“Golf Course at the Trump International Doral Miami.”

July 10, 2019; Talking Points Memo

The basketball-based charity Miami All Stars was to have benefitted from a two-day golf tournament this coming weekend until it discovered the event was to be hosted by a strip club and held at the Trump Doral Golf Course in Florida.

As our readers know, charities have been steering clear of Mar-a-Lago as a venue for their events. The Doral Golf Course has also seen its revenue decline—a 69 percent drop since 2015. According to one of the tax accountants for the Trump organization’s observer, it is seriously underperforming other courses in the area.

But Carlos Alamilla, the group’s director, wasn’t apparently as disturbed by the political association as he was by the fact that women who performed at the club would be caddying. As the club’s marketing director said, “If you enroll before the 10th [of July], you are able to pick out your caddy girl. Everybody that enrolled after the 10th, they’re going to have an auction” that night.

“Forget about it. We’re not going to participate,” Alamilla declared, admitting he had not realized the nature of the event until reporters from the Washington Post called him for a comment on their Tuesday article.Bottom of Form

“I didn’t know there was a strip tease club involved in this. You can’t mix kids with sex,” Alamilla told TPM. “It just doesn’t jibe.”

Alamilla admitted to having had a number of conversations with the organizer but, he said, “We never mentioned amounts, as far as the amount of money, any of that. We didn’t sign any agreement. There was no documentation involved.”

Alamilla said the organizer told him, “Look, once we finish everything, we’re going to give you a donation.” That would have been that, had the Post not gotten ahold of the story and revealed that packages being sold included attendance both at the club and on the links.

Alamilla says he stayed up ’til the wee hours reading the comments, which numbered more than 5,000. “I read them all,” he said. “I thought that maybe this would benefit us; it’s really taken the other extreme.”

Alamilla asked that the charity’s name be removed. The club has agreed, but it may be too little too late. The ads also featured logos from the NBA and WNBA without their permission, the charity isn’t registered with the state, and Alamilla himself admits he probably did not perform due diligence. Moreover, he’s no fan of Trump, thanks to his program of detaining immigrant children.

So, here is the moral of this story: If you do not want your name forever linked to something that outright violates the values of your work, you simply must vet those events and large gifts. Not doing so is very risky.—Ruth McCambridge