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Homeless Veteran Will Get Money That Was Raised for Him, GoFundMe Says

A homeless veteran who sued a New Jersey couple, claiming that he did not receive most of the $400,000 they had raised for him online, will get the money he is due, GoFundMe said Thursday evening.

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By
Sandra E. Garcia
and
Matthew Haag, New York Times

A homeless veteran who sued a New Jersey couple, claiming that he did not receive most of the $400,000 they had raised for him online, will get the money he is due, GoFundMe said Thursday evening.

The man, Johnny Bobbitt Jr., met the couple, Mark D’Amico and Kate McClure, when they were stranded on a road in Philadelphia in 2017 and he gave them $20. The couple posted the story online, and it inspired more than 14,000 people to make donations to Bobbitt via GoFundMe.

But Bobbitt said that he received only $75,000 and that the couple spent the rest, including on a BMW. He sued the couple last month, and police are investigating. The couple have disputed his allegations.

On Thursday evening, GoFundMe said it would help cover the costs, if necessary, to ensure that Bobbitt gets any donations he has not already received.

“Johnny will be made whole, and we’re committing that he’ll get the balance of the funds that he has not yet received or benefited from,” GoFundMe said in a joint statement with Cozen O’Connor, a law firm representing Bobbitt.

The statement came on the same day that investigators searched the property of McClure and D’Amico.

The authorities arrived at the couple’s home in Florence Township, New Jersey, around 8 a.m. Thursday and were seen taking away items in bags and towing away a BMW coupe.

Scott A. Coffina, the prosecutor for Burlington County, said investigators in his office and from the Florence Township Police Department searched the property “in connection with a criminal investigation into the Johnny Bobbitt matter.”

“As of this time, there have been no charges filed,” Coffina said in an email.

Lawyers for Bobbitt and the couple did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday. D’Amico was seen swinging a golf club outside his house as the authorities searched his residence.

The authorities executed the search warrant a day after a court hearing in New Jersey in which a judge expressed frustration that the couple’s lawyer did not show an accounting of the money raised and if it had been spent.

D’Amico and McClure did not appear at the hearing, and their lawyer, Ernest Badway, said the couple would invoke their Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination and not produce the financial information requested by the judge, Paula T. Dow of the Burlington County Superior Court.

“I am no longer comfortable with counsel representing what their clients purport to say, when I have no certifications from the clients, no appearances by the clients, and a record that before me lacks clarity at times as to what happened with the funds,” Dow told Badway on Wednesday.

At the end of the hearing, Dow ordered Badway and Chris Fallon, a lawyer for Bobbitt, to organize their financial documents and provide an accounting at a hearing scheduled for Monday.

On Aug. 30, Dow had ordered the couple to transfer the money into an escrow account by the next afternoon.

When the couple first met Bobbitt, he was homeless on the streets of Philadelphia and “living off the kindness of strangers,” according to Jacqueline Promislo, another lawyer representing him. She said last month that Bobbitt was seeking treatment in rehab but declined to elaborate.

D’Amico and McClure said they bought Bobbitt a trailer home and parked it on their property. But Promislo said they bought the trailer in their name and have since sold it.

Bobbitt estimates he received $75,000, including the cost of the trailer. Badway disputed that amount in court and said the couple gave Bobbitt more than $200,000 in goods and services.

“I had to ask them for everything in the beginning,” Bobbitt told WPVI-TV, the ABC station in Philadelphia. “It was a joke.”

On the NBC show “Megyn Kelly Today” last week, D’Amico said that of the total money raised, he spent only $500 on himself, at a casino, but he repaid it.

On the show, the couple said they withheld money from Bobbitt after they gave him $25,000 before Christmas last year and Bobbitt spent it in two weeks. “We didn’t want to give him the whole $400,000,” D’Amico said, adding that they were worried Bobbitt would spend it on drugs.

Bobbitt has said he wants to put what remains of the money in a trust and learn how to manage it.

“I hate that it came to this,” Bobbitt told the ABC station. “I didn’t want to be pressuring to get a lawyer or do anything, because I didn’t want to appear ungrateful.”

GoFundMe says it is prepared to pay for funds that Bobbitt has not yet received as part of its “GoFundMe Guarantee, which means that in the rare case that GoFundMe, law enforcement or a user finds campaigns are misused, donors and beneficiaries are protected.”

It is unclear how much that might cost, but the organization will find out “at the conclusion of the investigation or legal proceedings and after a detailed accounting has taken place,” said Bobby Whithorne, a spokesman for GoFundMe.

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