On November 5, 2020, a man named Frederic N. Eshelman contacted True the Vote and donated $2.5 million to help pay for lawsuits challenging the 2020 election results. This was the largest donation True the Vote had ever received. TtV used the money to establish a whistleblower program, to provide resources for the lawsuits filed in federal court on behalf of voters in four states and for groundbreaking research into election fraud.
12 days later, Eshelman sent TtV president, Catherine Engelbrecht, an email demanding the return of the money. TtV offered to return $1 million of his money to settle the matter. 2 days later, Eshelman filed the first of 2 lawsuits saying TtV had failed to provide an accounting of how the remainder of his money was spent.
When asked about the election fraud:
Eshelman voluntarily dismissed the first lawsuit after attorneys representing both Eshelman and TvT had a conference with the federal judge who cast doubts on his claims. He immediately filed the second lawsuit in the Texas state court. This practice is commonly referred to as “judge shopping”.
Eshelman claimed his gift of $2.5 million was a “conditional gift” and that he had a right to a refund because his conditions were not met. In early April, 2021, the Texas state court dismissed the lawsuit, finding that Eshelman did not have standing to bring his claims.
Engelbrecht stated that:
So who is Frederic Eshelman?
Fred started out in 1985 founding a pharmaceutical consulting firm which became Pharmaceutical Product Development (PPD) in 1989. He took the company public in 1996 but it was taken private in 2011 in a deal with affiliates from The Carlyle Group and Hellman & Friedman. Forbes reports he made $160 million from the sale after taxes. In the 10 years prior to selling to The Carlyle Group, PPD was awarded over $600,000,000 in federal grants and contracts.
Fred’s next venture came with the founding of Furiex Pharmaceuticals in 2009 and sold it to Forest Labs & Actavis in 2014 and is said to have gained somewhere between $270 million and $350 million from the deal. He has invested in numerous medical and pharmaceutical companies.
Fred founded Eshelman Ventures in 2014. They are an investment company primarily interested in private medical companies. Fred has spent his career in the pharmaceutical industry.
Fred is a long time supporter of the republican party donating to many candidates over the years including Trump. He has donated to the republican parties in many states. Most of the money for the PAC Our American Century comes from Eshelman Ventures as well as the money for RightChange.com.
Fred’s biggest donation was in 2008 when he donated $30 million to The School of Pharmacy at UNC-Chapel Hill which was then renamed to Eshelman School of Pharmacy. In 2014 Eshelman pledged another $100 million to UNC-Chapel Hill and the Eshelman Institute for Innovation was formed. Fred currently sits on the Steering Board of the Eshelman Institute for Innovation. The Eshelman School of Pharmacy ranks no. 2 for NIH research funding among schools and colleges of pharmacy. Because of Eshelman’s support, the school has added expert faculty in many disciplines, enrolled promising students from around the country and world and increased faculty research funding from the National Institutes of Health.
UNC-Chapel Hill is also the home of Dr. Ralph Baric who has spent the past three decades as a world leader in the study of coronaviruses and in 2017, he was awarded a grant for more than $6 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to accelerate the development of a promising new drug in the fight against deadly coronaviruses.
‘Rapidly Emerging Antiviral Drug Development Initiative’ (READDI), a nonprofit drug research and development organization that was co-founded by Ralph Baric along with researchers from the Eshelman School of Parmacy and School of Medicine.
In 2020, The Eshelman Institute for Innovation (EII) awarded Sam Lai, Ph.D., a $50,000 opportunistic grant to pursue COVID-19 research. The award funded the development of a number of nebulized monoclonal antibody (mAb)-based therapy against COVID-19. This is based on the “muco-trapping” mAb platform that the Lai Lab has pioneered over the past 10 years. These mAbs, when delivered by inhalation, will neutralize the virus and quickly eliminate them from lung airways.
In May of this year, The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health awarded the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health a $65 million grant establishing an Antiviral Drug Discovery Center to develop oral antivirals that can combat pandemic-level viruses like COVID-19. The center builds upon and is tightly affiliated with UNC’s READDI.
The READDI-AViDD Center, one of nine established by the NIH, is an integrated public-private partnership with a renowned, interdisciplinary research team of experts from the Gillings School, UNC School of Medicine and UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy. They will apply cutting-edge technologies to develop oral therapies that target viral families with high potential to cause a pandemic in the future.
Eshelman has filed a handful of lawsuits over the years. One in 2017 was a defamation case against Puma Biotechnology, Inc. This was closed on March, 2020 and Eshelam was awarded over $26 million. Puma appealed and the Fourth Circuit Court vacated the award in 2021 stating, “there is no evidence justifying such an enormous award.” Interestingly, his lawyers were from the firm, Clare Locke LLP. The same firm representing Dominion Voting Systems in defamation litigation:
Clare Locke (who also represented Fred Eshelman) has this to say about the eletion:
Eshelman is currently involved in a lawsuit against some hunters who he claims ‘corner crossed’ on his property in Wyoming while on a hunting expedition. Eshelman owns thousands of acres in a checkerboard pattern that blocks access to over 6,000 acres of public land. The hunters built and deployed a custom step ladder to “corner cross” from one parcel of public land to another where the squares touch diagonally in a checkerboard layout, without stepping foot on the private land on either side. The owner of the adjacent private parcels, Fred Eshelman, insisted that these men had entered his private airspace without permission.
Does this mean Fred Eshelman betrayed True the Vote? That I do not know. But I find some of the connections in his business life interesting. It could be all coincidence, of course. I would simply like to know why Eshelman tried so hard to get back the money he donated to TtV and what changed his mind only 12 days after donating the money. That’s hardly enough time to see what the results of TtV were going to be and if Fred truly thought there was fraud in the election then why try to distract TtV with litigation proceedings and those costs involved at such a critical time in TtV’s proceedings?
To me, it seems like everything is connected…………
Thank you for the research and time you put in to this article Gray Barn. As I read the article I had Eshelman pegged for a shallow but devious trickster- it turns out he was in far deeper than just a fake political supporter trying to take down opposition. They not only have a playbook to take down the opposition, but have a side benefit of taking tax payers money from all the compromised US orgs. while they do it.
Great sleuthing on a deeply disturbed individual who is acutely adroit at working the judiciary system to bend the laws in his favor.