Springtime for Harrell in PRSA…

If you ever want to teach a PR Masterclass in how NOT to write a mea culpa letter that instead comes across as a fake, kumbaya, “WE’RE TRANSPARENT!” nothing-to-see-here gaslighting exercise, then consider this for your classroom’s “Exhibit A”:

PRSA National Chair Heide Harrell’s May 19, 2026, “Message from the PRSA Chair.”

I’ll get to her letter in a second, but first, some context…

The Public Relations Society of America abruptly announced in January 2026 that they are in a financial and membership crisis. This sudden candor followed years of showboating a very different (and deceptive) tune to members, sponsors, and the larger industry, in what may prove later to be acts of state and federal fraud, once this tortured saga finally plays out.

Some time ago, I found through a government open records FOIA request PRSA staff’s open-ended feedback that was queried by the PRSA Board back in 2020, before PRSA hired its previous CEO, Linda Thomas Brooks.

(2020 was also 2026 PRSA Chair Heide Harrell’s first year on the board… so the $1.46 million loss of member dollars inflicted by the Board and senior staff that year occurred on her watch, too, not to mention subsequent years of losses.)

I’ve pasted the staff comments from 2020, below, with my own highlights.

Again: this was in 2020, during COVID.

PRSA, then led by the exceptionally inept Garland Stansell, was still reeling from the legacies of Jane Dvorak’s and Tony D’Angelo’s chairmanships.

Yet the PRSA Board as led by Mr. Stansell allowed PRSA’s CFO to report to himself for 18 solid months (and across three fiscal years) as dually serving CFO + “Interim CEO,” in a massive conflict of interest, only compounded further by the pandemic and everyone working from home, including Mr. PRSA Check-Approver + Check-Signer.

WHAT could go wrong?!?!

Apart from a few weird fixations on “Trump,” some of the rank-and-file PRSA staffers’ phrases that caught my eye included:

“…double standards”

“giv(ing) staff migraines…”

“Someone who can save the sinking ship.”

“PRSA does not listen…”

“Customers are not treated with the respect and loyalty they are entitled to.”

“…total disaster.”

“…scuttlebutt around the office.”

“…retaliatory culture.”

“…results were scathing.”

“…wrong path…”

“…fear of retribution…”

And those are just a few remarks.

In reading some of these staff comments from 2020, it’s abundantly clear that PRSA’s culture had already been suffered by staff, in a scenario that was beyond toxic.

This fact was further codified by this shocker of an internal memo the following year (legally obtained through FOIA), at the end of 2021, with references to PRSA’s “hostile work place” by PRSA’s own Board Chair-Elect Felicia Blow, not to mention other Board members’ and / or staff’s “inappropriate behaviors.”

I mean… SHEESH!

I truly feel for many of PRSA’s rank-and-file employees with little to no power in the association.

They clearly were BEGGING the PRSA Board in 2020 not to foul up the CEO hiring decision.

(With PRSA’s recent mass-layoffs in 2026, I’m sure the folks who tried back then in 2020 to give the most honest feedback were downsized first — since that’s how PRSA rolls.)

Those pleas in 2020 — like every other piece of good advice rendered to PRSA’s Board — fell on deaf ears, including by PRSA’s then-Chair, who, in my opinion, didn’t even have the competence to be dogcatcher in Birmingham, Alabama… much less, chairman over a national PR association already in a pre-COVID financial crisis thanks in part to him.

We’re now in 2026, and these PRSA chickens have met their roost.

Heide Harrell is now at the helm as roost-master — hand-selected by PRSA’s leadership as the best PRSA could muster for the Society, in stewarding PRSA’s ongoing race to the bottom.

As a reminder to the PR industry, clips from a public-facing March 2021 webinar to PRSSA students can be viewed below, if you’d like a sense for Ms. Harrell’s management flair, so to speak:

In her oversight of PRSA’s current crisis, Ms. Harrell decided just today to issue the following member-update letter (below), which — as noted — deserves a hallowed place in the PR “Transparency” Hall of Shame.

Judge for yourself, recognizing that it’s now mid-May 2026, but PRSA’s members still have not been told yet:

1) how many members PRSA does not have anymore; 2) how big their deficit was in 2025 (or anything specific about financials for 2025, despite that Joseph Abreu has recruited a woefully incomplete and shallow slate of 2026 Board nominees, who now are flying blind and without a net as to the legal / financial liability situation they’re being set up to assume next year, presuming PRSA stays in business that long); and — equally notable yet hidden — 3) how bad PRSA’s solvency ratio now is.

Naturally, the most sinister part of Ms. Harrell’s crackpot letter is her reference to PRSA “examining member behavior…”

What is that supposed to mean?

Never mind. From personal experience, I can tell you precisely what that remark means:

It means PRSA has already blacklisted all recent “complainers” and staff whistleblowers and “unhappy members” — and they’re all now being placed on officially unofficial notice, that if they don’t shut their yaps about Team Harrell’s and her Board predecessors’ years of ineptitude, then complainers will be given exactly the same retaliatory treatment as given to Mary Beth West.

The last thing Team Harrell will tolerate is PRSA’s own membership “examining LEADERSHIP behavior” …

They’re the culprits of PRSA’s mess — not regular members.

Over years and years, Ms. Harrell and her Board broke written PRSA Board policy (excerpt below, legally obtained via FOIA), by failing to operate within a balanced budget to keep revenues in even modest excess of expense — which is the de minimis requirement of these people.

Every single year that Garland Stansell and his cadre on the PRSA Past Presidents Council (like Michelle Olson, Michelle Egan, Joseph Abreu, and Ray Day), who ran five, six, or seven-figure budget deficit years, did so IN VIOLATION OF PRSA POLICY.

Every single Board member involved should be held accountable for their governance and policy violations.

Yet instead of accountability, the industry gets more of Ms. Harrell’s and her tribe’s goofy, self-serving and ineffectual band-aids, to their all-out blood-gusher of red ink.

For example, I find it beyond remarkable that Ms. Harrell considers her rinky-dink and grossly pandering “Women of Impact” PRSA awards program (at $450-595 cost to members per entry — vastly exceeding the cost of annual PRSA dues) to be a “strategy” for PRSA’s “more sustainable future.”

But that’s precisely the quality of logic you get from a person who has openly boasted of not having passed one single section of the G.R.E.

Incidentally, of the four women who PRSA lauded in the April 3 tweet below, the so-called “ethics” lady and the Latina have zero-tolerance for this lady (me), who dared ask some simple questions about where PRSA’s money went, back in 2020-21.

These specific individuals do not merit even serving as PRSA dogcatcher, either, much less being celebrated as emblematic of “impact” — apart from their “impact” of helping pave PRSA’s highway to financial collapse and irrelevancy and global embarrassment.

Incidentally, this one — Rosanna Fiske — flacked and deflected for years in her day job for the ethically rotten Wells Fargo, across years and years of WF’s fake-accounts scandal, which victimized mega-thousands of innocent consumers, including countless women — many of little financial means to fight back or rectify their ruined credit scores as a result of Wells Fargo’s greed.

In fact, “Florida Gator” Rosanna Fiske’s Wells Fargo engaged so much duplicity and retaliation against many of Wells Fargo’s rank-and-file bank branch staff (again, with countless female bank whistleblowers targeted and victimized), that the DOJ slapped Wells Fargo with $3 billion in fines for executives’ misconduct, not to mention other batches of federal fines.

So, THAT’s the kind of shady outfit that PRSA’s 2024 “Gold Anvil” winner and so-called “woman of impact,” Rosanna Fiske, sports on her resumé (which also includes Omnicom’s Ketchum… no surprise there).

PRSA and its leadership — past and present — should be investigated immediately for malfeasance, cartel activity, and money-laundering.

Mary Beth West is a public relations strategist based in Tennessee, with a long history of calling for federal and state government investigation of PRSA, following millions of dollars in documented PRSA financial discrepancies and compliance failures with New York State law and U.S. federal antitrust law, among other statutes and regulations.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT PRSA’S ABUNDANT EVIDENCE OF ILLEGAL CARTEL ACTIVITY AND ANTITRUST VIOLATIONS, by visiting blog posts from earlier this year, at this LINK: https://www.marybethwest.com/news/ .