(NY Times) – To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Petra Nemcova, a Czech model who survived the disaster by clinging to a palm tree, decided to pull out all the stops for the annual fund-raiser of her school-building charity, the Happy Hearts Fund.
She booked Cipriani 42nd Street, which greeted guests with Bellini cocktails on silver trays. She flew in Sheryl Crow with her band and crew for a 20-minute set. She special-ordered heart-shaped floral centerpieces, heart-shaped chocolate parfaits, heart-shaped tiramisù and, because orange is the charity’s color, an orange carpet rather than a red one. She imported a Swiss auctioneer and handed out orange rulers to serve as auction paddles, playfully threatening to use hers to spank the highest bidder for an Ibiza vacation.
The gala cost $363,413. But the real splurge? Bill Clinton.
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The former president of the United States agreed to accept a lifetime achievement award at the June 2014 event after Ms. Nemcova offered a $500,000 contribution to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The donation, made late last year after the foundation sent the charity an invoice, amounted to almost a quarter of the evening’s net proceeds — enough to build 10 preschools in Indonesia.
Happy Hearts’ former executive director believes the transaction was a “quid pro quo,” which rerouted donations intended for a small charity with the concrete mission of rebuilding schools after natural disasters to a large foundation with a broader agenda and a budget 100 times bigger.
“The Clinton Foundation had rejected the Happy Hearts Fund invitation more than once, until there was a thinly veiled solicitation and then the offer of an honorarium,” said the former executive director, Sue Veres Royal, who held that position at the time of the gala and was dismissed a few weeks later amid conflicts over the gala and other issues.
Press officers for Ms. Nemcova and for the Clinton Foundation said on Thursday that the foundation had not solicited the donation and that the money would be used for projects in Haiti, as yet undetermined.
The Happy Hearts Fund and the Clinton Foundation “have a shared goal of providing meaningful help to Haiti,” the school charity’s spokeswoman said. “We believe that we can create the most impactful change by working together.”
Never publicly disclosed, the episode provides a window into the way the Clinton Foundation relies on the Clintons’ prestige to amass donors large and small, offering the prospect, as described in the foundation’s annual report, of lucrative global connections and participation in a worldwide mission to “unlock human potential” through “the power of creative collaboration.”
Similarly, Ms. Nemcova, like other celebrity philanthropists, uses her fame to promote her charity — which has financed more than 110 schools, mostly kindergartens — just as she uses Happy Hearts to position herself as a model-humanitarian.
“This is primarily a small but telling example of the way the Clintons operate,” said Doug White, who directs the master’s program in fund-raising management at Columbia University. “The model has responsibility; she paid a high price for a feel-good moment with Bill Clinton. But he was riding the back of this small charity for what? A half-million bucks? I find it — what would be the word? — distasteful.”
In her letter of invitation to Mr. Clinton, Ms. Nemcova, then chairwoman of her charity’s board, said she wanted to show her appreciation for his “inspirational leadership” after disasters.
“My gratitude to you is so strong that should you accept, we will schedule our event commemorating the 10th anniversary around your schedule,” she wrote, speaking of their shared dedication to the survivors of both the tsunami and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
When the tsunami struck in December 2004, Ms. Nemcova, who had been featured on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue the previous year, was vacationing in Thailand with her boyfriend, a fashion photographer named Simon Atlee. They were swept from their beach cottage and separated in the turbulent waters; Mr. Atlee died.
Ms. Nemcova, her pelvis shattered, held fast to a tree for hours until she was rescued, listening impotently to the cries of children, she has said, which later motivated her to found her child-centric charity.
Happy Hearts rebuilt two schools in Thailand while Mr. Clinton was the United Nations’ envoy for tsunami relief and reconstruction. Most of the charity’s rebuilding has been in Indonesia after the earthquakes of 2006 and 2009.
After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Ms. Nemcova turned her attention to that small island nation, where both Mr. Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, as secretary of state, played outsize roles in the earthquake relief effort and the more problem-filled reconstruction. The country had attracted other celebrity benefactors, too, notably the actor Sean Penn, an ex-boyfriend of Ms. Nemcova’s who had created his own relief organization and forged a relationship with Mr. Clinton.
In the fall of 2011, many players in Haiti’s rebuilding effort, including Ms. Nemcova, attended the Clinton Global Initiative’s membership meeting in Manhattan. Members, who must be invited, pay $20,000 in annual dues, largely for the yearly gatherings, where charity founders and entrepreneurs get to network with world leaders, corporate executives and wealthy donors.
At the meeting, Ms. Nemcova signed a memorandum of understanding with the president of the Inter-American Development Bank to finance schools in Haiti. The development bank has also donated to the Clinton Foundation — just over $1 million — and it partnered with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department after the earthquake to create an industrial park in northern Haiti.
Almost four years after Happy Hearts and the development bank made their commitment, they have yet to complete a single school, partly because of problems finding suitable land. Five schools are under construction.
Happy Hearts collaborated more expeditiously in Haiti with the Digicel Foundation, whose founder, the Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien, is a multimillion-dollar supporter of the Clinton Foundation and whose parent telecommunications company benefited from grants from Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.
Digicel also made a commitment at the 2011 meeting to build schools; the commitment was a formality, though, as Digicel had already taken the lead in Haiti in that realm. It has built 150 schools there over the last seven years; Happy Heart has built seven, six of them joint or side-by-side ventures with Digicel.
One of those schools, operated by the Haitian group Prodev, was featured in the Clinton Foundation’s most recent annual report as “built through a Clinton Global Initiative Commitment to Action.” The Clinton Foundation’s sole direct contribution to the school was a grant for an Earth Day celebration and tree-planting activity.
In late 2011, Ms. Nemcova dedicated her charity’s annual fund-raiser to Haiti, awarding the lifetime achievement honor to Mr. Penn, whom the Haitian government had named an ambassador at large, and giving a speaking platform to Laurent Lamothe, Haiti’s foreign minister.
The next year, Ms. Nemcova, too, became an ambassador at large for Haiti. And by 2013, she was practically living there, having become romantically involved with Mr. Lamothe, by then prime minister. (Mr. Lamothe, no longer prime minister, is now a presidential candidate in Haiti, and the couple have split up.)
Through the years, Ms. Nemcova, 35, has blended her personal and philanthropic lives; her sister replaced Ms. Veres Royal as executive director of Happy Hearts. She has also mingled her celebrity and charity work, both in ways that benefited the charity and in ways that benefited her personally.
In 2011, when she appeared as a contestant on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars,” her survival story and charity received ample, positive attention. She brought on Clinique and Chopard as sponsors of the charity, but also accepted personal fees to model their products.
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“Ms. Nemcova has a long career as a model in fashion industry for 16 years and has longstanding relationships with many brands,” her charity’s spokeswoman said. “Happy Hearts Fund is grateful for Chopard’s and Clinique’s support.”
At the 2014 gala, Chopard, a Swiss jeweler that was dedicating partial proceeds from a heart-shaped bracelet to the charity, set up lighted showcases in the cocktail area, Ms. Veres Royal said.
“They were peddling exorbitant jewelry at a gala that was supposed to focus on children who have lost their belongings, homes, and often friends and family members,” she said. “It was inappropriate and tacky. Too many people at that event were looking after their own interests first.”
Happy Hearts Fund first asked Mr. Clinton to be its honoree in 2011. Trying again in 2013, Ms. Nemcova sent her first formal letter of invitation in July, asking Mr. Clinton to be the primary award recipient at a Happy Hearts gala on Nov. 4, 2013, celebrating Indonesia.
Mr. Clinton’s scheduler replied with a cordial rejection — “Regrettably, he is committed to another event out of town that same evening” — in an email copied to Frank Giustra, the Canadian mining financier who is one of the Clinton Foundation’s largest donors and also a supporter of Ms. Nemcova.
Ms. Nemcova subsequently met with officers at the Clinton Foundation, Ms. Veres Royal said. Afterward, she said, “Petra called me and said we have to include an honorarium for him — that they don’t look at these things unless money is offered, and it has to be $500,000.”
The invitation letter was revised and sent again at the end of August. It moved the gala to 2014, offered to work around Mr. Clinton’s availability, dropped the focus on Indonesia and shifted it to Haiti, and proposed the donation.
“Understanding the need and commitment to ‘rebuilding better,’ Happy Hearts Fund would like to also share the proceeds of the event with the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, committing at least $500,000 in partnership on a joint educational project in Haiti, of your selection,” Ms. Nemcova wrote, ending with her customary signoff, “Lots of Love, Light and Laughter.”
When charities select an honoree for their fund-raising events, they generally expect that the award recipient will help them raise money by attracting new donors. But the Happy Hearts Fund raised less money at the gala featuring Mr. Clinton than it did at its previous one.
Further, it is extremely rare for honorees, or their foundations, to be paid from a gala’s proceeds, charity experts said — as it is for the proceeds to be diverted to a different cause.
And while the original invitation letter spoke of a joint educational project, the Clinton Foundation said Thursday that Happy Hearts had agreed that the money could be “split 50/50” between the foundation’s education programs and its economic development and agriculture programs in Haiti.
In the charity gala world, it is considered unacceptable to spend more than a third of gross proceeds on costs, and better to spend considerably less. If the donation to the Clinton Foundation were counted as a cost, Happy Hearts would have spent 34 percent of its announced $2.5 million in proceeds on its gala.
Its actual expenses — while they might seem extravagant to outsiders, with the total cost of the Cipriani facility alone at almost $300 a head — were in line with what other charities spend on such events.
In the end, the Happy Hearts Fund’s gala was a star-studded event, with celebrities including Naomi Watts and John Legend and the models Karlie Kloss and Coco Rocha in attendance. The Haitian president, Michel Martelly, a former musician who was Ms. Nemcova’s boyfriend’s boss at the time, was a second honoree, and he performed a couple of numbers with Wyclef Jean.
At the start of the evening, school bells rang and, as the master program dictated, “Petra dressed as schoolteacher” appeared, wearing glasses.
“Good evening, class,” said the message on the screen behind her. She later changed into a sheer red lace gown donated by the designer Naeem Khan, with diamond and ruby jewelry by Chopard.
A video by the Happy Hearts Fund framed the moment she presented the award to Mr. Clinton like this: “Ten years ago, two people were deeply impacted by the 2004 tsunami. They met this year again to inspire …”
“Petra did not have to devote 10 years of her life to building these schools,” Mr. Clinton told the crowd. “But what she has done is a symbol of what I think we all have to do.”
Outside Cipriani, about 100 protesters, mostly Haitian-Americans expressing frustration with the earthquake reconstruction effort, stood behind barricades holding protest signs.
“Clinton, where is the money?” they chanted. “In whose pockets?”
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