After Years Of Scandal, The Golden Globes Are Getting New Owners

Dick Clark Productions has purchased the Golden Globe Awards and all of its assets from the struggling Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

The acquisition will result in the “winding down” of the HFPA and its membership, as well as the Globes’ shift from a non-profit to a commercial organization. The HFPA was created in 1943, and its members include journalists who cover Hollywood and the entertainment business for non-American publications.

Dick Clark Productions, which is owned by Rolling Stone’s parent company, Penske Media Corporation, in collaboration with the holding firm Eldridge, will take over the Golden Globes in time for next year’s program, which will telecast on January 7, 2024. It is currently unknown how nominees and winners will be selected; both responsibilities were formerly performed by HFPA members (which, of course, resulted in numerous allegations of shady transactions).

The sale concludes a turbulent few years for the Golden Globes, while the program and the HFPA have been dogged by scandal for decades. Vote-fixing and bribery allegations have long loomed over the HFPA and its membership, with one former publicist suing the organization in 2011 over an alleged payola scheme (the action was settled in 2013).

Brendan Fraser, who claimed former HFPA president Philip Berk molested him at a 2003 event, was perhaps the most notorious charge of wrongdoing. While the event was well-known at the time — The New York Times reported in 2005 that Berk had emailed Fraser an apology — it resurfaced when Fraser addressed it in a 2018 GQ story. According to a subsequent HFPA inquiry, “Berk inappropriately touched Mr. Fraser,” but “evidence supports that it was intended to be taken as a joke and not a sexual advance.” Nonetheless, despite being nominated for his performance in The Whale (which he ultimately lost to Austin Butler), Fraser elected not to attend this year’s Globes.

Berk, on the other hand, was banned from the HFPA in 2021 for sending an email to members in which he quoted an article dubbing Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement.” This came shortly after a damaging Los Angeles Times exposé of the HFPA’s lack of diversity, which included the fact that it had no Black voting members until that year. The controversy caused NBC to postpone the Golden Globes broadcast for a year, and Tom Cruise even returned three of his awards.

After Years Of Scandal, The Golden Globes Are Getting New Owners

Dick Clark Productions has purchased the Golden Globe Awards and all of its assets from the struggling Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

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