Alphonse "Buddy" Fletcher, a major Democratic donor who has contributed to both President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, was dealt a major defeat last week by a New York City judge who dismissed a racial discrimination lawsuit he filed against a Manhattan building.
Fletcher, who saw his hedge fund crumble to bankruptcy in recent years after it was caught executing a Ponzi scheme, decided to sue the Upper West Side's iconic Dakota after it refused to sell him a fifth apartment in the building due to his deteriorating financial situation.
Fletcher says the decision not to sell him the $5.7 million property was due to his race and filed a lawsuit in 2011 asking for $200 million in damages to compensate for the discrimination.
That lawsuit was dismissed on Friday, according to a New York Post report.
Although Fletcher had demanded a jury trial, it is unclear whether he would have been able to afford the bills that would have come along with one. Fletcher owes $2.7 million in unpaid legal fees and his fund still owes more than $140 million in court judgments to investors.
His wife, former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, announced last week that she could not afford to continue her appeal on a failed gender discrimination lawsuit she filed against her former employer, law firm Kleiner Perkins.
All counts in her lawsuit were dismissed in March.
For Fletcher, the legal troubles will continue. He is being sued by pension funds in both Louisiana and Massachusetts. As of earlier this year, he also remained under investigation by both the FBI and the Securities Exchange Commission.
He had been promising—and delivering—returns that were seen by his investors as "too good to be true." He had long made it his trademark to promise "triple-digit" returns.
The pension funds stuck with him anyway, and didn't learn that their suspicions were correct until they tried to withdraw money in 2011 and were denied by Fletcher.
Before Fletcher's financial career went up in flames, he was a prominent Democratic donor. He was one of Obama's inaugural donors in 2008 and hosted a cocktail hour before the Inaugural Ball.
He was able to boast at the event that the inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander, was a professor at Yale thanks to a fellowship that he funded at the university to promote race relations. The previous holder of the Alphonse Fletcher University Professorship was Cornel West.
Though he wound up being a major Obama supporter, he contributed to the maximum amount of money to Clinton during her failed primary fight in 2008.
He has made more than $200,000 worth of contributions to Democratic candidates and groups over the years.