Why Is New York’s AG Targeting a Castle in West Virginia?

Brimelow claims those long-running battles over protected speech are the reason he has been targeted by New York Attorney General Letitia James for alleged financial improprieties connected to a West Virginia real estate deal – an effort that has so far cost more than $1 million in legal fees and forced him to pull the plug on VDARE last year.

Its website now states the nonprofit organization, established in New York, was “battered into suspension on July 23, 2024, by lawfare from New York State Attorney General Letitia James.” 

Although the state of New York began investigating Brimelow and VDARE in 2022, it only brought civil charges last month for a complex series of transactions tied to a castle in West Virginia.

“The Brimelows used VDARE like their personal piggy bank, draining millions in charitable assets to enrich themselves,” James alleged in announcing her lawsuit. The suit says Brimelow and his wife, Lydia, “have looted or wasted the corporate assets, have perpetuated the corporation solely for their personal benefit, or have otherwise acted in an illegal, oppressive or fraudulent manner.”

The Brimelows contend the allegations are baseless and that James confected a case to mask her true purpose, which was silencing political voices with which she disagrees. The couple says James has taken a page from the same playbook she used to fulfill a campaign promise by prosecuting and convicting then-citizen Donald Trump last year. That, too, involved a sophisticated real estate deal in which there were no injured parties. The years of subpoenas and legal harassment that drained VDARE months before the suit was filed, along with tactics publicly outlined in 2022 by the lead prosecutor on the case, are further proof that James is engaged in a political witch hunt, according to the defendants.

“Here’s our response to all that: we are completely innocent,” Peter Brimelow told RealClearInvestigations. “We are an example of lawfare. The immigration issue has become increasingly crucial to Democrats who are really upset by Trump’s re-election, and they are clearly trying to bankrupt us with an overly broad and cumbersome investigation.”

The case brought by James comes at a time when concerns are high about the partisan use of the legal system to quash political enemies, and James herself is under federal indictment brought by the Trump administration over alleged mortgage fraud connected to homes she bought outside New York.

Cancel Culture Castle

At the center of James’ allegations against the Brimelows is the Berkeley Springs Castle in West Virginia, which VDARE bought for $1.4 million in February 2020. The castle was intended to serve as a location for VDARE events. Lydia Brimelow told RCI that it was a purchase necessitated by a concerted political campaign against the charity. More than a dozen venues in several states buckled to pressure from leftist groups and canceled contracts to host VDARE conferences. She said the nonprofit hoped to generate revenue by renting out the castle, a landmark completed in 1891 and included in the National Register of Historic Places, for weddings or other events.

In its suit, the New York AG’s office alleges the Brimelows got VDARE to buy the castle as a home for themselves, and then had the nonprofit pay them rent while they lived there. In another improper move, according to the lawsuit, ownership of the castle was transferred to the Berkeley Springs Castle Foundation, which prosecutors portray as shifting $1.7 million to “a corporation created by Lydia Brimelow.” 

None of that is true, Lydia Brimelow said. The family lived in the Castle after the purchase was made, but never gave up their home or official residence in Connecticut. They stayed in the Castle for about a year, but mostly in 2020, when COVID-19 shutdowns complicated travel back to  Connecticut. A felled tree that smashed through a roof also required oversight of a restoration project.  

“Nor of course does the Complaint acknowledge that [while staying there] I was running a [the VDARE] website … and that Lydia was now also locked into a constant battle to stop the Castle from falling down,” Peter Brimelow posted on VDARE Sept. 5 when the lawsuit was filed. “Instead, it insinuates we were just sitting around drinking tea.” 

The Brimelows say the ownership transfer cited in the AG’s complaint – in which the building became the property of the Berkeley Springs Castle Foundation, a new nonprofit formed for that purpose – was a routine move meant to protect VDARE from personal injury and other lawsuits that might be brought by people using the property. And while James raised concerns over the overlap of the Castle Foundation and VDARE boards, the Brimelows said that it is required to comply with Internal Revenue Service rules for “supporting organizations.”

Without citing this case or naming specific nonprofits because of the political nature of the case, RCI asked CharityWatch, a prominent nonprofit watchdog, whether these sorts of transactions raise red flags. A CharityWatch representative said they are common.

Frederick Kelly, a New York attorney who represents VDARE, says two other allegations against the Brimelows are also unfounded. The lawsuit claims that the $230,000 “paid to Lydia Brimelow’s father for ‘consulting services’ is an unapproved related-party transaction.” Kelly said that figure actually represents years of payments made for work at fair market value.

The fourth charge in the lawsuit relates to Happy Penguins, a now-defunct Connecticut company controlled by the Brimelows that received some $1.2 million in VDARE funds. Kelly said that it, too, was a response to cancel culture. Because many VDARE contributors wrote under pen names and were concerned about blowback for their opinions, the Brimelows set up Happy Penguins to handle payroll and other financial issues for years, according to Kelly.

A Fig Leaf

The castle kerfuffle is just a thin pretext for the true attention of the New York attorney general’s office, Kelly said. If it was the castle James’ office was concerned about – and neither West Virginia nor the IRS has raised questions – that could have been easily resolved if the New York AG had simply asked about it in 2022.

“The very first thing we heard about this was a blizzard of subpoenas – 70 of them,” he said. “If it had been a smaller universe of information, okay, but their approach only makes sense if the goal isn’t regulatory but is crushing of speech.

“There was no informal inquiry, no effort to sort it out,” Kelly added. “If this was really about the castle, we made it clear we were happy to meet and lay that to rest. But right away they took the most aggressive stance they could take, asking for some 40 gigabytes of emails and more.”

It isn’t clear what triggered the AG’s investigation of  VDARE three years ago. Neither the New York Attorney General, the ADL, nor the SPLC responded to multiple requests for comment. After a week, the NYAG sent an email, pointing RCI to its complaint and press release.

There is no evidence that the actions were promoted by VDARE donors. RCI spoke with two VDARE donors, both of whom said they have no issue with the organization or the way the Brimelows managed it.

The AG’s office has not brought similar cases against any other nonprofit in 2025, according to its press releases. VDARE, which draws its name from Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World, doesn’t raise the kind of money that typically attracts regulatory scrutiny, according to its tax returns. 

In 2021, the year before James launched her probe, VDARE reported $721,161 in contributions and grants, a figure that dropped to $582,929 in 2022. In 2023, VDARE reported $664,477 in contributions, according to IRS filings.

When investment income and other sources are added, VDARE reported gross receipts of $1.7 million in 2021, a total that dropped to $763,754 in 2023, tax returns show.

IRS records also show VDARE’s legal bill skyrocketing. After spending just $49,152 in 2021, legal fees jumped to $178,658 the following year and in 2023 hit $566,700, according to tax records. But if possible financial chicanery wasn’t the motive here, what was? 

‘Securing Our Democracy’

One obvious clue is contained in the filing of the original civil complaint. Letitia James and James Sheehan, chief of the state’s charities bureau, are listed first, but right below them is Meghan Faux, a longtime progressive lawyer whose title is “chief deputy attorney general for social justice.”

Another attorney listed in the filing in the case against the Brimelows was Rick Sawyer, who in 2022 headed the New York attorney general’s Hate Crimes and Bias Prevention branch and is now director of its Civil Rights Division. In November 2022, at an Anti-Defamation League conference called “Securing Our Democracy: Taking Hate and Extremism to Court,” Sawyer laid out his prosecutorial strategy.

Sawyer acknowledged that “hate is protected in the U.S. Constitution; the First Amendment protects hate,” but said that should be no deterrent to aggressive tactics against those alleged to engage in it.

“Attorney generals offices have massive amounts of power,” he said. “In New York, we have subpoena authority for any kind of hate crime, subpoena power against charities – and this is before we even file a lawsuit, by the way. We can get massive amounts of discovery without even having to go to court.”

“We have the authority to do massive investigations that look into an organization, or sham charities that are advocating hate speech,” Sawyer continued. “We can look into groups that are making money off of hate, and we can look into individuals who committed acts of hate crimes without even going to court. It’s an untapped power.”

Kelly said politically charged prosecutors have followed that path.

“VDARE and the Brimelows were forced into exactly the outline Sawyer gave there,” he said.

The Brimelows have sought to admit Sawyer’s speech as evidence in a federal motion they filed on First Amendment grounds, but thus far the court has not accepted it. Kelly insisted that no federal judge has yet issued a ruling “on substantive grounds,” instead using procedural steps to punt the matter back to state court.

“But we knew that if Donald Trump didn’t have First Amendment protections in New York courts, then the Brimelows certainly wouldn’t,” Kelly told RCI.

Outside the Mainstream

Brimelow, 78 and an immigrant himself who was reared in England, is no newcomer to the immigration debate. In 1995, he published “Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster,” which became a bestseller and is still available on Amazon. 

His position on immigration remains largely unchanged. Brimelow argues that the 1965 Immigration Act opened a spigot that went far beyond what Congress or the American people expected. 

“The country is being transformed against its will,” Brimelow said in a C-Span interview on Alien Nation. He believes the U.S. should stop illegal immigration, deport illegals in the country, and institute an “immigration moratorium” for between five and 15 years. During that time, “there should be a national debate” that would establish immigration policy in “a rational way.”

Even then, Brimelow said he expected pushback to his controversial contention that the immigrants coming to America were disconnected from the Western tradition and were more concerned with welfare than assimilation.

“They didn’t expect (immigration) would be dominated by just 15 countries, which is what happened,” he said of the 1965 measure. “They had no idea any of this was going to happen, but once it did it became a sacrosanct subject and people are afraid to discuss it. If it wasn’t for electronic media I would probably be in quite serious trouble.”

In addition to Brimelow’s views, VDARE published writers who seemed intent on pushing the boundaries of debate.  Posts there included, along with long-standing objections to open borders and lax enforcement of immigration court rulings, things like a claim that the “Central Park Five” were never exonerated, or that James herself is a “black supremacist.”

Some of the writers at VDARE were pseudonymous, as the Brimelows said they feared cancel culture, and many of them are unfamiliar to a wide audience. Most of the complaints lodged against VDARE by the Southern Poverty Law Center are from many years ago, when they highlighted the organization for publishing what they categorize as white nationalist or racist writers, like the late John Tanton and Sam Francis. The VDARE website also posted items by John Derbyshire, who was banned by National Review in 2012 for a piece he wrote for Taki’s Magazine that discussed IQ and race and crime and said it was best to “avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally … Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.”

VDARE also has published pieces by Kevin MacDonald, a psychology professor and editor of a publication called The Occidental Observer, who has been characterized as racist and anti-Semitic by critics, and it is this work Peter Brimelow believes leftist groups found particularly objectionable.

VDARE writers and the Brimelows have criticized other groups opposed to unrestricted immigration for failing to come to its defense in recent weeks, but some of them told RCI they are concerned about what’s happened, especially in light of James’ track record.

“Some of the stuff they posted there was interesting; some of it some people might find repellent,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “But you are supposed to be able to say what you want, and the idea you should be punished for that by organs of the state is outrageous. And immigration has become a kind of litmus test for the left.”