Inside the explosive $150M Golden Globes lawsuit against Penske Media

Jay Penske’s most controversial deal, his 2023 takeover of the Golden Globes, has been thrust into the center of an explosive lawsuit that aims to expose the unprecedented control Penske Media Company has over Hollywood’s awards market.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in the Central District of California, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association accused Penske and a slew of alleged co-conspirators of orchestrating a multi-year scheme to acquire the Globes and dismantle the HFPA to consolidate power. They allegedly did this by engaging in anti-competitive conduct, fraud and breaches of fiduciary duties, according to the suit. Plaintiffs are seeking $150 million in damages and want to reverse the acquisition of the Golden Globes.

Penske, his company, the non-profit Golden Globes Foundation and its CEO Gregory Goeckner, are all named as defendants in the 113-page suit.

In addition to owning the Globes and about a half-dozen other major awards shows, PMC owns the majority of the Hollywood trade publications that sell FYC advertising to studios to promote awards contenders. It also owns Gold Derby Media, an outlet that focuses on awards predictions, as well as Luminate, a data firm used to measure statistics for awards eligibility. 

The lawsuit was filed a little more than a year after 55 former Golden Globe members of the original group voted to reconstitute itself and, in the process, nullify a key stipulation of the original deal that saw Penske, with the help of Eldridge Industries CEO Todd Boehly, take over the group. A report in The Ankler last year noted that California AG Rob Bonta’s office still had yet to sign off on the acquisition. A rep for Bonta’s office did not respond when asked if that was still the case. 

“It’s been a long time coming. It just took a long time to find the right attorney,” a source familiar with the HFPA’s struggles to find a lawyer willing to take them on tells Page Six Hollywood. The HFPA is being represented by New York-based firm Kasowitz, whose founder Marc Kasowitz was Donald Trump’s longtime attorney before he launched his political career. Daniel Saunders, the attorney leading the case, also prosecuted Hollywood fixer Anthony Pellicano while he was at the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

The source continued: “They finally found a guy who could handle it and saw the merit in the case, and he’s going straight at the heart of Todd Boehly’s subterfuge, and Jay’s turned it into the Jay Show. You gotta buy ads in Variety.”

Said Saunders in a statement: “The defendants’ alleged anticompetitive conduct and brazen attempts to destroy the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, all to consolidate even greater monopolistic control in Hollywood and freeze out competing foreign journalists, has caused great harm to the 83-year-old organization and to the integrity of the awards market and related markets in the entertainment industry.”

At the center of the lawsuit is the supposed scheme Penske and Boehly undertook to take control of the Globes.

In early 2021, the HFPA faced intense scrutiny over its lack of diversity, which started with a Los Angeles Times article in February titled, “Who really gives out the Golden Globes? A tiny group full of quirky characters — and no Black members.” 

That article prompted a publicist-driven boycott of the HFPA and Golden Globes (among the most memorable moments was when Tom Cruise “gave back” his three trophies in protest) that would take it off the air for a year, after its longtime former broadcaster NBC canceled its contract. Tuesday’s lawsuit accused Penske of using his trade publications to further gin up the controversy which engulfed the HFPA. 

The Golden Globes eventually returned in 2023 after the group was restructured as a for-profit enterprise that would own the Golden Globes assets, with Boehly taking over as interim CEO. The lawsuit states that when Boehly became interim CEO, he was already angling to buy the Golden Globes through his company, Eldridge Industries, which created an “irreconcilable conflict of interest.” 

The group contends that Penske’s involvement in the acquisition was intentionally hidden from its members. According to the suit, when the HFPA members agreed to sell to Eldridge, they thought they were only selling to Boehly. It wasn’t until the deal was completed that, per the complaint, Penske’s involvement and eventual control of the awards was revealed. 

Two additional suitors for the Globes, Pacific Coast Entertainment and Appleby Ventures, were purposely obstructed, the complaint alleges, either by being given incorrect information or impossibly constrained deadlines. 

The complaint further alleges that then HFPA president Helen Hoehne and Goeckner, who was COO and general counsel at the time, of conspiring with Boehly to tilt the scales towards the Boehly/Penske group. Both of them now have prominent roles within the Globes — Hoehne as president of the Golden Globes awards and Goeckner as CEO of the Golden Globes Foundation. 

Goeckner is accused of legal malpractice by favoring Boehly/Penkse over his own client and that he “induced” the HFPA treasurer to transfer roughly $4 million from the group’s reserve funds to the newly-formed Golden Globes Foundation, a non-profit that was formed as the successor to the HFPA’s philanthropic arm. The suit further alleges that the terms of the deal for the Globes were changed after it closed, via an amendment that greenlit a $27.5 million gift — all the profits from the 2023 Golden Globes — from the HFPA to Eldridge. The complaint adds that this was done without approval from the group’s board or members.

A spokesperson for the Golden Globes and Penske slammed the lawsuit in a scathing statement.

“The Golden Globes transaction closed more than three years ago and received all required approvals — any assertion that it did not close, or remains subject to reversal, is once again unequivocally false,” the spokesperson said. “The attempt by former HFPA members to leverage the Golden Globe Foundation, an independent nonprofit, simply to secure Golden Globes tickets is an unfortunate distraction that inappropriately diverts resources from legitimate charitable causes.”

A rep for Boehley and Eldridge did not get back to us.