Titans clash as crucial primary election nears
Hollywood mogul Katzenberg, a Bass backer, targets Caruso over his GOP past.
In recent days, the Los Angeles mayor’s race has seemingly devolved into a rhetorical brawl between two of the city’s richest men.
One is on a quest to run the city, the other is backing someone else and also has big designs on reorienting L.A.’s response to homelessness, its most pressing crisis.
Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, who supports Rep. Karen Bass, says Rick Caruso’s history of supporting Republican candidates and being registered as a Republican a decade ago disqualifies him from being mayor.
This comes after Variety published an interview with Caruso in which he attacked the former Walt Disney Studios chairman for “lying” about him in ads by a proBass independent expenditure committee predominantly funded by Katzenberg.
“Rick’s attacks are an attempt to bully and squash the truth,” Katzenberg said in a statement to The Times on Wednesday. “He’s made it abundantly clear that he is way too thin-skinned and temperamental to serve as our mayor.”
The duo have known each other for many years, but this quarrel between Caruso and Katzenberg began in earnest in recent weeks when the pro-Bass committee made its first television ad buy. The ad starts off by referring to “Republican Rick Caruso,” goes on to slam the candidate’s GOP ties and his record on abortion, and compares him to former President Trump.
Both are longtime L.A. power players, though they run in slightly different worlds. Caruso, a longtime Brentwood resident, has been a fixture in the real estate and business community of the city. Katzenberg, who has long lived in Beverly Hills, is a Hollywood mainstay who has also been a key power broker in national Democratic politics.
Less than two weeks from election day, polling from both the Bass campaign and the committee supporting her campaign showed last week that the race is essentially tied. Any one candidate would need a simple majority of the votes on June 7 to avoid a November runoff.
One poll has Caruso up by 2 percentage points, with 37% support among likely voters, while the other shows Bass winning by 2 points, with the backing of 34% of likely voters. Both figures are within the margins of error.
After the million-dollar buy went on the air, Caruso’s lawyers fired off a cease-anddesist letter — the second of the mayoral campaign — de
manding that local broadcasters stop airing the ad, saying it misrepresented his history as a Republican.
Caruso changed his party affiliation in 2011, switching from the GOP to “decline to state,” now labeled “no party preference.” In January, he re-registered again, shifting to Democratic, before entering the mayor’s race the following month.
“Rick is a longtime Republican, and 19 days prior to announcing his bid for mayor he changed his party registration to conveniently become a ‘Democrat,’ ” Katzenberg wrote in his statement.
Caruso’s lawyers said the ad also incorrectly described his position on abortion. Caruso said he opposed the leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision that would invalidate Roe vs. Wade and was helping a campaign trying to enshrine abortion rights in the California Constitution.
Earlier, though, a 2007 article about Caruso in Los Angeles Magazine stated that Caruso “says he opposes abortion in most cases but would support some stem cell research.”
A lawyer for the pro-Bass committee said Caruso’s complaints were “without merit.”
Then came the Variety article, which included Caruso’s reaction to being likened to Trump, and his comments about Katzenberg.
“I’m the farthest thing from Donald Trump, and everybody knows that. What we’re seeing is an act of desperation, and they’re trying to throw Hail Marys and nobody’s buying it,” Caruso was quoted as saying.
Setting aside the nearly $30 million Caruso has devoted to his own campaign, Katzenberg is the largest individual contributor in the mayor’s race — having donated $850,000 to the independent committee backing Bass.
The other major outside donor is the union for rankand-file Los Angeles police officers, which has poured just over $3 million into ads and mailers attacking Bass.
Katzenberg, a co-founder of DreamWorks, has been a longtime national Democratic donor, but his giving this cycle to local races has far outpaced his largesse in the past.
He has poured half a million dollars into a committee supporting Robert Luna’s candidacy for sheriff and has said current Sheriff Alex Villanueva “has created dysfunction and chaos which has put our public safety at risk,” according to a fundraising appeal for Luna he sent late last year.
Contribution records show that Katzenberg also has given locally in the past, donating $50,000 in 2017 to the campaign for Measure H, which raised taxes to pay for social services that help Los Angeles County’s homeless population. Caruso also gave $50,000 to this effort.
A year earlier, both Caruso and Katzenberg contributed $100,000 to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s campaign for Measure M, the half-cent sales tax to support public transit and transportation programs.
In 2013, Katzenberg put more than $101,000 into the unsuccessful effort to elect Wendy Greuel — who worked with him at DreamWorks — as mayor.
Last summer, Katzenberg met with local elected officials and aides who work on homelessness policy in the run-up to a vote to impose new anti-camping rules, which would allow the city to remove encampments near public facilities, such as libraries and homeless shelters, once offers of housing have been made.
He said he continues to be interested in the crisis — and part of his giving to Bass is based on the belief that she is best positioned to address homelessness.
“Karen knows soundbites will never solve our homelessness crisis and the rise in crime,” he wrote in his statement to The Times.