Spencer Pratt’s resume won’t help him in the race for mayor of Los Angeles

from Jim NewtonCalMatters

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Call me old fashioned, but I believe that being a reality TV villain and having your house burn down are qualifications that fall short of what it takes to be mayor of Los Angeles.

So I was skeptical of Spencer Pratt’s angry campaign of insults. In Pratt’s world, that’s Mayor Karen Bass Karen “Basura”, City Council Member Nitya Raman is “crazy” and “a serious threat to your children,” and critical reporters are “media sick.” It’s a sharp argument for someone hoping to lead California’s largest metropolis, a city I’ve covered since Pratt was a small boy growing up among the more affluent denizens of Los Angeles.

Still, I figured I owed him a chance, so I picked up his memoir, Spencer Pratt: The Man You Loved to Hate , published earlier this year, to get to know the man behind the scathing candidacy. Here was an opportunity to see Pratt explain himself.

He doesn’t make an impression. Pratt of these pages is—in his own words—selfish, undisciplined and unprincipled. He deflects blame, squanders wealth, and complains. a lot. It’s hard to imagine him holding any office, much less one.

Here are some telling excerpts:

“The plan was simple,” Pratt writes on page 35. “Step one: USC’s Marshall School of Business. Step two: Wharton for an MBA—a golden ticket, handed the keys to the global economy. Step three: world domination.”

Needing money to finance a student film project, Pratt realizes that a friend of his has photos from when he dated a Hollywood celebrity—a “wasted resource,” as Pratt describes the photos. So Pratt peeled the pictures off his friend’s wall and sold them to US Weekly, he says on pages 40-42. “Here I am, twenty years old, turning my friend’s romantic misfortune into startup capital.

“Once I see an opportunity, I become like a shark in water, a dog with a bone,” he writes on page 66. “I see what I want. I take it.”

Then on page 77: “The girls were supposed to be interchangeable. One goes out, one comes in. The circle of life in LA.”

And on page 108: “Your dignity gets really flexible when there’s so much money on the table.”

Once, when asked by a producer to apologize to an enemy on his reality TV show, Pratt initially refused. He stood on principle. “I won’t,” he insists on page 124. But the producer insisted. “We are prepared to offer additional compensation.”

“How much compensation?” Pratt asks. “There was a number. A big number. A number that makes you reconsider your principles.”

Pratt married fellow TV personality Heidi Montag, in part to solidify their place on the show, to make them “unfireable.” It also turned out to be profitable. He writes on page 148: “US Weekly paid us $100,000 for that cover, part of a four-cover deal worth $400,000. We were able to turn romance into revenue, love into profit.”

Dissipated by the reality TV business, Pratt and his wife found themselves on the outside looking for relief, attending church and shopping.

“When we weren’t in the church, we pursued safety the only other way we knew; by spending, by proving how much money we had,” he writes on page 180. “Five hundred thousand dollar Birkin bags for Heidi. More or less the same for designer suits for me. Three hundred thousand dollars worth of ammo—endless ammo. Tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition stacked in the closet right next to my Armani. Faith in God, faith in consumerism, faith in our holy trinity for survival.” Nothing could be more American.

Convinced that the crystals’ “ancient energy” would make him “more famous than Elvis and Marilyn combined,” Pratt amassed a vast collection, “worth over a million dollars,” he says on page 182.

He writes that one of these crystals, purple sugilite, brought Heidi relief when she was in pain, and it convinced Pratt of their healing powers: “Then I really became a Crystal Dad,” he writes on page 192.

In March 2020, while filming a reboot of the reality show, COVID hit and made reality TV complicated because nightclubs and restaurants closed and performers and crew were forced to wear masks.

Even worse, his business, Pratt Daddy Crystals, then selling crystal jewelry at a cost of $250,000 a month, faced its own bill. “The government decided we weren’t essential,” he laments on page 265. “California’s blockade orders were stark and absolute. I wasn’t allowed to have employees in the house. Period. Packing orders. Not essential. Sending crystals to people who wanted them? Not essential.”

And then the final blow. Pratt and his father watched the Palisades fire descend on their neighborhood. He blames the government, particularly Gov. Gavin Newsom, but notes with satisfaction that his complaints about the response have at least gotten him some attention in Washington. “The villain was now giving evidence,” he writes on page 278.

In short, the memoir details a candidate for public office who steals, squanders his income, compromises his principles, and blames others for his failures, especially — in the cases of COVID and the fires — the government. And who earns his living, at least for a while, from selling crystals.

These days, Pratt doesn’t seem to want to talk about the portrait he’s created of himself. I have contacted him several times and he has ignored my attempts to reach him via text and email.

When the subject appeared briefly in an interview with CBS LA, he turned it down. “The book was a project before I ran for mayor,” he said. “Not currently relevant.”

Respectfully, this is not his decision, although it is obvious why he would want to turn people away from this project.

The only thing that befell him from his political performance was sympathy, but even that suffers in these pages. The government’s role in disaster response is, of course, fair game for criticism. But it’s hard to feel bad for a guy who says he blew about $1 million on designer bags and suits, more on crystals and $300,000 in ammo.

And the issue of money and principles is presented so gently in his book – as if people every day simply compromise their convictions once the price becomes high enough – that it takes a while to see what he’s saying.

Think of it this way: If Mayor Bass or Councilman Raman were that gentleman selling their beliefs, we’d be handing out indictments, not weighing their political prospects.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.