Former Golden Globes Owners Sue Over Alleged Fraud in Awards Show Sale

Members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the group that created and ran the Golden Globe Awards for about 80 years, have filed a lawsuit in federal court in California. They claim that a media company called Penske Media Corporation tricked them into selling the famous awards show. The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday and names Penske Media and its owner, Jay Penske, as defendants. The group is asking for at least $150 million in damages.

The HFPA says Penske Media and Jay Penske worked secretly with a holding company called Eldridge Industries and its CEO, Todd Boehly, to cheat them. The group claims these men hid Penske's involvement in the 2023 deal from the HFPA board. The lawsuit says the board never would have agreed to the sale if they had known Penske was part of it. The HFPA says they were pressured into accepting a deal they did not fully understand.

Penske Media is a large company that owns many well-known publications. These include Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, and Billboard. The company also owns Dick Clark Productions, which runs several awards shows, including the American Music Awards, and now has partial ownership of the Golden Globes. This wide reach is part of why the lawsuit claims Penske was trying to gain a monopoly over entertainment media.

The lawsuit makes a serious charge about how the sale was set up. The HFPA claims Boehly and Penske secretly stirred up a boycott against the Golden Globes to make the show look less valuable. They also say Penske used his media outlets to publish stories that hurt the Globes' reputation. By doing this, the group claims the buyers were able to purchase the show for less money than it was truly worth.

The Golden Globes had already been in trouble before the sale even happened. In 2021, a newspaper investigation found that the HFPA had only one Black member out of its entire group. That news caused public outrage, and NBC refused to air the awards show in 2022. The lawsuit now claims Boehly and Penske were quietly behind that boycott from the very beginning.

The HFPA members say they were promised lifetime tickets to the Golden Globes and the right to vote on who wins awards each year. They claim those promises were later taken back when the new owners added impossible conditions to them. The lawsuit also says the buyers placed their own people inside HFPA's leadership to push the deal through. The HFPA members say they felt misled at every step of the process.

The lawsuit also accuses the buyers of misusing California's nonprofit laws. It says a charity called the Golden Globe Foundation was used to lower the sale price of the Globes. The HFPA claims the foundation now mostly serves as an extension of a for-profit company called Globes LLC, set up by Penske and Boehly. Using a charity this way, the lawsuit argues, is both unfair and illegal.

The current owners of the Golden Globes responded with a sharp statement. They called the lawsuit 'absurd' and said the former HFPA was known for 'ethical failures, non-inclusivity, racism, and misconduct.' They also said the lawsuit was mainly an attempt to get free tickets to the show. After the 2023 sale and a full reorganization, the Golden Globes moved to a new broadcast home on CBS.

Todd Boehly, who also co-owns the Chelsea FC soccer team and the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. It was not immediately clear why he was left out, and the HFPA members who filed the suit declined to explain. Along with the $150 million in damages, the lawsuit asks the court to cancel the agreement that officially shut down the HFPA. The case is expected to be a long legal battle between two powerful sides in Hollywood.