Spencer Pratt's Twenty-Year Grift
The LA mayoral candidate has failed at everything except reality TV. Now he's channeling voter anger into an alarmingly viable run for office. Sound familiar?
As the people of Los Angeles head to the polls Tuesday to elect their next mayor, they should consider what Lauren Conrad told her roommate Heidi Montag on The Hills nearly twenty years ago.
He’s a sucky person.
Conrad was speaking candidly about Spencer Pratt, who was at the time Montag’s then brand-new boyfriend. She (accurately) believed that Pratt was a manipulative, untrustworthy creep who was trying to sabotage their friendship.
Two decades later, that “sucky person” is now running an alarmingly viable campaign for mayor. Pratt’s home burned down in the Palisades fire last year, a conflagration that killed 12 people, destroyed more than 6000 buildings, and was allegedly started by a disgruntled part-time Uber driver who was mad at rich people.
Pratt, forever a creature of reality television, has leveraged this tragedy for the one thing he thrives on: attention. Soon after the fire, he began lashing out at Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom on social media — where he has millions of followers — and on “The Fame Game,” the aptly-named podcast he hosts with Montag, his wife since 2009. (Naturally, they got married on The Hills.)
On the first anniversary of the disaster in January, he announced he was running for mayor, casting himself as a crusader for truth and his campaign as a mission “to expose the system.”
“We are going into every dark corner of LA politics and disinfecting the city with our light,” he said.
A few weeks later, he released a memoir, The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions of a Reality TV Villain, chronicling his lifelong quest for notoriety and wealth.
What the book does not detail is any interest in public service or improving the lives of everyday Angelenos. Other than a degree in political science from USC that he took more than a decade to complete, Pratt has zero experience in politics. The forty-two-year-old registered Republican and his wife — collectively known as “Speidi” — have spent most of their adult lives going from one reality TV show to the next, with side hustles in music and healing crystals. They made themselves rich by being utterly shameless, then squandered a $10 million fortune on wine, bodyguards, and Mayan Apocalypse preparations. Now Pratt wants to run the second-largest city in the country and manage its $15 billion budget, an idea that’s about as sound as letting a guy who went bankrupt running casinos be president.
In a sane world, Pratt’s “resume” would be a non-starter for anyone pursuing a career in politics. However (as Americans are now all too keenly aware), being a white guy whose sole talents are wasting money, getting his name printed in the tabloids, and convincingly playing an asshole on TV is enough to get elected to the highest office in the land. Twice.
And while Pratt is still a long shot, given LA’s deep-blue demographics, he is faring far better than he should be: According to a poll released Thursday, he has the backing of 22 percent of likely voters, putting him within striking distance of city council member Nitya Raman (25 percent), and Bass (26 percent). If none of the candidates receive more than 50% of the vote, then the top two finishers will compete in a November runoff.
Pratt’s standing has surged since a debate earlier this month, when he put his reality-TV skills to effective use, lobbing catchy soundbites and barbed insults rather than policy specifics. His campaign was also bolstered by an AI-generated ad portraying him as a Batman-esque crusader who directs an angry mob to hurl tomatoes at Mayor Bass (in Joker makeup), Newsom, and Kamala Harris.
Pratt has clearly borrowed some pages from the Trump trolling playbook, deploying racist attacks against Bass (whom he refers to as “Mayor Basura,” the Spanish word for trash) and calling her supporters “Bassholes.” He has used dehumanizing language to describe the city’s homeless population (calling them “fentanyl zombies” who choose to live on the streets) and stoke fears about “super meth,” a drug that doesn’t exist.
He has made crime a signature issue, pledging to increase the number of officers in the LAPD to more than 12,000 (the current number is about 8,700) without explaining how he’d pay for it. He has also played up his own victimhood, claiming in an ad that he’s been living in an Airstream trailer — even though TMZ reported he has actually been staying at the Bel Air Hotel. In his most significant deviation from Trump, Pratt has said he doesn’t want ICE in the city because, as he told Vanity Fair, “I’ve eaten more Mexican food than any white person in Los Angeles.”
Arguably Pratt’s most Trumpian trait is his ability to capitalize on intense voter anger that transcends traditional right-left politics. He has tapped into a deep well of frustration over the devastating wildfires, homelessness, crime, the steady loss of film and TV jobs to runaway production, and the perception — fair or not — that Bass is not up to the task of steering LA through multiple crises.
Not surprisingly, Pratt has been praised by Joe Rogan, the world’s most enthusiastic booster of mediocre white men, and was also endorsed by Rupert Murdoch’s recently launched West Coast tabloid, The California Post. His most vocal supporters include other chronically thirsty reality TV dingbats like sunscreen truther Kristin Cavallari, Brody “Son of Caitlyn” Jenner, and American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee (whose much older husband is David Foster, Pratt’s mentor and Jenner’s ex-stepdad, information I am ashamed to admit I can recall without consulting Wikipedia).
But Pratt has also won over much of the West Side donor class and business elite, including Lakers’ governor Jeanie Buss, producer and MAGA convert Brian Grazer, Universal Music CEO Lucian Grainge, Power Rangers mogul/Democratic fundraiser Haim Saban, and Nicole Avant, wife of Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos (and former ambassador to the Bahamas under Barack Obama).
Ironically — or fittingly — the constituency that seem least likely to support Pratt’s political ambitions are people who actually watched The Hills. To my knowledge, there are currently no pollsters tracking the opinions of people who spent way too much time consuming MTV docusoaps during the George W. Bush administration, so I can’t offer any hard data. But a quick glance at the Reddit forum for The Hills suggests he is even less popular than Sean Duffy is with Real World fans.
That’s because Pratt was not merely the guy viewers loved to hate on The Hills, he was the epitome of everything wrong with pop culture in the aughts — and with politics today.
Pratt grew up in the wealthy enclave of Pacific Palisades and attended Crossroads School, a haven for nepo babies — experiences that seemingly made the future star of Celebrity Wife Swap believe that fame was his destiny. He left USC early to executive produce The Princes of Malibu, a short-lived Fox reality series starring his best friend, Brody Jenner.
When that was canceled after two episodes, Pratt weasled his way onto The Hills by hanging out at LA nightclubs where the show was filming and striking up a romance with Montag. The docusoap, a spinoff of Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County which premiered 20 years ago this week, followed Conrad as she moved to Los Angeles and pursued a career in fashion.
As soon as he officially joined the show in Season 2, Pratt eagerly stepped into the role of antagonist, driving a permanent wedge between Conrad and Montag, then her best friend. It was all part of a mission to upstage Conrad and make himself (and Montag) the star of the show, and it was alarmingly successful.
For several years, “Speidi” was inescapable. When Montag got radical plastic surgery — undergoing 10 procedures in a single day — it made the cover of People magazine (the Obamas were relegated to a corner). Over the years, Pratt has made it seem that he was willingly playing the role of villain and doing producers a favor by bringing drama to the show. He and Montag have presented themselves as shrewd Warholian performance artists whose entire life is “content.” (Case in point: Montag filed for divorce in 2010, in what she later admitted was a bid to drum up publicity when The Hills was winding down.)
Since the show ended in 2010, Pratt has tried to cultivate a gentler, more woo-woo image as a hummingbird enthusiast and crystal entrepreneur. But he has never reckoned with — or apologized for — his conduct on The Hills, where he epitomized the foul misogyny that permeated celebrity culture in the mid-aughts. He joined the show in 2007, the same year that a mentally unwell Britney Spears shaved her head and attacked a paparazzo with an umbrella. It was an era when celebrity tabloids and gossip blogs feasted on the troubles of young female stars and brutally scrutinized their appearance.
Pratt was an early and eager adopter of this unfortunate Y2K trend: well before he appeared on reality TV, he made $50,000 selling personal photos of a teenage Mary-Kate Olsen which he’d taken from his friend Max Winkler, her ex-boyfriend.
On The Hills, he upped the misogyny, spending an entire season spreading an unfounded rumor that Conrad had made a sex tape with her ex-boyfriend. He leaked the story to Perez Hilton, the once-influential gossip blogger known for scrawling ejaculating penises on paparazzi photos of celebrities he didn’t like (and a major supporter of Pratt’s mayoral campaign). Conrad wasn’t the only woman he regularly insulted and demeaned: During his many meltdowns on The Hills, he dismissed his mother-in-law as “just the vagina that brought Heidi to Earth” and called his sister Stephanie a “crazy bitch.”
And as much as Pratt likes to claim he was playing the bad guy for the cameras, he was even more of a villain outside of the show: on his blog, he referred to Conrad using a vulgar slang term for female genitalia (and, as an extra dig, claimed her ex-boyfriends used the nickname for her all the time).
Conrad, the woman Pratt tormented on TV and in the press for years, has gracefully deflected questions about her former nemesis’s run for office. (“I am not a resident of Los Angeles,” she told Jenna Bush Hager on Today.) Pratt, meanwhile, continues to insist the sex tape is real and expresses zero remorse for his behavior toward Conrad.
“If I’m not gonna get elected mayor because I never apologized to [Conrad], I’ll take that.”
So would the rest of us.
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian
If Angelenos elect this creep as their next mayor, they deserve him. Hopefully, the example set by the orange dumpster will prevent that.
Two big lessons from this story:
1. Reality TV is a scourge on culture because it elevates people who have no actual redeeming character and teaches them to crave ever more attention.
2. Rich people (who are bankrolling this jackasses' campaign) aren't anywhere near as smart as they think they are.