Is Will Smith getting out of the charity business? First he shut down his private school in Calabasas, California, leaving it $307,000 in the red. Now his personal foundation has been emptied out, with total assets at the end of 2012 coming to just $22,000. The numbers come from the new form 990 found on Guidestar and filed by the Will Smith Foundation for the year 2012.
Smith didn’t drain out his foundation without distributing a very robust $375,000 in 2012 to a variety of charities. Most of them are in the Philadelphia-Baltimore area and many of them are arts oriented. If he’s giving money to Scientology-connected groups Smith no long does it through the Will Smith Foundation. It was too easily tracked. He could just be writing them checks. That’s the way Tom Cruise does it.
Is that the end of the Will Smith Foundation? That’s unknown. But Smith hasn’t had a hit movie in a long time. This past summer his “After Earth” was a total bust. On a nice note, I can tell you that Will threw a little cocktail party the other night here in New York for his “Focus” co-star Margot Robbie before and she and her family friends headed off to the premiere of ‘The Wolf of Wall Street.”
