News broke yesterday that TD Bank was suing Mary J. Blige and partner Steve Stoute’s charity organization The Mary J Blige and Steve Stoute Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now for a $250,000 loan that it had failed to pay back in full. Now, in a recent interview with Hot 97’s Angie Martinez, Blige explains FFAWN’s money issues.
According to her, the businessmen behind FFAWN had slipped up and failed to pay off the debt, which would have resulted in a number of the college scholarships the group offers to women to be pulled. Blige said that the issue has since been remedied and that the organization has replaced its entire business team and ensured that none of the scholarship funding had been pulled.
“It happens that FFAWN [The Mary J Blige and Steve Stoute Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now] has been mismanaged [financially],” she explained. “When I found out about all these issues and things concerning FFAWN, I immediately got on the phone with my lawyers and my advisors and tried to rectify this and fix this so none of those women [aided by the charity] would suffer that are going to college…my goal is to do exactly what I set out to do and my motives were true and upfront: I set out to empower, encourage and help women and because I got a second chance myself, I wanted to give them a second chance. But it turns out that the business part of it was not managed properly…the funding that needed to come in for everything, the business side [of the organization] dropped the ball and everyone was about to suffer.”
She added, “Right now as we speak, I’ve hired a team of people that are making sure that my business is taken as far as FFAWN is concerned. FFAWN is not shutting down, we are restructuring and we put a great team of people in place. I’m just proud to say that the grants, the scholarships that we set out to take care of will be taken care of.”
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Check out the full interview over at Xclusives Zone.
RELATED: Mary J. Blige Charity Sued For Unpaid $250,000 Loan
