From Russia With Love? PRSA’s House of Cards Begins Collapsing
For years, PRSA's frauds + ties to deep-pocketed Democrat and Russian Federation PR players remained heavily veiled. That ends today.
An Open Letter to Heide Harrell, 2026 PRSA National Chair:
Dear Heide:
I’m writing to respond to your letter to PRSA members this past Monday, disclosing – albeit at only a stratospherically high level – that the Public Relations Society of America, under your new leadership, appears to be in crisis.
It seems PRSA is running out of money, members, and credibility, after going ethically bankrupt years ago.
I’ve waited all week to see if more information or details would be forthcoming.
I’ve since learned PRSA HQ has been flooded with angry and urgent queries from members, trying to get answers, but receiving little to none.
Maybe I can help fill in some gaps, Heide, not only for your long-suffering membership, but maybe for you, too.
I’m a former PRSA Fellow and past PRSA national board member (2002-03; 2008), but with a tortured history with your association, as you should well-know.
EXHIBIT A: You wrote this e-mail, below, in 2020, from the server of your then-employer, Heide — Hillary Clinton’s own infamous former employer, the Rose Law Firm of Little Rock, Arkansas. You sent this e-mail to PRSA’s entire National Board (part of a larger thread with others’ defamatory remarks about me). You referred to me and my “valid” issues in PRSA… but in dismissive, not-so-complimentary terms (e-mail legally obtained through FOIA).
Footnote: Ironically, Hillary Clinton’s name comes up later, as per PRSA’s current situation — but, spoiler-alert! — the “Russia collusion” at hand is not Donald Trump’s.
I am also a federal taxpayer, Heide.
As PRSA is a non-profit, IRS-tax-exempt business league that took receipt of federal PPP pandemic loan taxpayer dollars into the seven figures (with non-“forgiven” portions of that loan still being repaid, as I understand it), I believe PRSA owes the public far more information about what on earth is going on here.
I explain why, below. Lots to unpack, Heide.
This report to you will discuss and document:
- PRSA’s toxic, retaliatory culture
- Unethical and illegal whistleblower retaliation in order to protect PRSA leaders’ systemic abuses of power enabling obvious misconduct
- Evidence of management (including board-level) negligence, incompetence, and various forms of interest conflicts
- Obvious and repeated, multi-year financial frauds, including purposely and habitually misleading PRSA’s Assembly voting delegation
- Improper PRSA dealings in violation of antitrust and conflict of interest regulations, pertaining to Ketchum / Omnicom commercial interests and rife abuses of power in the PRSA trade association
- Disturbing connections by PRSA / PRSA’s legal counsel with the Russian Federation government, thanks to for-profit dealings by Ketchum and other Omnicom mega-conglomerate agency interests that had long-running, multi-decade Russian contractual dealings, which overtly have influenced PRSA’s partisanship
Not insignificant issues, as you can tell.
As you know, Heide, I was retaliated against illegally by PRSA with a permanent banishment from the PRSA community in Q1 2021, after I reported serious PRSA misconduct over numerous years, with copious documentation (including undisputable PRSA ethics violations and legal non-compliance).
The New York State Code has legal statutes barring retaliation against “volunteers” of non-profit business leagues of PRSA’s size and scope, but mere laws often mean little to PRSA, in my longtime experience:
These prior matters remain unaddressed and unresolved as legally registered years ago to New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has opted instead in recent years to focus on, shall we say, other politicized issues of greater keen interest to the Democrat Party than PRSA’s malfeasance.
To that end, PRSA’s alignment with Democrat talking points and partisan rhetoric since 2017 is excessively well-documented, particularly in modeling to the entire PRSA industry what they’re also supposed to think and communicate.
As you are well-aware, the PRSA misconduct I directly observed and documented started in 2017, when your mentor, Jane Dvorak, was then PRSA National Chair.
During that timeframe (2017), then-PRSA Chair-Elect Tony D’Angelo at Syracuse University / Newhouse School worked overtime to deflect the damage that he and other board members knew full-well that Jane Dvorak inflicted on PRSA’s ethics, operations, reputation, and brand.
Due to D’Angelo’s efforts (which turned out to be far more in service to his own standing as incoming Chair, rather than for the health and wellbeing of PRSA or the larger PR industry), PRSA never recovered.
Examples of Jane Dvorak’s activities and other PRSA national leaders’ reactions to them, are noted below, but please know these are only a few examples of many in my evidence archives.
Among many things, Jane Dvorak used her Twitter handle in 2016-17 — the same handle specified by PRSA for her leadership role in PRSA — to engage in excessively partisan political commenting. Much of it was inappropriate, ribald, and in violation of PRSA social media policy. Her remarks also blurred the lines of PRSA’s own partisan stance and signaling:
At the time in 2017, many past National Chairs of PRSA behaved as though they were as appalled as I was. Some rushed to my aid, seeking to help (or so I thought) in mitigating Dvorak’s behavior.
E-mail to me from Past National Chair Kathy Lewton (Aug. 18, 2017), referencing Jane Dvorak:
Letter of Sept. 5, 2017, from 2017 PRSA Chair-Elect Tony D’Angelo to me, after Jane Dvorak defamed me in a conference call to my local PRSA chapter board in Knoxville, Tennessee, which included competitors to my PR firm that I owned at the time:
Tony D’Angelo (Sept. 2017) – Conference Call / Audio (legally recorded call with D’Angelo, then-PRSA CEO Joseph Truncale, and me):
Past PRSA College of Fellows Chair Deborah Radman (2020 PRSA Chair-Elect Michelle Olson’s surrogate) (Dec. 2020) — admissions by Radman of ethics violations in PRSA occurring and Jane Dvorak’s role, along with quid pro quo offer in December 2020 to add me to 2021 PRSA National board in “senior counsel” role if I agreed in advance to drop any potential of a lawsuit against PRSA (call legally recorded by prior mutual consent; recording the call was a required condition by me set forth in advance, due to prior texted threats):
It’s my understanding, Heide, that you know 2021 PRSA Chair Michelle Olson well, as referenced in the above call, of Olson seeking to offer to me a quid pro quo through a surrogate.
You both have attended PRSA Conferences, clearly:
Tony D’Angelo (and his own mentor, Kathy Lewton) later reversed course from their prior, private admonishments of Jane Dvorak in 2017 and their solidarity with me.
In 2018, both joined forces with Jane Dvorak instead. To this day, there has been no explanation for this about-face.
Others joined in, too, like Omnicom’s / Ketchum’s John Paluszek, as well as DEI activists Del Galloway and Rosanna Fiske, who then were employed with the ethics-embattled Wells Fargo, of the fake-accounts scandal infamy. They all began attacking me, in a highly collusive and coordinated manner. These attacks have never ceased, in reality.
By 2020-21, the express purpose of this pro-Dvorak group’s conspiratorial attacks was to have me ejected from PRSA membership on false and contrived charges — and to ruin my reputation and career in the process.
A 2020 PRSA Board member, Ana Toro, openly urged precisely such an attack in July 2020, after I had registered urgent concerns about PRSA financial irregularities on PRSA’s “MyPRSA” intranet forum, viewable by all members. Toro (a Fleishman HIllard / Omnicom alumna then working for the pandemic disinformation-embattled U.S. Centers for Disease Control) put forward my concerns to her fellow board members as examples of me being “poisonous” and “mean.”
Toro pleaded to her fellow PRSA Board members, “We have to dig DEEP in our member rules, code of ethics or something and kick out this member.”
They promptly lined up their politically like-minded friends on PRSA’s Past President’s Council, the national board and appointed committees, to execute their attack.
The official line-up of the primary cabal included 13 “Complainants” who all served as a Past National President / Chair of PRSA, over various years:
(Please note further below John Paluszek’s multi-decade connections via Omnicom’s Ketchum, and, concurrent Ketchum subcontractor + PRSA law firm of record, Venable, LLP, to the Russian Federation. I will get to that in a minute.)
When these pro-Dvorak “Complainants” registered their unethical “grievance” against me to PRSA (timestamped only days after I refused Ms. Radman’s / Michelle Olson’s quid pro quo offer), they did so using dummy gmail addresses untraceable to a specific person.
They also used the following fake phone number on their official PRSA “grievance” intake form:
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0
This egregious dishonesty in violation of the PRSA Code of Ethics helped ensure “plausible deniability,” so that no single “Complainant” on this conspiratorial ship of fools could be pinned with personally having registered the paperwork at PRSA.
Clearly, massive premeditation and pre-coordination went into this anti-competitive and illegal conspiracy targeting me, among the participants.
On the paid staff side of PRSA, a later FOIA records search turned up a likely culprit, just as he was getting the cast of characters into place and a new CEO on-boarded (Linda Thomas Brooks), precisely five years ago.
CFO Phil Bonaventura went to great pains in this e-mail, below (obtained via FOIA), to make PRSA’s new “grievance” brand of PRSA “discipline” appear orderly and “properly submitted,” despite the dummy e-mail addresses and fake phone number used and the multiple, obvious conflicts of interest between “Complainants” and PRSA’s various adjudication personnel. “The Respondent” as cited is me, Mary Beth West:
For example, once served with PRSA’s “notice,” I found (and reported) years and years of prior social media postings, documenting uber-friendly social interactions between PRSA National Board members, “Complainants,” “Grievance Committee Chair” and “Grievance Panel” members.
The social media record clearly documented prior friendships that automatically should have barred people like John Deveney (“Grievance Committee” Chair) and Joseph Abreu (“Grievance Panel” Chair) from being recruited to help execute PRSA’s attack on me.
There was a separate “Grievance Committee” different from the “Grievance Panel,” whose identities beyond the chair were never revealed to me, in violation of PRSA’s own written policies.
I discovered — as another example — that the 2021 “Grievance Committee” Chairman (John Deveney) — had only in recent years (2019) attended Complainant Del Galloway’s wedding, attended by fellow Complainant Rosanna Fiske, whom Deveney complimented on a Facebook comment from this wedding as “smokin’ “:
These were not professionally distanced or objective individuals here, Heide.
For that matter, Mr. Deveney as “Grievance Committee Chair” wasn’t professionally distanced from me, either. I had gone for decades — since the 1990s when I first met him — thinking that Mr. Deveney was my own friend in PRSA.
I cannot begin to tell you how personally hurtful this betrayal of prior friendship — and countless others — continue to be to me, Heide, to this day.
But such is the nature of PRSA-endorsed Machiavellian back-stabbing, Heide.
My research for my written complaint / interim response to PRSA on January 31, 2021, cited that Mr. Deveney had already made a mockery out of his role as PRSA Grievance Committee Chair, prior to this weaponization against me.
“…zany romp into ethics and law…”??? “…dish the dirt…”???
It also turned out that the dark arts of Machiavellian deception had been ENDORSED by 2018 National Chair Tony D’Angelo, as he was on his PRSA chapter speaking circuit in 2018, to promote PRSA’s partisan-driven “new order of things“:
Layer upon layer of unaccountable and / or unidentified culprits helped lock-in “plausible deniability” by 2021 Board leadership, led by Michelle Olson, whose name very rarely turned up on any related e-mails, but for a few discovered via FOIA.
When I specified and protested these egregious conflicts of interest in writing, PRSA’s attorney at Venable, LLP, Andrew Steinberg, overruled me, allowing this sham to proceed, unencumbered by such minor issues like ethics.
Steinberg also failed to disclose his law firm had a prior Russian Federation-affiliated contracting relationship with the very PR firm of one of the “Complainants” — John Paluszek of Ketchum (Omnicom).
I’ll get to that more in a minute, Heide.
A few years later, CEO Linda Thomas Brooks would be caught on a legally videotaped conference call, lying to an inquiring PRSA member, by claiming that she was “not involved” in the “grievance” attack against me and expulsion of my membership, when countless documents prove she herself sat on the four-person “Grievance Panel.”
These lies are damning, Heide:
As I later discovered through a FOIA open government records request, during the so-called “investigation” of me by PRSA’s “Grievance Panel” kangaroo court in February 2021, one of the individuals above, Del Galloway, pulled a disturbing legal threat to PRSA directly, in secret.
As you know, Heide, Galloway is a past PRSA “Gold Anvil” winner, no less, whose day job then, back in 2020-21, was to deflect and gaslight for Wells Fargo’s multi-billion-dollar violations of consumer trust, when he wasn’t otherwise occupied trashing Donald Trump on social media, per below, or threatening to pull universities’ ACEJMC academic accreditation for PR programs of study if they failed to jump through his DEI hoops, to his liking.
Clearly, abuses of power and secretive misconduct are Galloway’s modes of choice.
As such, Wells Fargo’s Del Galloway threatened to sue PRSA himself, if the Grievance Panel didn’t hurry up and expedite his attack against me.
Galloway’s e-mail (excerpt below, legally obtained via FOIA) to PRSA’s CEO and “Grievance Panel” chair / National Secretary Joseph Abreu and CEO Linda Thomas Brooks threatened that Galloway would “turn his attention to PRSA and its negligence in protecting (Galloway’s) reputation and livelihood” if “the panel and PRSA leadership” failed to “move expeditiously in resolving this matter,” which clearly implied a pre-ordained conviction-with-no-need-for-evidence that had been mutually agreed far ahead of time.
Galloway “encouraged” (how polite!) PRSA’s CEO to share his threat accordingly “with the Society’s legal counsel.”
I only found out about this threat of mutiny made by Galloway, in a government open-records e-mail obtained in 2025 (early last year).
U.S. courts of law might rule Galloway’s maneuver here as “extortion,” Heide.
Maybe someday we’ll find out.
Galloway didn’t give a care about my reputation or my livelihood that he was involved in defaming, nor the people he and others had dragged into this conspiratorial and illegal nightmare, nor that of PRSA’s larger reputation.
He only demonstrated care about himself and about his capacity to abuse his power and weaponize future “grievances” more easily and to his own liking, so that he would always remain protected while freely attacking others’ livelihoods within PRSA on a going-forward basis, as he deemed needed. Clearly, Galloway wanted future “grievance process” rules written (or re-written / “corrected”), accordingly.
So. Under threat of Galloway turning against PRSA, PRSA’s CEO and others folded like cheap lawn chairs.
Due process got thrown out the window, not that it ever had existed in the first place.
Example: Venable, LLP hastily scheduled my so-called “hearing” — TWICE! — on dates / times that they knew I couldn’t attend, after having pre-coordinated convenient timeslots for everyone else in the cabal, who Galloway lined up for the “hearing” conference call to pile-on to me (or eat their popcorn as they watched the degradation ceremony unfold as a form of twisted entertainment):
Sidebar: PRSA Gold Anvil winner and Past National Chair Del Galloway, APR, Fellow PRSA is no stranger to getting himself into legal incidents and “lawsuits,” by his own admission, Heide.
In fact, it appears that he’s so famous for it in the Greater Washington, D.C. area, that his endorsements for legal-defense firms carry real weight!
What is unclear, however, is whether Galloway engages his own personal legal counsel on the barter system, of “if you defend me in court and discount your bill, I’ll shoot a cute video endorsing you on Insta!”. Immediately after (clearing throat loudly) “retiring” from Wells Fargo recently, Galloway shot this testimonial for his personal legal-defense firm in D.C., who had helped him out of a real pickle, which he described as follows:
In full view of personal legal risks, Heide, you are abundantly aware of countless other egregious episodes of PRSA wrongdoing.
I would definitely say that commandeering a U.S. trade association in violation of numerous state and federal laws to gin up and send around — secretly and indiscriminately — a smear letter of false, misleading and defamatory content against me, a known whistleblower of association misconduct (ON PRSA LETTERHEAD, Heide!) so that “Complainants” and PRSA Board members and pretty much whoever gets their hands on it can then re-re-re-re-distribute said smear letter worldwide, is precisely such an egregious episode:
NOTE:
It’s not “outside the process” for a PRSA member (under attack by PRSA leadership’s bogus “grievance process” kangaroo court) to contact relevant third-party entities cited by “complainants” themselves, to seek out evidence owed to her when the “complainants” in the so-called “process” and their BFFs running the “process” and their paid (with PRSA member dollars) legal goons enabling the “process” deny access to that evidence themselves, in violation of PRSA’s own written policies.
Fully collusive efforts were made by PRSA leadership to cover up these shenanigans, Heide.
But then again, you already know that.
While I’m hardly a Linda Thomas Brooks fan myself given her CEO activities that you folks paid her around $2 million in member dollars during her four-year CEO tenure to do for you, I’m stunned by how quickly the same people who hired her to help target and attack me, then turned on her — less than a year later — as the expendable party to their own misconduct.
The below e-mail to the 2022 PRSA Board from PRSA’s then-Chair Felicia Blow (legally obtained through FOIA) was less than one year after you used Linda Thomas Brooks to help get me kicked me out of PRSA — and to fraudulently make it look legitimate.
When all of PRSA’s violations of law finally hit the court system, Heide, your former, “not pleased” CEO is not going to be your ally on a witness stand. Why would she be?
PRSA leadership’s / cabal’s cover-ups across recent years also have included these clowns handing to each other a dizzying array of public awards and accolades (like PRSA’s Gold Anvil), for little other purpose than to deceive / confuse PRSA’s own members via whitewash and window-dressing, while pacifying needy egos and mafia-like quid pro quos of the guilty.
Just months before the University of Tennessee’s Dr. Joe Stabb of the PRSA Educators Academy handed Jane Dvorak her “David Ferguson Award” in November 2025, she had been back at it, tweeting this brainy, charming content on X:
PRSA’s quid pro quo system became painfully obvious to me, when 2021 National Chair Michelle Olson offered to me a “senior counsel” PRSA Board seat myself via her surrogate in December 2020, if I would agree not to sue PRSA, as mentioned earlier.
A little more about that:
It was PRSA’s same “plausible deniability” pattern.
Olson didn’t call me up herself to offer the unethical deal. She sent someone else to do it for her. And another thing about that: the “deal” was ensconced in very real threats to my safety, Heide. These maneuvers are universal calling cards of mafia-like behavior.
Indeed, Olson’s surrogate had texted to me alarming threats against my safety prior to our call, that she would “end it” at my “peril” if I did not “work with” Michelle Olson by taking the surrogate’s phone call to discuss some deal-making. When this person called me unexpectedly one evening in early December 2020 and launched into an abrupt, hostile, cursing tirade to intimidate me, I hung up the phone, in utter shock and, frankly, fear.
She then shot angry, unhinged texts to me, as follows, which I immediately screen-shot on my phone:
U.S. courts of law might call such behavior on behalf of PRSA’s cabal against someone’s life / wellbeing illegal harassment, Heide.
Maybe someday we’ll find out.
Yet when I immediately reported this threatening misconduct, in writing, to PRSA’s law firm of record, Venable, LLP, Venable protected their client(s) past and/or present (not just PRSA but also Ketchum / Omnicom / the Russian Federation / whomever else politically), by dismissing my rightful protests out of hand, thus further enabling those in PRSA engaging in these threats against me.
At the time (2020-21), Venable, LLP, had disturbing, prior connections relative to the Biden Administration that I knew nothing about.
Much of this Venable, LLP partisanship connection was exposed publicly, during the last election cycle involving former Venable attorney Doug Emhoff’s wife, Kamala Harris, challenging Donald Trump in the 2024 race for the White House.
It turns out Mr. Emhoff had quite a storied history himself at Venable, LLP, according to news reports.
No doubt, the PRSA Board will continue trying to sweep this ugly stew of prior misconduct and cover-ups under the rug.
But there’s one consequence your cabal can no longer ignore, Heide, and that’s PRSA’s money problems.
So I’d like to address the realities of that matter next, including false and misleading information PRSA has been propagating to its own members, for years.
According to IRS Form 990 tax returns (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131582190) filed by you / your team for the PRSA business league since 2019 (pre-pandemic), the financial net losses or net gain each year for PRSA have been recorded as follows:
2019: – $415,241
2020: – $1,463,680
2021: – $725,978
2022: $453,449
2023: – $271,579
2024: – $156,701
That’s an accumulated net LOSS of PRSA member dollars since 2019 (just before you joined the PRSA Board in 2020, Heide) of -$2,579,730.
No wonder alarm bells are going off.
In light of these dire facts, Heide, a copy of your PRSA member letter this week (at top of this post) made its way to me by not one, but two, deeply concerned and universally well-respected, dues-paying PRSA members who received it.
These individuals also are long-time, devoted members of the PRSA College of Fellows. Naturally, I will not be disclosing their names to you, due to PRSA’s engrained culture of toxic retaliation toward anyone who dares to break ranks, which I personally know all too well, having been on the receiving end of it since 2017.
These PRSA members reached out to me, to see if I had any insights to offer, because as a past PRSA Fellow myself who actually cares about PRSA’s negative impact on the industry, I’m well-known to have amassed gargantuan files of PRSA leaders’ misconduct, over nearly a decade now.
Plus, it was clear that no real answers were going to be forthcoming from you.
Despite your dismissive, defamatory, and destructive personal treatment of me over many years, Heide, I still have friends in PRSA who have not dropped membership in your organization yet. I really don’t understand why, frankly. I think you’ve been modestly successful in tricking people into thinking if they leave PRSA, then they give up their APR (which is a myth). I realize people have their own reasons for staying.
These friends of mine are, nonetheless, disgusted by the many falsehoods and manipulations of member trust, occurring over many years, by PRSA leadership.
You cited in your own letter to members this week that you and your Board “are navigating significant financial challenges and a continued year-over-year decline in membership.”
You falsely claimed “to be transparent,” by saying, “These issues did not arise overnight, and they will not be resolved quickly” – in spite of your own PRSA Assembly minutes from 2023 that documented opposite assurances to PRSA’s voting delegates.
So let’s explore those financial false claims from 2023:
At the 2023 PRSA National Leadership Assembly voting delegation, your executive board and CEO promised members that everything in PRSA was going fairly well, or at least in a positive direction.
Please find below your own PRSA Board-approved Assembly minutes of October 14, 2023 (Pages 1 and 2). These minutes should look familiar to you, Heide, since you yourself wrote them as “Secretary.”
These minutes document for the record that you and your leadership team misled your Assembly voting delegation in 2023, by claiming that:
- “PRSA’s financial trajectory is on the upswing” for 2023, and
- PRSA had, during 2023, achieved “…the highest membership numbers in years…”
By contrast, you’ve now sent a letter to members this week, Heide, making it clear the association is actually in a long-running crisis of plummeting membership and revenue.
This crisis is due to Ray Day’s (2025) and Joseph Abreu’s (2024) leadership years, certainly, but also, very much pre-dating them as well, since PRSA has incurred $2.579 million in comprehensive net losses of member dollars since 2019 (pre-pandemic) through 2024’s now newly-posted IRS 990.
Who knows what 2025 holds? I’m sure you do, hence the panic-button.
- On the heels of PRSA’s bogus “upswing” claims at the 2023 Assembly, Heide, how do you square a -$271,579 net loss cited on your PRSA, Inc., business league 2023 tax filing to the Internal Revenue Service? (see below)
- How do you also justify a $25,821 loss that year on the IRS tax filing for the PRSA Foundation so-called “charity,” which somehow also managed to cite that the Foundation was paying Phil Bonaventura $354,932 in compensation (the same amount also being paid to him by the separate PRSA business league in the same year)? (see below)
- Further, how can it be true for you to claim in your January 2026 letter to members that you’re in a “year-over-year decline in membership,” when only two years ago, your Board promised “upswings” and “highest numbers in years” for membership? It appears you failed to present during that Assembly any audited or legally compliant data to your voting delegates, which, if true, is a violation of New York State not-for-profit corporation law: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/NPC/519 )
Something isn’t jiving here, Heide. The only consistent things seem to be the degree and volume of your own inconsistencies.
I urge you to produce accurate data and legally compliant financial disclosures for 2025 immediately and report them on public platforms.
This perennial song-and-dance of industry stakeholders and federal taxpayers waiting more than a year to see PRSA’s fiscal year financials was never acceptable practice, and it’s certainly not acceptable now.
At this point, it’s abundantly apparent from all evidence I’m seeing (and not even counting the MILLIONS in additional, prior financial discrepancies + losses that I formally registered from 2018-2022) that some form of potential fraud + cover-up has transpired and/or is actively transpiring in PRSA.
I also emphatically registered this concern of PRSA “fraud” to then-Treasurer Michelle Egan in 2020. An excerpt of our chat has been posted on X, since 2024:
Not once since I posted that legally recorded audio of my 2020 phone call with Egan has either PRSA or Egan or anyone bothered to contact me to say, “Whoa!!! Please take that down! You’ve been misinformed or placed under the wrong impression and here’s the documentation to prove PRSA is not engaged in fraud!”
Instead, it’s been crickets and tumbleweeds, Heide.
Egan promised to follow up with me in 2020, but then I never heard from her again. She later was rewarded, just as Michelle Olson and Jane Dvorak and all the toxic cabal were, with a PRSA “Past Chair” medal (literally, a wearable medal) — and no accountability for all the misconduct occurring on their watch.
If this painfully logical conclusion of “fraud” is not the case 5 ½ years later, Heide, then you need to start coughing up the receipts to prove otherwise, please.
You and your rather delusional “auditors” also need to give a shout to the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), and address the concerns I registered publicly there about your “audit” irregularities, 18 months ago: https://assets.pcaobus.org/pcaob-dev/docs/default-source/rulemaking/docket-055/12_mbw.pdf?sfvrsn=e18ccbc6_2
Turns out, your nearly two-decade audit firm (PKF O’Connor Davies) was actually cited by the PCAOB for bad practice, throughout the years of PRSA and the PRSA Foundation being clients, via audit contracts approved by CFO Bonaventura, notably:
I do not understand why you, Heide, were made PRSA’s Audit Committee Chair, when you’ve already voiced publicly your distaste for accounting topics specifically and math in general.
For your roles in all of this, Heide, I’m not sure your PRSA chairmanship this year is “going to be worth it in the end,” to use your words.
It’s not just members who deserve answers now.
The full tax-paying public also deserves answers, given PRSA’s IRS tax-exempt status.
Plus, there’s the inconvenient truth that PRSA gobbled down more than $1 million in U.S. federal taxpayer dollars in your PPP pandemic “loan,” (which since has been mostly “forgiven”), to help keep now-former CEO Linda Thomas Brooks and now-former CFO Phil Bonaventura paid their mega-salaries, which you and your board approved and kept escalating for them… thus rewarding them for systemic and episodic failures, of epic proportions.
Compensation / 2024 (Linda Thomas Brooks: $538,999; Philip Bonaventura: $358,891):
Compensation / 2023:
Both Linda and Phil have since left PRSA over the past 13 months, under unexplained circumstances of this new-found financial crisis that you now only cryptically referenced in your letter this week.
Again, Heide, these concerns of fraud / serious misconduct are nothing new.
Unexplained financial irregularities, discrepancies and massive losses of member dollars have been going on, for years and years, unchecked:
Heide – You’ve already made it abundantly clear to everyone (on a 2021 webinar to PRSSA students, no less) that basic financial competency isn’t exactly your cup of tea, while sycophantic idolatry of Hillary Clinton is.
(See this much longer video below from March 2021 of your public-facing remarks, while you were then employed as a marketing coordinator by The Rose Law Firm, of Hillary Clinton “Whitewater” infamy, in Little Rock, Arkansas):
Yet somehow, despite your struggles with passing a single section of the GRE exam, PRSA thought it was a superb idea to place you – in full light of your “not a clue” status – in charge of PRSA’s financially and ethically sinking ship.
Felicia Blow announced to the entire membership in 2024 that most people who participate in PRSA’s national board / officer recruitment process know that PRSA nominations are not based on merit but instead are “overly insular” and “politically motivated.”
Not a ringing endorsement, Heide!
(https://x.com/marybethwest/status/1833937065068622014?s=20)).
There is no excuse for lying to / purposely misleading members and keeping them in the dark while they’re footing the bills for this ineptitude.
You serve on a legally liable, fiduciary board in PRSA, Heide.
For every falsehood told financially, there are receipts. It appears I have many of them, from my years of research and tracking PRSA’s misconduct, all focused with extreme concern for the integrity of the overall industry.
I have abundant FOIA government records, documenting yours and many of your PRSA Board Chair predecessors’ (including Joseph “Sacrificial Lamb” Abreu’s) defamatory remarks about me, their participation in cabal-driven attacks of me, and self-admissions of PRSA’s policy violations and legal non-compliance problems internally.
It should be noted that this particular “Sacrificial Lamb” joker now works for a different “Clerk and Comptroller” government agency (Lee County, Florida), which collects tax dollars from citizens… that is, when it’s not in hot water itself by its own Inspector General for “substantiated” stuff like “fraud”.
It seems “Sacrificial Lamb” Abreu has achieved unethical PR career nirvana, according to the Lee County Clerk of Court & Comptroller’s Inspector General’s office.
The IG cited a list of super-“substantiated” reports of misconduct in 2025, within Abreu’s employer agency:
https://www.leeclerk.org/home/showpublisheddocument/16729
While the above ethics investigation of Abreu’s employer was underway in 2024, “Sacrificial Lamb” Abreu hit the interstate up to Chattanooga, Tennessee (my home state) — far outside of earshot or viewership of his own home market in Florida.
His mission: to preach how ethical he is under the banner of PRSA, on a December 2024 newscast that was then placed on YouTube:
Gag.
What “Sacrificial Lamb” Abreu forgot to mention on that newscast is that PRSA’s own receipts of Abreu’s and others’ misconduct are stacking up, too.
For example, PRSA illegally promoted a no “white man” “near retirement age” CEO staff-hiring mantra in 2019.
These documents showed up in a FOIA request just this year, within internal PRSA governance board / HR committee / CEO search committee documentation… which arguably constitutes PRSA staff-driven sex, race, AND age hiring discrimination, Heide.
The EEOC should find this interesting!
I think you left your marketing post at The Rose Law Firm too soon, Heide, since I’m sure “your lawyers” there could have given you some free legal advice… that such brash, overt hiring discrimination on the basis of sex, race, and age is risky at best and flat-out unlawful at worst.
I even have 2022 PRSA Board Chair Felicia Blow’s admission – made in writing in FOIA-discovered e-mail on PRSA “Legal Expense Analysis” – that “the PRSA Board Human Resources Committee” “had been out of compliance” “for years.”
No shock there, but I’m sure the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would find this information curious, if not fascinating.
Which brings me to all of PRSA’s phony DEI rhetoric and performative whatnot.
I have a written resignation e-mail (via the FOIA records) of a Black male PRSA (now former) Board member (which I will not share in this e-mail to protect his name).
He cited in his PRSA Board resignation that he was personally observing and experiencing serious racial discrimination / bullying / passive-aggressive treatment in PRSA while trying to serve in good faith in national leadership.
This gentleman stated explicitly in his resignation to then-Chair Felicia Blow (a Black woman, ironically) and Michelle Egan that he could not “show up as my authentic self” in PRSA, he said, and, that people on PRSA’s National board “have to walk on eggshells,” which he rightfully noted as “sad.”
He also observed in his written comments that the notion of there being “Black voices” in PRSA leadership or Black representation on the PRSA executive committee “is not a popular opinion” within PRSA leadership, he said. This was only a number of years ago – hardly ancient history, Heide.
Seems he likely had a point, given what you see and hear on this rather navel-gazing PRSA National “strategic planning” committee ZOOM call in recent years (link legally obtained through FOIA), lamenting and opining DEI when PRSA’s absurd hypocrisies are painfully obvious:
Speaking of hypocritical, these ridiculous DEI-posturing embarrassments prevail in PRSA, ad nauseam.
Like this one by Michelle Olson (2021 PRSA Chair of quid pro quo fame), on a PRSA DEI webinar with Felicia Blow.
This preachy ethics violator with a mafia-like track record has no business scolding her Black male client executive about what an acceptable “diversity” mantra is for his own company… and then bragging about it later while seated in this client’s own office — unbeknownst to the client!
It’s just one, big, self-inflicted, ego-driven mess after another.
I almost feel sorry for you, Heide, for the way they have left you holding the bag in 2026. But then, I recall all of your own direct participation for years now, and my sympathy evaporates.
You yourself have also been in voluminous receipt for years of PRSA National Board member survey results / open-ended survey comments (which I obtained through FOIA), documenting concerning (yet secretive) knowledge by PRSA National board members of “wrongdoing by staff.” (see example below)
Yet amid all of this poor oversight, you and your PRSA board / executive staff buddies have constantly bullied and demonized me, as if I somehow were the culprit / problem, as opposed to my actual role as the whistleblower of observed PRSA misconduct… begging PRSA to stop it with the corruption.
For example, at the end of 2023, PRSA / CEO Linda Thomas Brooks (with the financial wizardry of CFO Phil Bonaventura, of course) produced a “year in review” brochure for PRSA that published more than $5 million in multiple math errors, on 11-month, legally noncompliant PRSA financials that ALSO had been retroactively changed from the prior year, without announcement or notation: https://www.marybethwest.com/p-r-popcorn-alert-i-hate-math-anti-mantra-cracks-under-prsas-5-mill-error/
Helpful hint, Heide: Get out your calculator to do some ciphering, because those sub-columns (below) do NOT add up.
Does PRSA’s “auditor” know how to proof anything?
You’ve been the Audit Committee Chair recently, Heide, but what good are you in this function, when you’ve already admitted to the world that you have “NOT A CLUE” about financials.
Apparently, you were in good company with PRSA’s now-former CFO and CEO.
PRSA published this bonkers document in December 2023 and placed it on your PRSA website for weeks, until I raised the issue that the financials were garbage on my blog.
At which time, Linda hastily yanked the document down off the Internet and (quietly) replaced it with a corrected version (although still legally non-compliant with 11-month instead of 12-month financials)… with no announcement or explanation, much less any apology.
Not satisfied with her own cover-up attempt, however, Linda then took it upon herself to hold one-to-one phone chats with members, and further defamed / demonized ME for somehow misreading these bogus numbers (false!), which she further dismissed as a mere “typo” / graphic design error (also false!):
I should also flag this form send by CFO Bonaventura for signature by Joseph “Sacrificial Lamb” Abreu in 2022 (the year he was PRSA Treasurer and Audit Committee Chair).
This form as located in an open records request showed it was pre-checked as claiming there had been no “actual or suspected fraud” or “allegations of fraud,” when this information was patently false, per reports to the New York Attorney General documenting a vast range of unexplained reporting discrepancies, for years — copied to PRSA’s legal counsel (Venable).
Talk about the evils of “disinformation,” Heide… It feels like PRSA is the resident Disinformation Factory of the PR industry, largely from secrecy and seeking to hide things.
See Past National Chair and cabal member Mike Cherenson’s secret take on PRSA’s ethics problems in 2021 — the very month I got kicked out of PRSA, thanks in part to him (e-mail obtained through FOIA):
I don’t know if Cherenson was trying to pre-bunk, de-bunk, or just traffick in bunk.
He’s certainly gone to great pains in the past year to travel from New Jersey to my home market in Knoxville, Tennessee, to speak on my alma mater campus, to posture as an expert and try to cast legitimacy on PRSA — co-opting my own alma mater to do it:
Clearly, on March 29, 2021 — 14 days after I received Garland Stansell’s hostile and illegally retaliatory certified letter banning me for life from all future PRSA events and telling me I was not ethically fit to be in his presence any longer — Cherenson was sending frantic e-mail to Joseph “Sacrificial Lamb” Abreu and PRSA staffer Jeneen Garcia. Per above, Cherenson was clutching his pearls over dishonest PRSA CEO communication and behaviors and a “black hole of decision making.” Yet he was simultaneously seeking to have me expelled from PRSA for the sin of making the same observations, for years.
Previously, there were these ugly e-mails (obtained legally via FOIA) between you and other 2020 PRSA Board members, Heide, on PRSA’s “strategy on MBW”:
The only “strategy on MBW” that ever could have worked with me, Heide – to answer former PRSA Board member Samantha Villegas’s rather obtuse e-mail query to the entire board in 2020 on how to deal with me – was to be truthful, act in good faith, and stop gaslighting / lying all the time about core ethics, governance, and financial issues.
But clearly, no such manifestation of the PRSA Board in the past decade has materialized.
Instead, I get kicked to the curb, while Villegas scores high-profile speaking engagements with PRSA in 2025 on how to be “ethical”:
PRSA is a disgrace to the PR industry, Heide.
It’s because of a zero-accountability culture that attacks and demonizes people who ask obvious questions and call out obvious problems.
In 2023, Heide, you negotiated – upon being hired by the folks at Central Arkansas Water (a public utility that is subject to FOIA open-records law) – for hard-working water utility ratepayers across rural Arkansas to pay your New York-based PRSA dues and your PRSA “business” travel / other expenses (that otherwise weren’t instead heaped upon other hard-working PRSA dues-paying members to pay for you). (See FOIA records below.)
It seems you have precious little skin in PRSA’s game, Heide. That’s a problem.
Kind of like Del Galloway’s mode, everyone else but you pays the expenses and losses you casually inflict, by all appearances. (If this is inaccurate, then please explain, with verifiable facts and documentation).
And now, PRSA is awash in red ink. But… of course it is!
The 2024 IRS 990 finally came out in only recent days online, and it’s yet another bloodbath (-$156,701).
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131582190/202513169349309021/full
It documents more than $1 million in member dollars paid in 2024 to only three people / entities (all of whom received RAISES in 2024, compared to 2023): Your now-former CEO, your now-former CFO, and your dirt-bag PRSA legal counsel of record (Venable, LLP).
In fact, your (PRSA’s) 2024 legal bills from Venable as cited in the latest 990 are the highest on PRSA record.
Which tells anyone with a brain that you (PRSA) have massive legal problems, Heide. And they’re not my fault. I haven’t been a member for years. These receipts are on you and PRSA leadership:
I mean, good grief, Heide.
And the above trainwrecks were from several years ago.
Who knows how badly all of these issues have devolved, since then. Culture eats strategy for lunch, as the saying goes.
Again, I urge you to start complying with federal and New York law, get your house in order with PRSA’s crackpot finances, and start reporting overdue disclosures of how many members you don’t have anymore (including your PRSSA student rosters, which have been utterly decimated, thanks to 10+ straight years of mismanagement).
Report accurately, please, precisely how much more member treasure has been squandered in 2025 on outrageous PRSA executive salaries (with hideous results), as well as on your legal bills with PRSA’s grossly overpaid law firm (Venable, LLP).
Incidentally — and saving the most astonishing part for last — it turns out Venable, LLP has quite a dark history of its own, Heide, alongside John Paluszek’s firm.
That history is wrapped entirely around the axle of PRSA Past National President John Paluszek, of Ketchum (Omnicom), who has brokered sweetheart deals for Ketchum/PRSA, over many decades, with overweening influence as a PRSA beneficiary.
Back in 2021, neither John Paluszek nor Venable nor PRSA ever disclosed to me during their sham “grievance” process targeting me (which Venable project-managed for PRSA / Paluszek) that Venable and Paluszek’s Ketchum had their own separate, prior, highly lucrative business relationship in league with the Kremlin / Vladimir Putin’s government.
Nor was any disclosure made to me that in 2020-21 Ketchum’s and parent conglomerate Omnicom’s Russia-based interests were still going VERY strong — thanks in large part to their shrewd use of PR trade associations as “legitimacy” front groups.
As I’m sure you know, 1989 PRSA Past National President John Paluszek’s Omnicom-owned Ketchum PR firm, included as its client some years ago the Vladimir Putin / Russian Federation regime and its owned energy company Gazprom.
They sub-contracted with Venable (PRSA’s legal counsel of record), for “government relations” work.
In fact, Ketchum / Omnicom worked for years and years and years with Putin’s government directly, to advance the socialists’ agenda in America and around the world.
Please tell me you’re aware of this, Heide:
Or did you not know these compromising facts about Past PRSA National President John Paluszek and his agency at Ketchum, when you (PRSA) renamed in 2024 PRSA’s Atlas Award the “The John L. Paluszek Atlas Award for Lifetime Achievement in International Public Relations?” (see below).
https://www.prsa.org/conferences-and-awards/awards/individual-awards/atlas-award
- Please tell me, Heide, that – as a Rose Law Firm alumna yourself – that you at least know that Ketchum’s name showed up multiple times in the U.S. Department of Justice’s May 2023 Durham Report on your personal political idol’s (Hillary Clinton’s) “Russia collusion” hijinks with the Steele Dossier.
- Please tell me that you at least know that your new PRSA chapter president of PRSA’s flagship New York Chapter (Paul Cohen) worked hands-on as a senior adviser to the Kremlin’s Presidential Press Office and the Government of the Russian Federation during his own time at Ketchum, and now, his presidency of PRSA-NY coincides this month with the swearing-in of New York’s first full-on socialist mayor:
- Please tell me, Heide, that you at least are aware of Ketchum’s Russian Federation disclosures to the DOJ that documented PRSA Gold Anvil winner and past “senior counsel” PRSA Board member Ray Kotcher’s generous political donations to a certain political party, alongside the name “Chuck Dolan” (right above Ray’s name), and with “Charles Dolan” later turning up in the May 2023 DOJ Durham Report on Hillary Clinton’s “Russia collusion” ethics violations more than 400 times?
Please tell me, Heide, that you and Ray Day at least knew full-well last year that Michael Maslansky was an Omnicom-owned Russian Federation subcontractor to Ketchum, too, when you / Ray / PRSA brought Maslansky on board last May to coach PRSA members on a nationwide webinar on how to (essentially) subvert U.S. federal compliance regs on DEI and ESG with creative language that avoids detection as DEI and ESG:
- Please tell me, Heide, that you at least know that the PRSA Foundation’s recent 2025 chairmanship by a Fleishman Hillard executive is a little weird for PRSA now, given FleishmanHillard Vanguard’s (Omnicom) Russian Federation documentation cited on an obscure 2019 U.K. Companies House financial disclosure.
- Please tell me, Heide, that you at least are aware that Ketchum’s and Fleishman Hillard’s parent conglomerate, Omnicom, is now under a U.S. Federal Trade Commission compliance order post-merger, for the very reason that Omnicom was investigated for participating in an alleged “anti-conservative” “cartel,” as documented by a U.S. Congressional report, to silence “conservative voices.” You know. Kind of like mine.
Because if you didn’t know about PRSA’s Omnicom / Ketchum / Fleishman Hillard / Paluszek / Kotcher / Cohen / Dolan / Maslansky connections to the Russian Government / Vladimir Putin, then consider yourself now duly informed, Heide.
You’re welcome.
Maybe you need to inform your own employer CEO at Central Arkansas Water about these details, Heide, since his own mother in-law apparently used to be Hillary Clinton’s “personal secretary” at the White House for eight years. (see FOIA doc below)
I’m reasonably sure your own Governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, would find all this stuff just as fascinating as I do, given her past role as arguably the most prominent PR person in the world at the White House… yet insulted in online outbursts by the likes of your mentor and PRSA’s most outspoken and least competent basement-dweller:
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/stealth-players-whos-putins-american-payroll-n44876
https://efile.fara.gov/docs/5758-Supplemental-Statement-20140128-21.pdf
https://efile.fara.gov/docs/5931-Exhibit-AB-20100621-5.pdf
I would normally wish someone in your horrifically self-compromised position “Good luck,” Heide, because you’re absolutely going to need it, from a legal standpoint.
However, nothing “good” can come from PRSA continuing to exist. The fact that what I’ve placed in this very long blog is only tip-of-the-iceberg of what’s happened in PRSA, should be sobering.
Even if you set aside all of PRSA’s front-group connections to Omnicom and Ketchum and Russia and Putin and Hillary Clinton and the Biden Administration, for Pete’s sake, it cannot escape notice that you / PRSA are now waving your flag of financial-crisis desperation within only a few months of that Omnicom FTC antitrust-compliance order that requires Omnicom to cease-and-desist with its partisan political, pro-liberal, anti-conservative, front group veiled money / propping-up, and all manner of pro-socialist crap.
Which tells me this:
That PRSA maybe isn’t getting the 2026 “membership” or “sponsorship” funding from Omnicom that you thought you would be getting. And now PRSA’s tail is in quite the sling.
To borrow the words of my mentor, Susan Hart, APR, Fellow PRSA: “Too bad, so sad.”
For the PRSA Board’s sake, I sure hope former CFO Bonaventura didn’t let those D&O insurance premiums lapse as his going-away present to the PRSA Board last year, because otherwise, you might lose your house, Heide, given the way things are looking.
I don’t wish misfortune on anyone, but the era of non-accountability that PRSA arrogantly has enjoyed and wallowed in, for years… is over.
Particularly given all the apparent PRSA Board member violations and abuses and scheming over the years, in flagrant failures of New York state-mandated duties of care, loyalty, and obedience for state-chartered non-profit business leagues: https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Right-From-the-Start.pdf
While this organization is dead to me in so many ways because your cabal of village idiots killed its integrity so long ago, Heide, PRSA’s insidious damage being inflicted upon the PR industry isn’t finished yet, sadly. I’m going to continue calling things out, for as long as it takes, to make these harms cease.
A word of parting suggestion (not legal advice, mind you… just a suggestion):
Hire an attorney, Heide.
One who works for you and only you, and who is reasonably competent enough to take one look at this report and this very small sampling of evidence herein, and advise you to resign yesterday from PRSA, and never look back.
Because I can assure you, PRSA’s legal counsel of record – particularly if it’s still Venable, LLP of prior Ketchum subcontracting / Russian Federation fame – does NOT work for you (or for any honest PRSA members, for that matter).
No, ma’am. They do not.
They work for whomever is paying their big, fat bills and have been paying their big, fat bills for many, many years now, whether directly or indirectly or completely surreptitiously. And that’s clearly not you personally, Heide.
If PRSA’s circular firing squad hasn’t already started loading their muskets like a cluster of “Keystone Kops,” then believe me, they’re scrambling around right now, praying for gun powder, an NRA endorsement and a YouTube tutorial on what “locked and loaded” means.
For your own sake, I have trouble believing that you want to get caught up in that, to the extent that you aren’t already.
Think what happened to CEO Linda Thomas Brooks, Heide.
These people do not hesitate to throw people they view as expendable under the bus — then drive away. Particularly PRSA National “Not A Clue” Board Chairs, who are already on the YouTube record as wholly unqualified for the fiduciary role they hold.
Even though you’re culpable in PRSA’s years of misconduct because you were serving on its legally liable board since 2020, you’re potentially not as liable as some other people / mega-conglomerate(s)(?)… whichever ones were the actual architects of this house of cards. Your attorney may advise you (or not) to file your own complaint to the FTC – who knows. But hiring your own personal attorney who is paid by you to care about your interests in this matter is suggested.
To be clear, Venable, LLP apparently was PRSA’s legal counsel of record back in 2014 (or even far earlier) during its Ketchum subcontracting era / heyday for the Russians – as documented by the late, great Jack O’Dwyer, who – ironically – appears to be getting the last laugh here:
Rest in peace, Jack:
If there is anything in this blog post that appears somehow inaccurate, you (and everyone) are welcome to contact me. I will gladly update or amend any information for which there is documentation of any factual error.
Happy New Year, Heide.
Regards,
[…] even as mafia-like as some of the most prominent and well-resourced players in the PR industry sometimes behave, it’s stunning how penny-wise and pound-foolish these same folks can be, […]