California built a disclosure system so voters could see who a mayor is leaning on for money. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass filled out the forms. Then she wrote “Anonymous” on them, at least 23 times.
The filings reviewed by The Center Square cover a 12-day stretch in January 2025. The payments added up to $240,563. They moved through the Pledgeling Foundation, a donor-advised fund that can hide a giver’s name, and landed at the California Community Foundation, tagged as fire relief. The reports exist. The names do not.
DSA-LA endorsed her runoff opponent. Three DSA council members endorsed Bass anyway. None of that changes what the Form 803s leave blank.
That is the trick. A behested payment is a donation an elected official asks someone else to send to a third-party nonprofit. State law requires the official to disclose who got asked, who paid, and where the check went. The point is motive. If a contractor, a lobbyist, or a company with business at City Hall is writing the check, the public is supposed to read that on a form. “Anonymous” is a closed door with a stamp that says transparency.
Officials are supposed to identify the underlying donor as far as they know, or can determine by asking the middleman.
Gregory Yorke, Pledgeling’s CFO, said he is not aware of any request from the mayor’s office, or any other third party, for those names. “They are not anonymous to us,” he wrote, “but they can opt to be shown as anonymous to the organization we regrant to, like CCF.”
Bass’s office has not explained how she solicits money from people she does not name. One answer may be that she is not on the call. Conway Collis, who runs the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, has said Bass had “minimal to no involvement” in that group’s fundraising, even as she reports its gifts as behested payments under penalty of perjury. Center Square found no anonymous gifts to the Mayor’s Fund. The anonymous batch went to CCF. Her name is on the form. The public still does not get the donor.
This is not a one-off blank. Earlier this week, Center Square reported that Bass has steered more than $38 million to favored charities, often from companies with business before the city. CCF has taken more than $4.2 million from donors at her request. She does not sit on its board. The foundation still works “alongside” her office on housing projects such as LA4LA. Fire relief is a sympathetic label. Partnership is a political relationship. The disclosure law was written so those two things could not hide behind each other.
The pipeline is larger than 12 days in January. Since taking office, Bass has directed more than $22 million in behested money to the Mayor’s Fund and the Getty House Foundation after announcing “the most strict ethics reforms” those groups had ever adopted. Lobbyist-paying companies kept giving. Charter Communications sent $10,000 to Getty House ten days after a proposed contract extension that raised its city spending cap by $2.75 million reached her office. PepsiCo, AT&T, Amazon, and the Dodgers turn up in the same filings.
A Consumer Watchdog review of more than 560 of her disclosures found she filed late on average, 51 days against a 30-day deadline. An anonymous complaint already went to the state ethics commission over another large behested gift she had not reported on time. The system runs on trust. The people who wrote the rules are the people filing the forms.
Somehow, none of this required a raid, no surprise FBI visit at dawn. The numbers are in the state’s own reports. Twenty-three lines that say “Anonymous.” A quarter of a million dollars in less than two weeks. A mayor whose name is on the ask, and a public that still cannot answer the only question the law was built to answer: Who is the mystery donor, and what did they want at City Hall?
