Fact Check: NO Evidence Kamala Harris Campaign Paid Beyoncé $10 Million To Attend Harris Rally
Did Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign pay superstar Beyoncé $10 million to attend a Harris rally in Houston? No, that’s not true: No public evidence exists to support this claim. The Federal Elections Commission’s most recent records do not show that the Harris campaign paid Beyoncé for appearing at the rally. A campaign finance expert told Lead Stories he did not see any proof of such a payment. There also is no reporting from credible news organizations about it.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 27, 2024. It said:
Beyonce told a crowd ‘I’m not here as a celebrity’
Her $10M paycheck says she’s full of shit
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on October 29, 2024 19:21:07 UTC)
The post provided no evidence to support its claim of a $10 million payout.
On October 25, 2024, Beyoncé appeared in Houston at the Harris for President rally, where she spoke. Her speech can be watched beginning at the 23:15 mark in a video posted on C-SPAN (archived here), the nonprofit U.S. public broadcaster.
Telling the crowd that “I’m not here as a celebrity. I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother,” she gave no indication that her appearance was paid.
Lead Stories searched Harris’ Federal Election Commission (FEC) processed filings of candidate disbursements (archived here), or payments, and found no payments to Beyoncé listed, as this screenshot shows:
(Source: FEC screenshot taken on October 29, 2024 19:29:11 UTC)
The current filings, however, show payment data only as of September 30, 2024, nearly a month before the Harris rally. The FEC website notes that processing the filings “can take days (for electronic filings) or weeks (for paper filings).”
Lead Stories also searched the FEC raw filing disbursements (archived here), which include data until October 17, 2024, eight days before the rally, and also found no payments to Beyoncé listed. According to the FEC website, this data includes information that “has not yet been categorized and coded by the FEC” and is taken “directly from a committee’s raw, electronic reports.” The data does not include paper reports.
The screenshot below shows the results of our search of the raw filing disbursements: two payments, neither to Beyoncé.
(Source: FEC screenshot taken on October 30, 2024 18:01:12 UTC)
Andrew Mayersohn (archived here), a researcher for Open Secrets, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization that tracks money in U.S. politics (archived here), told Lead Stories via email on October 29, 2024, that he did not see “anything that could plausibly be a $10 million payment to Beyoncé,” after looking at the FEC’s raw expenditure search:
October 25, 2024 is the day after the pre-general filing period closed, so if the expenditure was made that day it wouldn’t be reported until after the election.
It would be hard to conclusively disprove it until the post-general FEC reports come out, but unless there are corroborating details, I strongly suspect that it was made up.
A search for news and reports on Google (archived here), using the keywords “beyonce,” “paid,” “10 million” and “harris rally,” found no actual news reports that the singer was paid $10 million to appear at the rally.
Lead Stories contacted Beyoncé and the Harris campaign about the claim and will update this fact check when a response is received.
At the time this fact check was written, PolitiFact had reviewed the same claim.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks of claims that mention Vice President Kamala Harris can be read here. Our fact checks of claims about Beyoncé are here. Other fact checks of claims about the 2024 U.S. presidential election can be found here.
