Penske Media Hit With $150M Lawsuit by HFPA Over Golden Globes Acquisition

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Penske Media on Tuesday, accusing the media conglomerate of orchestrating a fraudulent scheme to seize control of the Golden Globe Awards as part of a broader effort to dominate Hollywood's awards and advertising ecosystem.

The suit, filed in California federal court, names Penske Media, parent company of The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Billboard and a string of other entertainment trades, as the architect of a years-long campaign designed to weaken the HFPA to the point of forced sale.

According to the complaint, Penske used its extensive reach across the Hollywood trade press to fuel a public backlash against the HFPA, ultimately triggering an industry-wide boycott of the 2022 Golden Globes ceremony. That boycott, the HFPA argues, was not an organic response to legitimate criticism but a manufactured crisis engineered to soften up the organization for what would become a hostile and deceptive acquisition.

The lawsuit brings a battery of claims, including monopolization, unjust enrichment and fraudulent misrepresentation, and demands at least $150 million in damages along with a court order unwinding the sale of the Golden Globes' assets and rights entirely.

The firm representing the HFPA described the case in blunt terms in the filing, framing it as a calculated effort to destroy the awards show's 80-year-old founding organization while consolidating outsized power over entertainment journalism and awards-season advertising revenue.

Central to the HFPA's case is the 2023 sale of the Golden Globes to Dick Clark Productions and Eldridge, two entities that share ownership ties with The Hollywood Reporter. The complaint alleges that Eldridge chairman Todd Boehly took over as interim CEO of the HFPA within months of the boycott and worked in tandem with then-HFPA president Helen Hoehne, now head of the reorganized for-profit Golden Globes entity, to rush through a deal riddled with conflicts of interest, given that Boehly effectively sat on both sides of the negotiating table.

The suit further claims that after the deal closed, its terms were quietly altered to authorize a $27.5 million payment representing the entirety of the 2023 ceremony's profits, funneled from the HFPA to Eldridge. That amendment, according to the complaint, was never properly disclosed to HFPA board members and was never formally approved by the organization's membership.

Not long after, Boehly revealed he was teaming up with Penske Media chief Jay Penske on the acquisition, a partnership the lawsuit says cemented Penske's grip on the entertainment news and advertising landscape reaching the public.

The complaint also points to a meeting held last February, where Hoehne addressed roughly 50 former voting members who had signed five-year contracts with the Globes' new corporate ownership back in June 2023, agreeing to an annual base salary of $75,000. At that gathering, those members were offered severance payments of $102,500 as the organization moved away from compensating its awards voters directly.

Penske Media's holdings extend well beyond the Globes and the trade publications that sell advertising to awards contenders, encompassing several other major awards shows, the awards-prediction platform Gold Derby Media and Luminate, the company that tracks eligibility statistics across the industry.