California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta abruptly pulled out of a planned mediation session Monday to seek a resolution to the antitrust lawsuit that has stalled Paramount Skydance’s blockbuster $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery.
Bonta, in a statement, accused Paramount of leaking and misrepresenting information the two sides had discussed during a preliminary session Friday. He said Paramount was “playing games.”
Representatives of Bonta and Paramount Skydance came together late last week to set ground rules for Monday’s meeting, which was to involve Paramount Skydance Chief Executive David Ellison.
One of the rules had been confidentiality of the mediation process. But, over the weekend, a stream of news stories contained information about the proposed summit.
Late Sunday, the Wall Street Journal published deal points that it said Bonta was preparing to offer Paramount in exchange for dropping his lawsuit. Terms included asking the company to sell some basic cable TV channels because the merged entity would control more than 50, including CNN, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, HGTV and MTV.
Bonta also was going to call for keeping the Warner Bros. film studio separate from Paramount Pictures — which would be a non-starter for Ellison who wants to create a Hollywood super-studio.
“Not only did Paramount leak the alleged substance of the settlement discussions, but they misrepresented these discussions, demonstrating a lack of good faith,” Bonta said on Monday, noting: “I have pulled down this meeting.”
Paramount declined to comment.
The fight with Bonta has grown increasingly ugly after Ellison threatened to pull Paramount — a fixture on Melrose Avenue — out of California. Tennessee has been wooing Paramount, and Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, had moved his software behemoth Oracle to Nashville two years ago.
Several prominent Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass and Xavier Becerra, the Democratic Party’s nominee for governor, has called on Bonta to settle the lawsuit — rather than go to trial next spring.
Bonta didn’t entirely close the door on mediation, which had been ordered by the judge in the antitrust case.
“As soon as Paramount stops playing games and engages sincerely, my office is happy to meet again,” he said.
Tensions crackled after Paramount on Friday went after actor Mark Ruffalo — a prominent deal critic — to accuse him of injecting “antisemitic tropes” into his campaign to derail the industry-reshaping deal.
Leaders of prominent Jewish organizations, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League, quickly came to Paramount’s defense, scolding the Emmy-winning actor best known for playing the Hulk and for being an outspoken political progressive.
Ruffalo had recirculated a two-year-old video clip of Safra Catz, Oracle’s former CEO and a current Paramount board member. During an Israeli-American Council National Summit conference, she said she couldn’t discuss Oracle’s work with Israel’s military, but “we have some profoundly scary technology at Oracle and we wanted to make sure that it was available” to Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks by Hamas.
Ruffalo, in his post, described the war in Gaza as a “genocide” that “was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”
Paramount said: “Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong — they’re a bridge too far.”
Mark Goldfeder, head of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, lashed out at Bonta on Sunday and suggested California’s top law enforcement official was doing Ruffalo’s bidding by filing the antitrust lawsuit against Paramount and Warner Bros.
“Your friend @MarkRuffalo said the quiet part out loud. His campaign against the Jewish Ellisons is about Israel, ‘genocide’, and ‘apartheid’,” Goldfeder wrote in a message on X directed at Bonta.
“Did you hear that too before you sued?” Goldfeder asked Bonta — a reference to a Feb. 27 message by the state attorney general, who at the time was responding to Ruffalo’s dismay after Paramount won the bidding war for Warner Bros., besting Netflix.
In that nearly six-month-old post, Bonta wrote on X: “Mark, I hear you. I’m in conversation with my AG colleagues about Paramount/Warner Bros. As the epicenter of the entertainment industry, California has a special interest in protecting competition.”
Bonta and 11 other state attorney generals went on to sue, claiming Ellison’s merger violates U.S. antitrust law.
By Monday, some Jewish leaders questioned Bonta’s commitment to fighting antisemitism — or protecting Hollywood’s Jewish leaders, including the Ellisons.
“Attorney General Bonta told Mark Ruffalo that he hears him and said California has a ‘special interest in protecting competition’ because we are the epicenter of the entertainment industry,” Rabbi Noah Farkas, president and chief executive of the Jewish Federation Los Angeles, said in a statement.
“We agree that California has a special obligation to protect Hollywood, but not only from anticompetitive conduct. It must also protect the people who power this industry from antisemitism and every form of hate,” Farkas said.
The rabbi added that Bonta’s “record with Jewish Californians remains mixed.”
“In some important moments, he has failed to stand up with the clarity and urgency our community deserved,” Farkas said. “This is why it is so important that Bonta clarify what ‘Mark, I hear you’ means. Hearing legitimate antitrust concerns cannot mean excusing rhetoric that invokes age-old tropes about Jewish wealth, media control and sinister power.”
Ruffalo defended himself over the weekend.
“The accusation that I am antisemitic is appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” Ruffalo wrote on X. “Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people.”
It’s unclear when the mediation sessions between the state attorneys general and Ellison will be rescheduled. The judge in the case has scheduled a hearing in late September.
“As I have said before, generally for all cases, I prefer to resolve disputes in the boardroom, not the courtroom,” Bonta said in his statement. “As I’ve also said, if the opposing party in litigation wants to meet in good faith to make a sincere effort to resolve the case, we’ll meet.”
