LOS ANGELES — The organization that invented the Golden Globes is suing the man who bought them, and the complaint it filed in federal court makes a claim that would be unusual in any other industry: that he first destroyed them, then acquired the wreckage.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, reconstituted by former members in 2024, filed suit July 28 in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against Jay Penske, Penske Media Corporation, the Golden Globe Foundation and Gregory Goeckner, the HFPA’s former general counsel who became CEO of the foundation that eventually succeeded the organization. The complaint seeks more than $150 million in damages, potential treble damages under federal antitrust law and rescission of the January 2023 acquisition that handed the Globes to a joint venture between Penske Media and Eldridge Industries.
The suit, filed through the Kasowitz Benson Torres law firm, lays out a scheme beginning around 2021, when the HFPA came under significant criticism for its lack of Black members. NBC announced it would not air the Globes ceremony in 2022; studios and agencies followed with public statements of disapproval. The complaint contends that what appeared to be organic industry outrage was, in fact, partly engineered.
Penske’s media properties, including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline, three of the four dominant Hollywood trade publications, amplified coverage of the HFPA’s diversity failures in ways the complaint characterizes as coordinated devaluation rather than impartial reporting. All three are operated by or under Penske-affiliated entities. The HFPA alleges they were deployed as instruments of a campaign designed to weaken the organization financially and render it susceptible to an acquisition the defendants were simultaneously planning.
Into that vulnerability stepped Todd Boehly, the billionaire chairman of Eldridge Industries. The complaint alleges that while he was positioning himself as a bidder for the Globes, he was also serving as interim CEO of the financially strained HFPA. That dual role is the structural heart of the fraud, the suit argues: a buyer who ran the seller’s organization during the period it was being pressured to sell.
Members of the HFPA approved an Asset Purchase Agreement in July 2022. The deal closed six months later, in January 2023, with Dick Clark Productions, the Boehly-controlled Eldridge subsidiary, taking ownership of the Golden Globes franchise.
The lawsuit does not stop at the acquisition itself. It alleges that after closing, the deal terms were modified to authorize a $27.5 million distribution from HFPA profits to Eldridge without proper board authorization. It also names Gregory Goeckner, who moved from HFPA general counsel to CEO of the Golden Globe Foundation, the charitable entity that received HFPA assets. Goeckner, the complaint says, transferred approximately $4 million in HFPA reserve funds to that foundation to strip the HFPA of operating cash and force its dissolution.
The antitrust claims extend further than the deal itself. The complaint argues that Penske now operates a closed loop over the entire Hollywood awards economy. Through Luminate, the data company that certifies eligibility metrics for awards consideration, and Gold Derby, the predictions platform that shapes the industry’s pre-vote awards narratives, combined with near-total control of three major Hollywood trades, Penske’s operation can, the suit alleges, extract mandatory compliance from studios. The complaint points to “$70,000 dinners” for voter access and “$5,000-per-project administration fees” as the cost studios now pay to participate in an awards cycle the defendants effectively administer end to end.
Kasowitz partner Daniel Saunders described the alleged structure to The Hollywood Reporter as “an industry ouroboros that feeds on itself,” a loop in which media coverage shapes the awards race, the awards race drives advertising spend in the trades and that spend flows back to the same outlets whose coverage shaped the race.
The Golden Globes pushed back in terms that were not subtle. A spokesperson called the lawsuit “a new low” and said it “continues the absurdity and irrationality that the industry has come to expect” from the reconstituted HFPA, adding that “the Golden Globes transaction closed more than three years ago and received all required approvals.” As of Tuesday, Penske Media Corporation had not filed a separate response.
The HFPA suit is one of two major fraud-related entertainment industry filings in recent days. Jason Cloth, a Hollywood producer behind the Joker franchise, was separately indicted this week in an alleged $100 million Ponzi scheme targeting film and television investors.
The HFPA filed its case knowing that the primary reporting on it would fall largely to publications operated by the defendant. The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, both named in the complaint as instruments of the alleged devaluation campaign, are among the outlets now covering their own parent company’s legal exposure.
The HFPA’s ability to pursue the lawsuit rests on its 2024 reconstitution, a move former members made specifically with litigation in mind. Whether a federal court will entertain a claim seeking to unwind a three-year-old acquisition under antitrust and fraud law, and what the discovery process might reveal about communications between Penske, Boehly and the HFPA’s former leadership during the period the complaint describes as the coordinated dismantling of an 83-year-old institution, will determine whether the Golden Globes remain with the man who, the HFPA alleges, engineered their fall.
