Fundraiser For Indiana Pizza Shop Owners Abruptly Ends After Reaching Nearly $850,000

A viral fundraising campaign for an Indiana pizza shop whose owners said they could not cater a same-sex wedding if asked, has quickly ended after approaching one million dollars.

Just before Dana Loesch’s show on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze TV started on Wednesday, a staffer created a GoFundMe fundraising campaign for the family who owns Memories Pizza. That campaign was in response to attacks forcing the restaurant to close temporarily. Crystal O’Connor and her father Kevin O’Connor had been interviewed by a local Indiana TV news reporter who asked them how they felt about Governor Pence’s “religious freedom” law.

“If a gay couple came in and wanted us to provide pizzas for their wedding, we would have to say no,” Crystal O’Connor said. “We are a Christian establishment.”

That set off a firestorm the family says brought death threats. One high school coach was suspended for suggesting the restaurant be burned down, and the attacks on social media were often intense and graphic.

In just over 12 hours the fundraiser broke $55,000 in donations. It quickly went viral, with the help of Rush Limbaugh trumpeting it as an opportunity to “ram it down these people’s throats.” 

“These people” being the LGBT community, apparently. 

Limbaugh also told listeners there were 10 people who were responsible for the social media attacks on Memories Pizza.

“It takes a concerted effort rooted in lies and fraud and deceit sponsored by 10 people paid for by George Soros and Media Matters to gin something like this up and to make you get dispirited and depressed, and think that you are vastly overwhelmed and outnumbered. You are not,” Limbaugh promised his listeners Friday. “We’re talking about a minority that’s not even 5% of the population here. Eighty percent of this country claims to be Christian, which is its own interesting little factoid given what’s happening here. But that’s for another discussion.”

Late Friday evening, after concerns of fraud raised that Loesch said were baseless, the fundraiser was closed, little more than 48 hours after it began – in what seems to be a relatively short time for a GoFundMe campaign.

Once it ended, 29,160 people had donated $842,387.

 

GoFundMe takes 7.9% plus 30 cents of each donation, so it looks like the O’Connor family presumably will get over three-quarters of a million dollars –  a little over $767,000, assuming our calculations are correct.

Why did Loesch shut the campaign down just two days in?

Our request for information, made late Friday via Twitter, did not receive a response. 

 

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