The Hollywood Foreign Press Association filed an antitrust lawsuit against Penske Media Corporation in federal court in Los Angeles on July 28, 2026, alleging the company seized control of the Golden Globe Awards through a "years-long scheme" it calls a "sham process tainted by fraud" (Variety; TheWrap).

The suit, filed by the law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, names PMC, the Golden Globe Foundation, and Gregory Goeckner as defendants (Morningstar/PR Newswire). The HFPA, a non-profit association of foreign journalists that ran the Golden Globes for nearly 80 years, is seeking damages of at least $150 million (Variety).

At the centre of the dispute is PMC's 2023 acquisition of the Golden Globes. The HFPA had adopted reforms — prompted by a February 2021 Los Angeles Times report revealing the organisation had no Black members — before agreeing to sell the awards to PMC-owned Dick Clark Productions and Eldridge. That 2021 diversity scandal led publicists to boycott the Globes and NBC to drop the 2022 broadcast entirely (Variety).

The lawsuit now alleges that PMC instigated that very boycott to weaken the show and make it vulnerable to a takeover. According to the complaint, HFPA members were assured they would retain lifetime voting rights for the awards and lifetime tickets to the ceremony. Instead, the suit claims, Penske later guaranteed voting rights only to members who accepted direct employment with the Penske Trust (Variety).

The HFPA also argues that PMC wields monopoly power across three interconnected markets: trade journalism (Penske owns Variety, among other outlets), what the suit calls the "secondary awards" market, and the "For Your Consideration" advertising market — the campaign spend that studios direct at awards voters each season (Variety).

PMC has denied the allegations. A spokesperson for PMC and the Golden Globes stated that the transaction closed more than three years ago and received all required approvals (Variety).

The lawsuit follows a decision last year by the HFPA board to pause its own dissolution process — the wind-down that was supposed to follow the Globes sale — in order to investigate alleged malfeasance and conflicts of interest connected to the deal (Variety). Scott Orlin, U.S. correspondent for the German magazine Cinema, was named president of the revived HFPA in July 2025 (Variety).

The complaint, drawing on the now-public court filing, frames the Globes sale not as a clean handover but as the product of a deliberate strategy (Kasowitz). PMC calls that framing baseless. A federal judge in Los Angeles will now decide which account holds.