Crow Paid Tuition Of Clarence Thomas' "Child" For Private Schools

In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas sent his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of Georgia.

Photo Insert: The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear.

The boy, Mark Martin, had lived with the justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son,” by Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski reported for ProPublica.

Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill.

A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: The company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.

The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.

“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.

Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.

ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools.

The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.

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