Exposing Alex Miller

By now many of you have seen Alex’s “explanation” of what happened. Most of you probably immediately saw the problems and holes but we’re still going to go point by point and explain what’s wrong with it.

TLP was never a charity and I never claimed it was. I attempted to register TLP as a 501© organization in January, with the help of an LGBT center in southern California I worked alongside for a few weeks, but the process would have taken a lot of time (according to the lawyers they sent me to) that I didn’t think I had. No, you aren’t going to find TLP as a registered charity because it never became one and it was never intended to become one. The goal was to assist a few hundred trans people in need. It is simply a ‘cause.’

From the e-mail Alex sent us:

“Second, I noticed that you’re sharing the fact that we’re not a registered charity. You’re correct. If you noticed, that’s why we refer to ourselves as a non-profit cause rather than an organization or charity because legally we cannot refer to ourselves as such without filing the legal paperwork and registering as a 501©3 to do so: a process that takes months. We started the process in January but the lawyer fees were expensive so we couldn’t continue the process. We have never claimed to be an organization or charity.“

We’re jumping ahead but:

If there’s over $11000 left now after the immense amount of work they claimed to have already done then why did they not pay the $100 fee to become a 501©3?

They could have cut a night of drinking in half and made the project legit but instead chose to pretend that it cost some crazy amount of money that it did not and hope we wouldn’t eventually Google it.

I don’t know how PayPal was thrown into the mix, but monetary donations were made through the website Go Fund Me. Go Fund Me takes away 7.9% of donations as well as $0.30 per donation. In the end, there was approximately $16,000. There was also a PayPal donation button on TLP’s blog, but after PayPal’s 2.9% cut as well as $0.30 per donation, only approximately $200.00 was received. Now you have to understand how much everything cost. 

Paypal was thrown into the mix because they asked for donations on Paypal.

They removed the Paypal donation link because…there was a Paypal donation link!

Multiple people said they donated via Paypal in higher amounts than $200.

We originally used U.P.S. to ship packages for the first month but their services were too expensive. To send our first mass shipment of 9 packages cost over $120.00. We switched to U.S.P.S. in February and began using their flat rate boxes. To send a “small” box with make-up or binders as the only contents is $5.25. To include the mascara, eyeliner, eyeshadow, and lipstick we offered, that cost approximately $7.00. (That depends on whether they want liquid eyeliner vs pencil eyeliner or lip stick vs lip gloss, but the price only varies by $1.00 or $2.00.) To send only make-up totaled about $12.25. To include a binder cost $28.33. To send only a binder totaled $33.58. To send a “medium” box with clothes is $11.30. That’s assuming I already had the clothing they requested. If not, I would visit a store to purchase the items needed and leave them with a gift receipt. An example is provided below. That particular ensemble, including a blouse, skirt, and blazer, cost approximately $65.00. I had to do this often, specifically for trans men and once for a mother who requested clothes for her 7 year old, questioning child.

We have established that some things were shipped and received by some people. This part of the post and the screenshots below it don’t explain

• how many people actually got anything
• why there are no receipts of packages sent out between February and us calling you out

The project got $14518.93 plus (according to Alex) $200 in Paypal donations. Take $11175.16 out of $14718.93 and you get $3543.77. Even assuming they were all the $65 package they mention that’s only 55 packages. Not 120 like their last post before they deleted the project’s web presence said. It also doesn’t explain why there’s all that money left. We’ll get to that.

Clothes, wigs, bras, underwear, bra inserts, STPs, binders, make-up and more were purchased for recipients because we didn’t have either their size, their specific request (i.e., professional clothing), or any more in stock. I made my last purchase of binders from Underworks in bulk on April 13th. 30 binders in a variety of sizes and colors cost over $800.00.

Wigs were purchased from Amazon or my local beauty store for about $10.00-$20.00 each. Bras cost $11.99-$15.00 (depending on the size), bra inserts cost $5.99-$9.99 (depending on whether it’s foam or silicone), STPs cost $6.10, underwear cost $5.49, and so forth. 

Amazon shows there were dozens of these things donated through there and that’s only the stuff donated through the wish list. There was also all of this

…plus whatever came in from physical clothing drives and the drop box in their area. They’re trying to say they went through all of these donations plus more plus bought more stuff and still have over $11000 left but also had to shut the project down and couldn’t afford to send out more packages. Makes sense right?

We also thought it was funny that the only receipt they posted for a bulk purchase came from two weeks after they announced they were shutting the project down for lack of money which was the day after we said we would expose them if they didn’t show that the project wasn’t a scam.

Why are there no receipts from before we contacted them and started this blog?

I purchased a business mailbox from U.P.S. that people could send clothing donations to for $90.00 (not including the initial $15.00 set-up fee) for 3 months. It is why I closed clothing donations on April 30th. I opened the mailbox in February, clothing donations slowed down tremendously over the months, and I didn’t want to spend another $90 to keep the mailbox open for another 3 months only for the donations to continue slowing down. I also closed down the Go Fund Me page and removed the PayPal donation button from TLP’s blog on April 15th. I haven’t received monetary donations since.

They say here they closed donations on April 30 and that’s it but that’s not what they said the day after we contacted them. We’ll remind you and them right here:

For anyone who doesn’t see what’s wrong with this we’ll make it as clear as we can:

It’s also interesting that they said they were going to just donate the rest of the clothes and makeup when there was $11000 in the account. What was going to happen to the money after they donated the clothes and makeup?

My mother volunteered often. She assisted in driving me to stores for purchases, keeping records (including receipts), occasionally putting a package together, organization, and more. A prominent volunteer I had is my very good friend De’nae, who made a post addressing some of the situation and her role in the project. She stopped helping a few months ago due to personal matters she needed to attend to. There were two other volunteers but neither have blogs and I’m not releasing their names. (Some of you have sent messages to my family, friends, and even business associates regarding the project as well as other claims. I won’t subject them to potential harassment.) They also stopped volunteering due to personal matters they needed to attend to. I was essentially left by myself to continue working on the project, which I have been doing. I have continued to send packages to recipients. Admittedly, at a much slower pace than expected, but it is being done. The most recent shipment was made on June 4th. Afterwards, I was out of the state for most of the month, returning on July 3rd.

We aren’t worried about them sending off a few packages after we called them out so they could make a post like this. Where are the receipts from between when De’nae left and when we called them out?

I have been using my house as the ‘operating base’ for the project since it began. The living room, kitchen, hallway, and my room are littered with boxes to the point where you have to maneuver your way around them. 

That’s interesting considering they told us The Leelah Project had an office separate from their house that they wouldn’t return to until the next Monday and that’s where the receipts were.

We also wonder how they could afford to rent an office but not pay $100 to become a charity officially.

The storage bin peeking out from behind in the second picture is a 3 drawer Sterilite cart. I purchased 3 of those at Target for $49.99 each. Their purpose was to store clothes so I could clear my house of these boxes. De’nae and I separated clothes by size into these containers, hopefully making it easier to search for certain sizes for packages, and we filled those to the brim without even going through ¼th of the boxes I had in my home.

On July 6th, I resorted to renting a storage unit for these boxes that will cost $46.55 a month. I have already begun moving boxes into the unit, but there are still over 50 boxes in my house waiting to be moved.

When the project initially started, I gave a handful of people my home address and there was honestly so little that I was able to even keep inventory of the clothing received. I was able to keep track of what was received, what was sent and who it was sent to. It was nice. As soon as I opened that U.P.S. mailbox, there were dozens of donations coming in weekly and it overwhelmed me. I wasn’t able to continue taking inventory of items I received, but I did track inventory for items purchased. Below is last month’s inventory for women’s items that were purchased by me.

They have enough boxes of clothes that they need to get a storage unit but are still buying new ones? But are saying they can’t afford to send them out? Even though

A lot of this is not making sense.

We won’t be covering the part of the post about Alex’s cam work in any great detail. We think it’s silly that Alex thinks telling what their videos cost next to a screen shot of Paypal with no detailed info will make us forget that other people can still donate in those amounts or that there are more donations outside that screen but we don’t want to even imply that we judge negatively people that do that as a living.

We will ask why they were begging for money throughout December 2014-March 2015 for many different life events if they were making over $1000 a week doing this?

Skipping ahead:

Despite the rumors circulating that question or say otherwise, I do attend school and I am working on getting my degree. Because of my schedule, I am only able to dedicate a single day out of the week to this project. I had a few volunteers, with De’nae and my mother being the most prominent, but they had other matters to ultimately attend to. Some suggested I should have hired help. I did think about it and I could have, but I’m not an employer. I’m a 20 year old who was in over their head. 

They asked for over $42000 in donations and claimed what they got wasn’t enough.

We also noticed that many of the donations on the GoFundMe were monthly donations meaning that if we never called them out and they didn’t shut down the project the money would have kept coming.

They said they didn’t have enough money, now it’s too much money, then it was not enough stuff, now it’s too much stuff. Struggling to pay out of pocket (according to their friend/volunteer) for items and shipping even though they made over $1000 a week apparently on top of ad revenue and a regular job and art commissions and donations and oh yeah