LA28's big gamble

After numerous calls to resign from both his eponymous agency and his role as LA28 chair due to his association with charged and convicted child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Casey Wasserman finally announced he was making some changes. "I’m deeply sorry that my past personal mistakes have caused you so much discomfort," he wrote on Friday. "It’s not fair to you." So that's why he's going to step out of the public eye and donate his massive fortune to survivors of... oh, wait, no, sorry. He's going to sell off his company and cash out with the private equity firm that already holds a majority stake. And with all that spare time, he's going to devote his "full attention" to his volunteer role as the chair of the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, traveling the world representing the city of Los Angeles.

As you might imagine, LA's leaders are not particularly happy about this outcome. But that's not coming through in the news coverage, where this kind of Entourage-esque sleight-of-hand to extricate someone steeped in scandal constitutes a typical Friday night news dump. Aside from a throwaway line about how many LA officials might have issued statements calling for Wasserman to step down as LA28 chair — even the New York Times can't get the numbers right — few publications seem to grasp what Angelenos have at stake here: the city of LA holds the contract with LA28, our tax dollars are the financial backstop, and our electeds have not just a fiscal responsibility but a moral imperative to demand change if they believe that deal is in jeopardy. Over at The Wrap, Sharon Waxman's "lighting-fast fall of Casey Wasserman" concludes with a similar sentiment I'm hearing from city employees and civic organizations: Casey Wasserman's own company forced him out — and now LA28 really expects the city to embrace him?

"I believe that I have become a distraction," Wasserman wrote in a heartfelt apology to his agency. (Those crisis comms are worth every penny.) But the idea that Wasserman had become a "distraction" didn't come from his clients. I went through all the statements of the artists who departed or threatened to depart Wasserman's agency, because, as Torched readers know, I have been diligently tracking every single one. None of the artists called Wasserman a distraction — they called him a lot worse things than that!

But you know who did call Wasserman a distraction? A majority of the elected officials who called for him step down from LA28. The people actually working to bring LA28's vision to life. And, as of last night, those officials now include LA Mayor Karen Bass, who had previously capitulated that decision to the LA28 board which voted last week to keep him in power. Now, she says, he should resign.

"My opinion is that he should step down," Bass said on CNN. "That's not the opinion of the board." (A board, by the way, that's made up of three of her own appointees.)

With that in mind, it's important to re-read the statement from Wasserman's LA28 board, issued just 48 hours before he blew up his company, to look at how, exactly, the board, the lawyers from O’Melveny & Myers LLP, and Wasserman, in "full cooperation," with both parties, chose to exonerate themselves. "We found Mr. Wasserman’s relationship with Epstein and Maxwell did not go beyond what has already been publicly documented," the statement reads. "Based on these facts, as well as the strong leadership he has exhibited over the past 10 years, Mr. Wasserman should continue to lead LA28 and deliver a safe and successful Games."

Taken with the events of the past week, this is somehow worse than the typical "we investigated ourselves and discovered we are awesome, actually." This claims the LA28 board knew all about this information which had the potential to implode Wasserman's own professional reputation — and didn't do anything? What else has been "publicly documented" that we should know about?

Snuggling up to Trump, refusing to speak out against ICE raids; the LA28 board's vote seems to signal yet another way that this organization is out of sync with the city it claims to represent. But one argument for keeping Wasserman around is that the alternative could be much, much worse. With the LA28 board recently stacked with Trump allies, there's this fear that should Wasserman leave, our choices would only be more MAGA. One name floated is former House speaker Kevin McCarthy — who was seen cavorting around on Marine One with Wasserman and Trump — which I worried might be an across-the-aisle orchestration of his close personal friend Bass. But even though Wasserman has been previously dispatched to the White House to dangle gold medals in Trump's face, there are plenty of other LA28 leaders who can fulfill this role — LA28's CEO Reynold Hoover, a former Army general who served in both Democrat and Republican administrations, is shouldering the bipartisan butt-kissing just fine.

What Wasserman brings to the fold is not his political acumen but his business relationships: no one out there, apparently, has Wasserman's crossover portfolio of sports and entertainment. As an anonymous source told the LA Times' Jim Rainey, Wasserman is "crucial to landing the corporate sponsorships needed to make the Games succeed, without taxpayer subsidies." There are dozens of Wasserman clients competing in Milan-Cortina right now. He puts his own musical acts in the opening and closing ceremonies. The conflict of interest is a feature not a bug; Wasserman needs to win if we want LA to win, too. So if he's burning all these bridges as his own agency goes down in flames, are those connections still worth what they were before? Why is everyone so confident that Wasserman's own personal brand toxicity isn't going to become its own liability? When asked directly, even MLB commissioner Rob Manfred tried to distance himself: "Our dealings are not with Casey."

And whether or not Wasserman gets booted, LA will still be stuck with LA28 and the bad deal we struck nearly a decade ago. LA28 may claim Wasserman is racking in the sponsorship dollars, but, as a private nonprofit, we have no way of verifying those figures. What we are able to track, as a city, are deliverables, and that's not looking great either. LA28's impact and sustainability plan, due March 31, 2025, landed nearly five months late and very light on details. The city services agreement known as the ECRMA, due October 1, 2025, is now more than four months late. The human rights strategy, due December 31, 2025, is nowhere to be seen. After the LA28 board's vote, Councilmembers Monica Rodriguez and Imelda Padilla introduced a resolution demanding more transparency from LA28 leadership to "reinforce public trust."

In an interview with KCRW on February 4 — before she declared her candidacy for mayor — Councilmember Nithya Raman also conveyed a waning confidence in LA28. "The city council has asked for a lot of clarifications, we've asked a lot of questions about what the costs are that we are going to be incurring, what will be covered, and we have not received those answers," she said. "Our partnership with LA28, I think, needs to improve." That's why calls for Wasserman to resign are focusing on the wrong problem, argues civil rights attorney Connie Rice, who has been sounding the alarm about the city's contract with LA28. "The mayor needs to tell us: where is the ECRMA agreement that guarantees the city's taxpayers will not be left holding the bag for $1 billion in Olympics costs?" she tells me. "Casey Wasserman is a red herring."

There's one more LA28 deliverable we don't have any kind of timeline for: the Cultural Olympiad, the arts festival that's supposed to run concurrently to the Olympic and Paralympic Games. With Maria Arena Bell now out as the chair of the Cultural Olympiad — as Torched reported last month — it's fallen to Wasserman to shape the festival internally. Wasserman's got art ties as well; he's on the board of LACMA and the NBA All-Star event he hosted the night before his company imploded was held at Larry Gagosian's gallery. But here again, LA28's planning (and fundraising) is lagging. A New York Times story featured a dozen high-profile arts leaders voicing anxiety about having no clear vision for what's supposed to be, essentially, a third megaevent in 2028.

And that's another reason keeping Wasserman around could backfire spectacularly. The Cultural Olympiad's success relies on the one type of Angeleno fleeing Wasserman's orbit in droves: artists. For the past year, artists have been telling me they are already wary about working with LA28 due to its Trump administration affiliations. Now, after all this, Wasserman will personally have to rally a roster of artists, cultural institutions, and philanthropic dollars behind him. Do these relationships also start to unravel from the inside out? Or does LA28 continue to go all-in on Wasserman — with a little over two years left to go? 🔥

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