Black campaigner accuses white co-owner of awakened DEI company of RACISM in battle for control of business

Race campaigners who co-founded an awakened DEI organization after witnessing a racist incident at a Starbucks parted ways after threatening legal action against each other.

Michelle Saahene and Melissa DePino watched police arrest two black businessmen asking to use the Philadelphia coffee shop restroom and filmed the interaction in 2018.

A white barista called the police and the men were taken away in handcuffs. The incident sparked a change in Starbucks bathroom policing and also earned the men undisclosed compensation in a settlement.

Both Saahene and DePino co-founded a DEI venture called Privilege to Progress after the incident, making hundreds of thousands of dollars in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

At their peak, they charged $10,000 to speak at an event, and each earned more than $100,000 by 2021 according to the Los Angeles Times.

They set up a website and social media for the campaign and pitched companies to pay them to share their stories.

DePino, a marketing professional and liberal mother of two, explained that she wanted to make a difference after seeing “racism right in front of her eyes.”

Healthcare worker Saahene, who is black, teamed up with DePino, who was the company’s vice president, and the pair went on Red Table Talk with Jada Pinkett Smith.

They also collaborated in 2020 on paid assignments at Google, Spectrum, Ikea, Yale, MIT, Tufts, and the United Nations.

Both developed a friendship. Saahene was a housekeeper for DePino and even had the code to her marijuana safe while the pair were meeting each other’s families.

Saahene lived in Ghana for a long time, which she says made her feel stronger in her black skin, and she began to question her role.

She said, “I started to realize I was the draw: my skin, my story. I grew faster and thought about this on a deeper, more complex level.

“I told her the pain I felt about how we made money on this. Her reactions were cold.’

The pair clashed over Saahene’s discomfort about capitalizing on Floyd’s murder, as well as how to divide the money.

They split the profits evenly until Saahene suggested she deserved a larger share because speaking about racism required more “emotional labor” from her.

She claims DePino disagreed, saying she was doing more background work — so they kept their profits even.

DePino said, “She set boundaries. I respected them. I never told her to do more than what she wanted.

“If she had wanted a pay fairness model, I would have been open to discussing that.

She was also the president. I was vice president. So she could have set one herself. I didn’t know she felt so wronged.’

Saahene grew closer to African activists and said she felt she had suffered “micro-aggressions” while working with DePino.

She texted her in 2021 to say, “I’m exploiting my trauma.” … Someone said this to me yesterday, ‘Nobody asks a sexual assault survivor to tell their story again, so why are black people expected to tell theirs?’

“You have to do what feels right for you,” DePino replied. “I fully support you.”

Saahene also claims that her partner didn’t listen to her, claiming she felt uncomfortable after proposing a visit to a lynching memorial in Alabama.

She said, “Like we haven’t had countless conversations about how traumatizing it is for me to witness black body violence.”

The activist went on to call DePino “manipulative” and mentioned “the challenges of working with white women on racial justice,” arguing that “black people don’t always have to be in therapist or coach mode.”

DePino said, “I thought our personal relationship was so much deeper… this lyric sounds like we’re strangers.”

“I thought we were working things out. I thought we were best friends. Instead, I learned that we weren’t friends anymore. … The organization had a mission and it no longer supported it.’

As a result, they decided to part ways but struggled to untangle their social media, website, bank account and business contacts.

DePino told Saahene in March 2022 that she wanted to make the organization “independent of both of them,” as her ex-partner said she wanted it “disbanded.”

Saahene didn’t like that DePino kept posting to their joint Instagram, claiming she was “misleading the public.”

On April 22 last year, Saahene posted on social media that DePino was “not honest” and had no “commitment to end colonialism” — before plugging in her personal Instagram.

DePinto deleted the messages before emailing Saahene to say, “You can’t legally defame me…I’ll send a cease and desist as soon as possible.”

Both women continued to post and delete content, with their website and social media account permanently deleted from September – with the pair only communicating through lawyers.

Saahene has since moved to Los Angeles to work with black activists and calls herself a “speaker, activist, model and global inclusion strategist.”

She has spoken about racism, healing and self-care at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg and is hosting a six-day retreat for changemakers at a black-owned luxury hotel in Morocco.

She told the LA Times, “I’ve spent so much time talking to white people about a white problem: racism.

‘It sucks. I want to make black people my audience. I’m over it, I’ve moved on. It’s a new chapter. A new me.’

DePinto has been branded a racist by the couple’s former supporters and has faced a spate of online abuse – being called a fake and a manipulator.

She has relaunched her blog and is working on a book that picks up when she witnessed the Starbucks incident.

Talking about her relationship with Saahene, she said, “I don’t really know where she is or what she’s doing. But I wish her well.’

In the aftermath of the Starbucks incident, the company closed more than 8,000 stores in the US to teach 175,000 employees how to better recognize unconscious biases.