Well look who just popped up like a pimple — the Hollywood Foreign Press Association! The HFPA is the mysterious cabal of international journalists who founded and hosted the Golden Globes, and also exclusively did all the voting themselves. While the Globes were a fun party, the HFPA were a hotbed of blatant bribes, sexual misconduct, and racism. In 2021 the LA Times outed HFPA as having NO Black members, and the dominoes finally started falling. By the summer of 2023, it was announced that HFPA was disbanding. Don’t worry, it wasn’t as simple as “That’s all, folks!” At the time, HFPA said their organization would end… but for at least five more years their members would be paid $75,000 annually to watch TV and movies and still vote on the awards. Meanwhile Dick Clark Productions (owned by Penske Media) teamed up with Eldridge Industries (also associates of Penske) to purchase the Golden Globes.
If you’re thinking, “Wow, all roads lead to Penske,” BINGO. From the minute the deal was announced in 2023, the Penske of it all was a huge red flag. Penske already ran the major trade publications — like The Hollywood Reporter and Variety — whose ad pages were bought by studios campaigning for their projects, AND the awards prediction site Gold Derby, AND now the Golden Globes as well. Monopoly, thy name is Penske. Well, guess who just got a clue three years later? This week, the HFPA filed a lawsuit against Penske, alleging they orchestrated HFPA’s bad publicity in their trade papers so that the organization would be vulnerable to selling the Golden Globes. HFPA is asking for at least $150 million, and they want the Golden Globes back. From The Hollywood Reporter, a Penske publication:
“This case arises from a clandestine scheme to fraudulently acquire the prestigious and valuable 80-year-old Golden Globe Awards, destroy their founder and former owner, the HFPA, and exert monopolistic control over the Hollywood trades, awards, and advertising markets,” states the complaint.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Golden Globes said the lawsuit “continues the absurdity and irrationality that the industry has come to expect from the defunct organization formerly known as the HFPA.”
…The lawsuit accuses Penske of orchestrating a media campaign that criticized HFPA for lacking diversity, leading to an industry-wide boycott that resulted in major players across Hollywood refusing to broadcast or participate in the Golden Globes ceremony in 2022. (A publicity firm backlash against the Globes began in February 2021 after The Los Angeles Times published an article titled, “Who really gives out the Golden Globes? A tiny group full of quirky characters — and no Black members.”)
Within months of the alleged boycott, Eldridge chairman Todd Boehly became interim CEO of the HFPA and worked alongside then-president Helen Hoehne, now president of the for-profit enterprise, to fast-track an acquisition, according to the complaint. The group claims that they facilitated a “conflicted and corrupt” negotiation for the transaction, pointing to Boehly sitting on both sides of the deal.
The lawsuit also alleges that the terms of the transaction were changed after it closed to greenlight a $27.5 million gift from the HFPA — all the profits from the 2023 Golden Globes — to Eldridge. The amendment to the acquisition, the lawsuit claims, wasn’t properly presented to board members and never ratified by the group’s members.
Shortly after, Boehly announced that he was partnering with Penske Media owner Jay Penske in the deal.
The purchase positioned Penske to “control the entertainment news disseminated to the general public, while maintaining a monopoly over streams of advertising revenue in the market,” writes Daniel Saunders of Kasowitz in the complaint. Marc Kasowitz, founder of the firm, is a longtime personal legal advisor for President Trump.
Ugh, there’s just no one to root for here. Is HFPA right that Penske has a monopoly? Yes, but that doesn’t take away from the crap HFPA was doing all on their own. Whether or not Penske amplified HFPA’s bad press — a claim I think will be hard to prove — the fact is that HFPA was earning their bad press! It’s not like the reporting of the bribes and misconduct wasn’t true. The only thing sparkling white on HFPA’s report card was their membership! It’s like when everyone started publicly turning on HFPA in 2021, and Tom Cruise pointedly returned his three Golden Globes to protest their lack of diversity. Great, nice gesture Tom. But where’s Shelly?? Like I said, no one to root for with this cast of characters.
This can’t be legal. pic.twitter.com/hBp0D7O6jt
— Ben Fritz (@benfritz) January 12, 2026
Photos are screenshots from Youtube/Nikki Glaser’s opening monologue and credit Getty