The Hollywood Foreign Press Association filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Penske Media Corporation 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 113-page suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, names Penske Media, CEO Jay Penske, the Golden Globe Foundation and its CEO Gregory Goeckner as defendants. It brings claims including monopolization, unlawful restraint of trade, unfair trade practices and fraudulent misrepresentation, seeking at least $150 million in damages and a court order unwinding the 2023 sale of the Golden Globes.
The HFPA (Hollywood Foreign Press Association) is the organization that founded and ran the Golden Globes for nearly 80 years before it was dissolved as part of the 2023 sale — so this is effectively the show’s original owners suing the company that now runs it.
The core allegation
According to the complaint, Penske used its reach across Hollywood’s trade press to fuel public backlash against the HFPA, helping trigger the industry boycott that led NBC to drop the 2022 Golden Globes telecast. The HFPA argues this wasn’t an organic response to legitimate criticism but a manufactured crisis engineered to weaken the organization ahead of a hostile, deceptive acquisition.
The backlash traces to a 2021 Los Angeles Times investigation that found the HFPA had only one Black member, prompting a publicist-led boycott. The lawsuit claims Eldridge chairman Todd Boehly used that boycott as a “pretext” to install himself as interim HFPA CEO within months, then worked with then-HFPA president Helen Hoehne and then-general counsel Gregory Goeckner to push through the sale to Dick Clark Productions and Eldridge in 2023. The suit says Penske’s involvement in that deal was concealed from the HFPA board and that he took full control roughly three months after the agreement was signed.
The complaint also alleges the deal’s terms were later altered to authorize a $27.5 million payment representing the entirety of the 2023 ceremony’s profits, funneled from the HFPA to Eldridge, without proper disclosure to the board or approval from HFPA membership. It further claims Goeckner induced the HFPA’s treasurer to transfer $4 million from the association’s reserves to the Golden Globe Foundation.
Worth untangling here: the Golden Globe Foundation (GGF) is a separate nonprofit created when the HFPA dissolved in 2023, meant to carry on the charitable side of the old organization. The lawsuit alleges Penske and Boehly have used the GGF as leverage, most recently offering its members Golden Globes tickets and voting rights on the condition that the (separate, now-reconstituted) HFPA formally dissolve. In other words, the complaint claims one nonprofit is being used as a pressure point against another entity entirely.
The suit says roughly 50 former voting members were offered five-year contracts in June 2023 with an annual base salary of $75,000, and were later offered severance of $102,500 as the organization moved away from compensating voters directly. It also alleges members were promised lifetime Golden Globes tickets and voting privileges that Penske later reneged on by attaching unworkable conditions.
Boehly and Eldridge Industries were not named as defendants; the reasons weren’t immediately clear, and the plaintiffs declined to comment.
What Penske Media owns, and why the lawsuit says it matters
The complaint doesn’t argue that Penske Media is simply powerful. It argues PMC’s holdings overlap across three specific markets in a way that allegedly lets the company manipulate and profit from the Golden Globes situation.
Trade journalism, the outlets accused of fueling the boycott. Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline are named in the complaint itself as the outlets that “participated in a media campaign that disparaged and criticized the HFPA.” The lawsuit’s theory depends on this overlap: Penske allegedly controls enough of the press that covers Hollywood to shape public narrative around an organization it was simultaneously trying to acquire, meaning the newsroom and the buyer were the same company.
Awards shows, the asset being acquired and a competing one PMC already owns. Dick Clark Productions, a PMC-controlled company, already produces the American Music Awards and Billboard Music Awards, and is now a part owner of the Golden Globes itself. The complaint argues this gives Penske a direct financial stake in the outcome rather than journalistic distance from it, since the same company producing rival awards shows also now owns a piece of the one it’s accused of devaluing in order to acquire.
Awards-season advertising and data infrastructure, the tools every studio campaign relies on. Gold Derby, an awards-prediction platform, and Luminate, which tracks eligibility statistics industry-wide, are used by studios and campaigns to run for-your-consideration advertising during the actual awards race. The complaint alleges PMC uses this position to try to exclude the HFPA and its members from that same ecosystem, meaning Penske isn’t just covering the race, it also controls some of the infrastructure that determines who’s visible in it.
On the legal terms: “monopolization” and “unlawful restraint of trade” are the actual antitrust claims here, meaning the suit argues PMC didn’t just get big, it used that size across these three connected markets to unfairly box out a competitor (the HFPA) from an industry it used to help run. That’s the mechanism that turns a business dispute into a federal antitrust case rather than just a breach-of-contract fight.
The throughline the lawsuit draws: it isn’t any single piece of this that’s the problem, it’s that the same company allegedly wrote the story that damaged the Globes’ reputation, then acquired a stake in the Globes, then controls the advertising and prediction tools built around it. That combination, according to the complaint, is what turns ordinary media consolidation into an antitrust violation.
Penske Media’s broader portfolio, including Rolling Stone, WWD, ARTnews, Sportico, BGR and the recently acquired Vox Media brands like The Verge, Eater and SB Nation, sits outside those three markets and isn’t part of the legal theory itself. It’s relevant mainly as a measure of the company’s overall size and reach; notably, the Vox deal closed just weeks before this lawsuit was filed and made PMC, by its own description, the largest digital publisher in the world.
The response
A representative for the Golden Globes called the lawsuit part of “the absurdity and irrationality that the industry has come to expect from the defunct organization formerly known as the HFPA,” adding that the 2023 transaction “closed more than three years ago and received all required approvals.” The statement also criticized the HFPA’s use of the Golden Globe Foundation to pursue tickets, calling it “an unfortunate distraction,” and pointed to the HFPA’s own history of “ethical failures, non-inclusivity, racism, and misconduct involving talent.”
This isn’t the first legal fight over the Globes. The HFPA sued Dick Clark Productions in 2010 over telecast rights, a dispute that ended in a 2014 settlement after a federal judge sided with DCP.
Sources for article:
- Deadline — https://deadline.com/2026/07/hollywood-foreign-press-sues-penske-golden-globes-1237006006/
- TheWrap — https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/awards/hfpa-penske-golden-globes-lawsuit-explained/
- ABC News — https://abcnews.com/Business/wireStory/former-golden-globes-owners-sue-penske-media-alleging-135173229
- The Hollywood Reporter — https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/penske-media-sued-hollywood-foreign-press-golden-globes-1236658413/
- Law Commentary — https://www.lawcommentary.com/articles/penske-media-hit-with-150m-lawsuit-by-hfpa-over-golden-globes-acquisition
- Fortune — https://fortune.com/2026/07/29/golden-globes-boycott-buyers-lawsuit-boehly/