Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt is demanding that The Los Angeles Times retract its story questioning the Palisades Fire survivor’s eligibility for the race based on his residency.
Pratt’s team sent a letter to LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong Friday asking the newspaper for an answer to his demands by 9 a.m. on April 13 for “willfully and maliciously publishing false information.”
The Times published a piece titled, “Spencer Pratt’s move to Santa Barbara County after his Palisades house burned raises eligibility questions in L.A. mayor’s race” on April 6. The article quotes several people casting doubts on his LA residency and builds a case towards his connection to his temporary home in Santa Barbara County.
Writers Noah Goldberg and Richard Winton even interviewed the manager of a local Santa Barbara Mexican restaurant, who said they see Pratt often. Another person quoted said Pratt’s temporary Santa Barbara residency “brings up the question” as to whether he can satisfy the residency requirement, but the person, a professor of law, doesn’t substantiate their claim further.
View this post on Instagram The 2025 LA wildfires burned down Pratt’s home along with many others in The Palisades, forcing him to relocate to his parents’ house in Santa Barbara County. He maintains a vacant lot where his residence was, and recently moved an Airstream trailer there, the article noted.
One writer, Goldberg, responded to the article on X suggesting he expected backlash for it, Pratt’s team said.
“Here comes the ratio,” Goldberg wrote.
The LA Times’ characterization of his residency and LA mayoral eligibility demonstrated “actual malice,” Pratt’s team said. They said it was clear the reporters ignored domicile rules, which allow Pratt to run for mayor, governing fire victims’ eligibility to run for office.
“This is not rocket science and it is clear that Goldberg and Winton deliberately published false information after willfully and deliberately avoiding the research needed to write a fair report,” they wrote.
Pratt’s team believes the LA Times and the writers purposefully penned the article to “provoke a negative response surrounding Mr. Pratt’s campaign for Mayor.”
“There must be consequences for their reckless disregard for the truth,” Pratt’s team added.
Pratt is running against LA Mayor Karen Bass, who the publication endorsed in 2022. Soon-Shiong has since the called the endorsement a “mistake.”
Pratt is a LA City Clerk certified candidate for mayor along with Bass and socialist councilmember Nithya Raman. The Palisades survivor’s team says this certification is enough to prove that he is eligible to run for mayor, and any suggestion to the contrary is “reckless.”
His team says that the LA Times’ demands to the City Clerk’s office for Pratt’s eligibility documents, which they have kept confidential, is akin to “demanding that someone with a passport prove their citizenship by demanding a letter from the State Department validating their social security number.”
An email from Pratt’s party to the City Clerk’s office shows city approval for him to run because of rules related to wildfire displacement.
“Fire victims, like Spencer Pratt, are able to maintain their vacant burned lot as their primary residence, and are indeed eligible to both vote and run for city office while rebuilding, even if they’ve been temporarily displaced outside the city during the recovery,” the clerk writes.
The city does not require you to change your voter registration address if wildfires displace you, The California Post confirmed.
The California Post reached out to the LA Times for comment.
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