The Golden Globes Are Getting New Owners After Years of Scandal

The Golden Globe Awards will soon be under new ownership, with Dick Clark Productions purchasing the awards show and all its assets from the embattled Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

The acquisition will mean the “winddown” (as it was put in a statement) of the HFPA and its membership, as well as the Globes’ transition from a non-profit enterprise to a commercial one. The HFPA was founded in 1943, its membership comprises reporters covering Hollywood and the entertainment industry for non-American outlets.

Dick Clark Productions — owned by Rolling Stone’s parent company, Penske Media Corporation, in partnership with the holding company Eldridge — will take over the Golden Globes in time for next year’s show, which is set to air on Jan. 7, 2024. It’s currently unclear how nominees and winners will be chosen; both tasks were previously undertaken by HFPA members (which, of course, led to plenty of claims of shady dealings). 

The sale caps off a tumultuous few years for the Golden Globes, though really, the show and the HFPA have been shrouded in scandal for decades. Claims of vote fixing and bribery have long hung over the HFPA and its membership, with one former publicist even suing the organization in 2011 over an alleged payola scheme (the suit was settled in 2013). 

Perhaps the most notorious allegation of malfeasance involved Brendan Fraser, who claimed former HFPA president Philip Berk groped him at a 2003 event. While the incident was known about at the time — The New York Times reported in 2005 that Berk had sent Fraser an apology — it received renewed attention when Fraser discussed it in a 2018 GQ profile. A subsequent HFPA investigation found that “Berk inappropriately touched Mr. Fraser” but that “evidence supports that it was intended to be taken as a joke and not a sexual advance.” Still, Fraser pointedly chose not to attend this year’s Globes even though he was nominated for his performance in The Whale (he ultimately lost to Austin Butler).

As for Berk, he was expelled from the HFPA in 2021 not for anything to do with Fraser, but for sending an email to members in which he quoted an article calling Black Lives Matter a “racist hate movement.” This was revealed not long after a damning Los Angeles Times investigation about the HFPA’s lack of diversity, including the fact that it had no Black voting members until that year. The uproar prompted NBC to drop the Golden Globes telecast for a year, and Tom Cruise even gave back three of his trophies.