On March 14 of this year, Morris Dees, the co-founder and chief trial lawyer of the Southern Poverty Law Center (splc), was fired. Nine days later, the president of the organization, Richard Cohen, resigned. This implosion of leadership came after rumors surfaced of a long-standing culture of discrimination, harassment, and employee mistreatment.

The splc began as a civil rights law practice in 1971 and later became a nonprofit organization devoted to various social justice initiatives. As the splc tells it, in the years since, the organizations has

shut down some of the nation’s most violent white supremacist groups by winning crushing, multimillion-dollar jury verdicts on behalf of their victims. It dismantled vestiges of Jim Crow, reformed juvenile justice practices, shattered barriers to equality for women, children, the LGBT community and the disabled, protected low-wage immigrant workers from exploitation, and more.

But consistency is not the splc’s strong suit. Though the group was founded to fight racial discrimination, harassment, and the mistreatment of people because of immutable characteristics, we now know that the splc didn’t practice internally what it preached publicly.

It’s now clear that the organization’s very name reflects the stack of falsehoods that has characterized its rise and fall. For starters, the organization is not focused exclusively on the South. And the poverty in the name clearly doesn’t refer to Dees, who lives in extraordinary luxury, or even to the organization itself, which has become a fundraising machine (described by one