Golden Globes sale was a 'sham,' Hollywood Foreign Press alleges in $150-million suit against Penske, others
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association claims the 2023 Golden Globes sale to Jay Penske and Todd Boehly was a sham built on fraud, monopoly power, and misused charitable money.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is fighting back hard, filing a $150-million lawsuit that brands the 2023 sale of the Golden Globes as an outright sham orchestrated by Jay Penske and Todd Boehly.
According to the suit, the transaction wasn’t a legitimate sale at all. Instead, it was a carefully structured fraud designed to strip the nonprofit HFPA of its most valuable asset while leaving it saddled with debts and stripped of control. The HFPA accuses the buyers of engineering a monopoly that now dominates the awards-show business.
Buried in the allegations is a particularly sharp claim: that charitable funds meant for good causes were diverted and misused to grease the deal. The HFPA, which once ran the Globes as a quirky foreign-press outfit, says it was systematically sidelined once the money and media rights became too tempting.
Penske, whose media empire includes Deadline and Variety, and Boehly, the Guggenheim Partners chief and part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, stand accused of leveraging their financial and industry muscle to lock out competition. The lawsuit paints a picture of Hollywood insiders turning a nonprofit’s crown jewel into a profit machine for themselves.
What makes the suit sting is how completely the HFPA now finds itself on the outside of an event it created. Once custodians of the golden statuettes and the star-studded telecast, the association says it was defrauded out of both governance and future revenue streams that were supposed to sustain its charitable mission.
The $150 million demand isn’t just about payback. It’s a demand that the court unwind what the HFPA calls a rigged transfer and restore what was taken under false pretenses. Whether the suit can survive motions to dismiss in a town where Penske and Boehly wield real power remains the open question.
Original reporting: LA Times.
Original reporting: LA Times, Business.
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