Former North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson and his wife, Yolanda Hill, filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy on November 3, with court documents showing the couple now owes nearly $800,000. It marks the fourth time the pair has sought bankruptcy protection since the late 1990s, following prior filings in 1998, 1999 and 2003.
A Pattern Stretching Back Decades
According to the News & Observer, the couple has racked up more than $120,000 in credit-card-purchase debt and owes about $3,000 in taxes or other debts to the IRS, on top of facing several lawsuits from banks over unpaid balances. Court documents reviewed by the paper also list Yolanda Hill as unemployed. This is not the first time financial trouble has dogged the Robinsons: as ABC News has reported, Mark and Yolanda Robinson, then doing business as Precious Beginnings, filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy on January 8, 2003, after earlier bankruptcy filings in 1998 and 1999.
That 2003 case reported debts surpassing $1 million, including $290,525 in unsecured debts and $871,550 in secured debts, per the same outlet's review of the filing. The Internal Revenue Service later filed a motion asking the Bankruptcy Court to compel Robinson to file federal tax returns for 1998 through 2002, and he ultimately filed those back taxes in May 2003 — an estimated $15,800 in income taxes the couple had failed to pay, which they later repaid that year. The Robinsons never completed that repayment plan: they lost their Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in October 2003 due to the failure of the debtors to comply with the requirements of the plan, the outlet's report states. Court documents cited in the current reporting also show the couple had two cars repossessed around that same period.
What Chapter 13 Means This Time
Chapter 13 bankruptcy creates a payment plan allowing debtors to repay what they owe over time rather than liquidating assets, and it helps prevent creditors from foreclosing on a debtor's home while the plan is in effect. Robinson has previously acknowledged the family's financial struggles, describing in 2022 a past habit of bad money management. Court documents from the new filing list eight guns owned by Robinson, valued collectively at $5,950, with some described as semiautomatic.
An attorney for Robinson and Hill did not respond to a request for comment on the new filing, according to the News & Observer's reporting. Robinson himself has pointed elsewhere for an explanation, citing costly litigation and political gamesmanship by my detractors.
Nonprofit Debts Still Unresolved
The family's financial entanglements extend beyond the couple's personal filings. Yolanda Hill closed her nonprofit, Balanced Nutrition, in 2024. The organization, which connected childcare centers with government-funded nutrition programs, made improper claims for payment from a federally funded food program and improperly documented purchases, and it owed North Carolina $132,000, according to the News & Observer.
As of March, Balanced Nutrition had not repaid $101,142 in misspent funds, missing its repayment deadline by nearly a year, according to a North Carolina DHHS spokesperson quoted by WUNC. NCDHHS submitted the outstanding balance to a collections agency on March 24, which was set to pursue it for six months. Separately, American Express filed legal action in January against Balanced Nutrition and Hill seeking more than $19,000 in unpaid credit-card bills, and Hill also faced legal action from the lender SoFi over $26,844 in debt tied to a personal loan she took out in 2023, per the same report.
A Broader String of Legal and Political Setbacks
The bankruptcy filing lands amid a cascade of other financial and legal headaches for Robinson. The North Carolina State Board of Elections found in 2024 that his 2020 campaign committed several campaign finance violations, and Robinson was ordered to pay the board $35,000 that year, which he paid in December 2024. Vox Insights sued Robinson in October 2024 over an alleged unpaid $114,000 bill for services; that lawsuit was later dropped after an undisclosed mediated settlement reported by Carolina Journal in September 2025.
Robinson also sued former Greensboro porn shop employee Louis Money and CNN after Money told The Assembly that Robinson frequently patronized the shop in the 1990s and 2000s and claimed Robinson failed to pay him for a bootleg porn video purchase. Money's own lawsuit accused Robinson's suit of being illegitimate and said Robinson used the legal process against him to advance an ulterior purpose. Robinson dropped his defamation lawsuit against CNN three months after filing it — a case stemming from a September 2024 CNN investigative story reporting that Robinson made racist and sexually explicit comments on the website Nude Africa, where CNN reported he used slurs and called himself a Black Nazi and a perv, and recalled peeping into a women's locker room as a teenager to watch women shower.
That reporting preceded Robinson's loss in the governor's race to Democrat Josh Stein, as some of his top campaign staff quit amid the scandal and Donald Trump, who went on to win the 2024 presidential election, distanced himself from Robinson. Robinson has since kept a public profile, hosting the podcast Mark Robinson Unscripted for Real Truth Media, a podcasting and conservative news company, since March, while maintaining a sizable social-media following through frequent short-form conservative commentary.
