Former Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso on Tuesday said he declined to shake Jeffrey Katzenberg’s hand at a recent event, after the entertainment kingpin had heavily criticized him before and after his run for office.
“[Katzenberg] came up to me and tried to shake my hand, and I said, ‘There’s no way I’ll ever shake your hand,’” Caruso told Bari Weiss on her “Honestly” podcast.
Caruso said people like Katzenberg — who publicly and financially backed his opponent, current LA mayor Karen Bass, during the 2022 election — are “dangerous” and they “should be held accountable for the things that they did.”
Katzenberg was Caruso’s most prominent critic during his unsuccessful run to be LA mayor. At one point in 2022, the famed producer said the real estate mogul had “made it abundantly clear that he is way too thin-skinned and temperamental to serve as our mayor.”
The Dreamworks co-founder also donated $1.85 million to help Bass win the election. And after her victory, Katzenberg mocked Caruso for continuing to lead media trips to Skid Row in an effort to show how bad the city’s homelessness issue had become.
“Caruso, you have $5 billion, why do you keep taking people to Skid Row? Katzenberg said to Vanity Fair in 2023. “You just pissed away $104 million on a failed campaign, why don’t you put that towards the homeless?”
Those barbs are still fresh in Caruso’s memory, with him telling Weiss on Tuesday that Katzenberg went out of his way to paint him as a “terrible human being.”
When asked how Katzenberg responded to his non-handshake, Caruso said he had a “sort of stunned” look on his face.
Katzenberg did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
“If you want to oppose me, at least do it in a way that has a sense of honesty to it. But if you’re not going to be honest, I don’t want you in my world, and I’m certainly not going to give you the benefit of a handshake, which is a gesture of friendship,” Caruso told Weiss.
He continued: “There is no friendship there, because he disrespected my family. And so unless he says he’s sorry publicly, and that what he said was wrong publicly — at that point, I’ll forgive him, because forgiveness is important. But until then, I won’t.”
Caruso has made a few media appearances lately, including an interview last month on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” after Bass has been skewered by many on the left and the right for her handling of the devastating LA wildfires.
