The four-year legal battle of a former member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. who sued the organization behind the Golden Globes over allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and breach of contract, has ended.
Husam “Sam” Asi, a long-standing member of the HFPA who had been expelled from the group in 2022, filed to settle and dismiss his lawsuit with prejudice on Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.
Asi was not immediately available for comment.
“The HFPA is pleased to resolve its litigation with Dr. Asi on mutually agreeable terms and wishes Dr. Asi the best in his future endeavors,” said a spokesperson for the HFPA in a statement to The Times.
Asi sued the HFPA in May 2022, three months after the organization put him on probation following allegations of sexual misconduct that were first reported in the Wrap, prompting a third-party investigation into him.
At the time, he denied the misconduct allegations, calling them baseless. “Of course, I deny them, I deny them all, they are ludicrously absurd,” he told The Times then.
Asi represented the United Kingdom and the Middle East for the association from 2010 to 2022 and was a Palestinian journalist for the BBC Arabic service and a columnist for pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi. In his lawsuit, he alleged that the HFPA was “weaponizing false sexual misconduct allegations” in retaliation for “his attempts to hold it accountable.”
According to his lawsuit, Asi said he had “been subjected to and endured a pattern of sexual harassment, hostile behavior, racial epithets and discrimination, and retaliatory conduct, none of which was ever investigated or handled according to HFPA’s bylaws and procedures.”
Asi further alleged that the organization issued a news release announcing that it was putting him on probation “without informing him or communicating with him and contrary to their own bylaws.”
The HFPA denied Asi’s claims.
A flurry of litigation ensued over the next four years.
In July 2022, the HFPA filed a special motion to strike nine of Asi’s 14 causes of action under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, arguing its statements to the press were protected activity.
In October 2023, a year after a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied the HFPA’s anti-SLAPP motion, an appeals court reversed much of that decision and granted the organization’s motion to strike seven of the 14 accusations Asi had filed against it.
The HFPA filed another motion to dismiss Asi’s complaint, based on his “failure to comply with the court’s orders,” in August, stating that it planned to file a motion “to deem Asi a vexatious litigant.”
According to the court docket, a contempt hearing was scheduled for November.
The organization has undergone a series of reforms and changes over the last five years in order to rehabilitate its image and revive its relationship with Hollywood.
NBC had dropped the broadcast of the 2022 Globes and studios including Netflix and WarnerMedia cut ties with the HFPA following a 2021 Los Angeles Times investigation that raised questions about the group’s ethical and financial lapses and revealed that not one of its then-87 members was Black.
Todd Boehly, the billionaire chairman of private equity firm Eldridge Industries, acquired the Golden Globes in 2023, dissolved the nonprofit HFPA and converted the awards show into a for-profit enterprise.
In July, original founding HFPA members filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court against media mogul Jay Penske, Penske Media Corp., the Golden Globe Foundation and others, alleging the acquisition of the popular awards show was a “sham process tainted by fraud.” The plaintiffs are seeking damages of at least $150 million.
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