher, which has long campaigned against U.S. military intervention and economic sanctions. Another $2.24 million went to Grassroots International, which funds social movements around the world; $1.61 million went to Social Good Fund, a nonprofit that provides fundraising and infrastructure support for charitable projects; and $1.29 million went to the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group. The foundation also gave about $114,000 to Alliance for Global Justice, an activist nonprofit that has faced scrutiny for its past fiscal sponsorship of Samidoun, a pro-Palestinian group later sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury. Benjamin has said the foundation was not aware of any specific groups sponsored by AFGJ when it made those grants, and the foundation’s attorney stressed that both CodePink and AFGJ were recognized by the IRS as tax-exempt public charities.
Beyond the biggest checks, the foundation’s grantmaking wove through a much broader ecosystem of progressive organizations. IRS filings show that since 2009, Arc of Justice and its predecessor gave roughly $492,000 to World Beyond War, an anti-war group; about $255,000 to the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning think tank; around $124,000 to Jewish Voice for Peace, a group critical of Israel; and $110,000 to Grassroots Global Justice, an alliance of grassroots organizations. It also gave $90,000 to the Center for Popular Democracy, which advocates for progressive policies like universal health care and workers’ rights, and about $65,500 to Democracy Now!, an independent news program where Benjamin has appeared as a guest many times over the years. The grants were small in the grand scheme of the foundation’s $54.6 million in assets, but experts say such funding can have an outsized impact on the political landscape. Matthew Johnson, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, pointed out that even modest amounts of money can shape the media ecosystem and the information available to Americans, amplifying messages that might otherwise struggle to find a platform. CodePink, for its part, has used its funding to become one of the most visible protest groups in the country, disrupting hearings, confronting top officials, leading delegations to Cuba and China, and launching campaigns against U.S. policy toward Iran, Israel, and immigration enforcement. In 2020, the group launched its “China Is Not Our Enemy” campaign, which argued that the United States should cooperate with Beijing rather than confront it. Benjamin has denied taking direction from any foreign government, telling Fox News Digital that the foundation’s donations were meant to support CodePink’s anti-war work, and saying at a recent House hearing, “I’ve been an anti-war activist from the days of Vietnam. I never had a foreign government tell me what to do.”
The foundation’s money did not come from mysterious sources; it came from family wealth rooted in real estate and inheritance. Arc of Justice was originally called The Benjamin Fund, and its earliest IRS filings show that Benjamin’s father, Alvin Benjamin, a prominent Long Island real estate developer who founded The Benjamin Companies in the early 1960s, contributed a partnership interest valued at $683,715 to the foundation when it was established in 2003. Medea Benjamin, listed as president, presided over a foundation that would grow dramatically over the years. In 2010, the estate of her mother, Rose Benjamin, contributed more than $10.8 million. Five years later, the estate of Alvin Benjamin contributed another $15 million, followed by $8.6 million more in 2019. Even Medea Benjamin herself personally contributed $1 million to Arc of Justice in 2022, listing a Miami address. The foundation’s wealth was not simply spent down; it was invested, and those investments generated significant gains. Federal tax returns show the foundation’s assets grew from $39.63 million at the end of 2020 to $54.64 million by 2024, even as it distributed millions of dollars in grants every year. In 2023 alone, the foundation reported nearly $2 million in revenue, including more than $1.1 million in dividends and interest from securities, $166,421 in interest on savings and temporary cash investments, and $686,919 in net gains from asset sales. In 2020, it reported more than $12.3 million in unrealized gains on securities, pushing its year-end assets to nearly $40 million. Throughout its history, the foundation reported no compensation for its officers and no highly paid employees, meaning the money was directed almost entirely to outside organizations rather than to its own staff.
For all its wealth and influence, Arc of Justice has recently stumbled over its own paperwork. The state of California revoked the foundation’s charitable registration after years of financial compliance failures, and the foundation has been working to regain its standing. In a strange twist, Fox News Digital reported that a new Florida nonprofit using the Arc of Justice name was incorporated at the Miami home of Benjamin’s longtime partner, Tighe Barry, raising questions about whether the foundation was trying to move its assets or operations out of California. The address was a modest turquoise home, largely obscured by trees, an unassuming setting for an organization tied to a foundation with more than $50 million in assets. Barry and Benjamin have appeared together at CodePink demonstrations for years. The foundation’s attorney, David Levitt, later explained that the Florida corporation was created as a “placeholder” while the foundation considered relocating, but the move was never completed. No assets were transferred, he said, and the Florida entity “holds no assets and has conducted no business.” The foundation has since filed five years of overdue reports covering 2020 through 2024 and paid $1,800 in filing fees and penalties as part of a petition for reinstatement. In that petition, Levitt attributed the missed filings to an administrative misunderstanding, writing that during the tenure of the foundation’s “former president,” leaders believed Arc was no longer subject to California’s registration requirements because it had moved to Florida. The foundation later appointed a “new president” who discovered the compliance problems and worked to fix them. That new president is Maya Danaher, Benjamin’s daughter, who had previously served as treasurer. Benjamin herself has resigned from the board, saying, “As previously reported, I have resigned from the foundation’s board, and its new management will set its own funding priorities going forward.”
What that new direction will look like remains unclear, but the foundation’s attorney has said its new leadership intends to shift grantmaking away from the causes it historically supported. “Going forward, the foundation’s new management intends to focus its grant-making on domestic childhood enrichment programs and organizations that support the well-being of children, families and individuals in need throughout the US,” Levitt said. That would mark a dramatic break from a two-decade pattern of funding anti-war activism, progressive legal advocacy, and international social movements. Whether this change is an organic evolution, a response to regulatory pressure, or an attempt to move past controversy is unknown. No one has been charged with wrongdoing, and Benjamin, Singham, and the organizations involved have denied taking direction from foreign governments. Yet the investigation raises broader questions about how private foundations can quietly shape public discourse and political organizing for decades, often with little public attention. The story of Arc of Justice is not just a story about one family or one protest group; it is a story about the enduring power of money in American civic life, the blurred lines between charity and activism, and the quiet decisions made in foundation boardrooms that can help amplify certain voices over others. For Medea Benjamin, the days of standing in front of cameras with a bullhorn may not be over, but the foundation that helped support her cause is already charting a different path, one that future historians will watch with as much curiosity as the protests themselves.
