Tiffany Carr will not spend a day in prison.<\/p>\n
If you don\u2019t remember her name, you should.<\/p>\n
For years, Carr ran the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence, entrusted by the Legislature with tens of millions in state and federal funding for Florida\u2019s domestic violence shelters.<\/p>\n
Over just three years, Carr received an astonishing $7.5 million in compensation. Florida investigators later determined that $3.4 million came from a scheme that defrauded the Department of Children and Families. Her CFO, Patricia Duarte, received another $291,000. When they were arrested in 2023, then-Attorney General Ashley Moody described it as the theft of more than $3.7 million intended to provide safe haven for victims of domestic violence.<\/p>\n
Carr could have faced as much as 30 years in prison. Instead, she received 10 years of probation, $100,000 in restitution and about $155,000 in investigative costs. Duarte received eight years of probation and 350 hours of community service.<\/p>\n
I spent 10 years running Harbor House of Central Florida. I know what this money represents. It is the advocate answering a hotline at 2 a.m., a hotel room when the shelter is full, transportation to safety, an attorney helping a victim get an injunction or a safe place to hide from someone who has threatened to kill her.<\/p>\n
I also know this case personally. I spent years providing records and working with investigators, legislators, journalists and prosecutors. Speaking up cost me a job I loved and changed the trajectory of my career. I continued providing information until Carr\u2019s sentencing because I believed eventually the system would work.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t just about Tiffany Carr anymore. It is about what we are willing to accept.<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t need another law to hold Carr accountable. We had laws, investigators and prosecutors. Carr entered a no-contest plea to fraud and official misconduct and faced the possibility of decades in prison. What we needed was the courage to use the laws we already had.<\/p>\n
We have seen what happens when powerful people prey on vulnerable Floridians before. Jeffrey Epstein sexually exploited girls in Palm Beach County and received an extraordinarily favorable plea agreement in 2008. Now Hope Florida has raised serious questions about millions of dollars associated with helping vulnerable Floridians and where that money ultimately went.<\/p>\n
These cases are not the same. But they should make us ask why accountability seems so difficult when the people at the bottom have the least power.<\/p>\n
Girls. Battered women. Poor children. Families struggling to survive.<\/p>\n
Carr\u2019s case stretched across the tenures of three Florida attorneys general: Pam Bondi, Ashley Moody and now James Uthmeier. We have become so consumed with whether someone has an R or a D after their name that we have forgotten to ask a more important question: Is this right?<\/p>\n
If someone in your own party does something wrong, demand accountability. If someone you voted for fails to protect the public, demand better. If someone powerful exploits people who have almost no power, don\u2019t look away because confronting it is politically inconvenient.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t need another law for that. We need courage and integrity.<\/p>\n
I learned long ago that speaking up has a price. I paid one. I would do it again because silence has a price too, and usually someone with less power pays it.<\/p>\n
Carr walked out of court with probation and millions of the wealth she accumulated during those years apparently intact. Her CFO got probation and community service. How did we get to a place where that is OK?<\/p>\n
Laws sitting in a statute book don\u2019t protect anyone. People willing to enforce them do.<\/p>\n
The next woman who calls a domestic violence hotline and is told there is no room doesn\u2019t know Tiffany Carr. She doesn\u2019t care whether the attorney general is a Republican or a Democrat. She doesn\u2019t care who won the last election.<\/p>\n
She needs somewhere safe to go. She needs an advocate to answer the phone. She needs a shelter bed. She needs someone in power to believe that money intended to save her life is worth protecting.<\/p>\n
And right now, she needs the rest of us.<\/p>\n
Stop asking which side you\u2019re on. Start asking whether what happened was right.<\/p>\n
Then have the courage to do something about it.<\/p>\n
Carol Wick is the president of Sharity, an Orlando-based international consulting firm, and a former finalist for Central Floridian of the Year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tiffany Carr will not spend a day in prison. If you don\u2019t remember her name, you should. For…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":418666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[483,482,139,141,140,109,76410],"class_list":["post-418665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-commentary","tag-opinion","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-social","tag-social-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/418666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}