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Casey Wasserman was born into Hollywood royalty, and for much of his life – until the release of the Epstein files brought his world crashing down – he appeared as formidable and untouchable as the entertainment industry moguls of old.
He wasn’t just the man charged with organizing the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles – a position he still holds, despite widespread calls for his resignation. He was a consummate power broker, someone who controlled the careers of prominent musicians, actors and athletes through the talent agency named after him, cultivated relationships in local and national politics, raised money for key election contests, endowed civic buildings and, through his family wealth, gave lavishly to social causes.
When Los Angeles hosted the Super Bowl in 2022, Wasserman chaired the host committee, and his client Kendrick Lamar featured prominently in the half-time show’s all-star lineup. At the annual Coachella music festival, in the desert east of LA, his clients have become so dominant that, this year, they are set to outnumber the nearest competition by more than two to one.
When Wasserman celebrated his 50th birthday, in 2024, the Democratic party luminaries who flew in for the party and rubbed shoulders with Hollywood industry executives and sports, film and television stars included former president Bill Clinton, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and California’s governor, Gavin Newsom.
All that influence and glamour is now in question, after the revelation of a 23-year-old, graphically sexual email exchange between Wasserman, who was married at the time, and Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s closest friend and partner in crime now serving a life sentence for child sex trafficking and other offenses. Wasserman previously acknowledged that he and his wife flew on Epstein’s private plane on a humanitarian mission to Africa in 2002.
Since the beginning of the month, several of Wasserman clients, including the pop star Chappell Roan and Abby Wambach, the former US soccer player, announced that they were cutting ties with him. “We are tired of learning, over and over, that men who control access, resources, money and so-called safety in our industry are given endless grace,” one of the first to leave, Bethany Cosentino of the band Best Coast, said in a statement. “We are tired of being asked to treat proximity to something horrific as an unfortunate situation we should simply move past – especially when the person involved still holds all the power.”
Wasserman sought to limit the damage with a statement of his own, in which he said he deeply regretted his correspondence with Maxwell but that it occurred years before her crimes came to light. He also said he had never had a “personal or business relationship” with Epstein.
That did little to turn the tide, however. With the exodus from his agency threatening to become a stampede, Wasserman announced last Friday that he was stepping aside and putting the agency up for sale. For now, he remains in charge of LA28, the organizing committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, but Los Angeles’s mayor, Karen Bass, and one-third of the city council are calling for him to step down.
“Shouldn’t it be a bare minimum expectation that you don’t have a leader [of the Olympic committee] who is associated with an international sex-trafficking ring?” LA city council member Monica Rodriguez asked in an interview. “We have an obligation and a duty to protect these athletes and uphold the integrity of the games.”
Wasserman has not himself been accused of any association with sex trafficking. In his 31 January statement, he underlined that his correspondence with Maxwell occurred long before public knowledge of what he called her “horrific crimes”. He said of Maxwell and Epstein: “I am terribly sorry for having any association with either of them.”
The fall from grace has been astonishingly rapid for a man who seemed to enjoy boundless resources, connections and good fortune. Wasserman’s grandfather was the formidable Lew Wasserman, who also started out as a talent agent and ended his career with his name emblazoned on the executive building at Universal Studios, which his agency bought and ran for close to 30 years.
The elder Wasserman had been instrumental in ending the old studio system and in negotiating lucrative single-picture deals for his actor clients, who included James Stewart and Marilyn Monroe. With the help of Ronald Reagan, then the head of the Screen Actors Guild, Wasserman broke the firewall that previously prevented talent agents from producing films and television, and in exchange helped launch Reagan’s political career.
Casey was a favorite of his grandfather’s and for years had a regular weekend breakfast date with him at Nate and Al’s, a well-known Jewish deli in Beverly Hills. He used family money to help establish his sports agency and leaned on his fortune again to acquire Paradigm, a music agency, in 2021, and Brillstein Entertainment, which represents A-list actors including Brad Pitt and Florence Pugh, in 2023.
It was Lew Wasserman who introduced him to the Clintons, among many other political connections, and it was Clinton Foundation business that led Wasserman and his wife to join Bill Clinton, Epstein and Maxwell – along with corporate executives and Hollywood celebrities – on Epstein’s plane in 2002.
The files released by the justice department do not indicate any one-on-one contact between Wasserman and Epstein other than the plane rides to Africa and two FedEx packages sent shortly after the Africa trip. Paperwork on the packages, one addressed to Wasserman at his business address and the other to his wife, lists both Epstein and Maxwell as the senders. There appears to be no correspondence sent directly to Epstein, and no communications between Wasserman and Maxwell after 2003.
LA28’s board, a high-profile group including former labor secretary Elaine Chao and top Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, hired a law firm, O’Melveny & Myers, to conduct an investigation and concluded that Wasserman’s relationship with Epstein and Maxwell “did not go beyond what has already been publicly documented”.
The board added: “[We have] determined that based on these facts, as well as the strong leadership he has exhibited over the past ten years, Mr Wasserman should continue to lead LA28 and deliver a safe and successful Games.”
That, however, has not satisfied Wasserman’s critics, who say the known record is already damning enough – even leaving aside questions of what else might be in the millions of Epstein files that the justice department has yet to make public. They also question how Wasserman can be too compromised to stay on at his agency but still retain the credibility to continue to lead the Olympics.
“Why should he have a different response in his private capacity to the one in his public capacity?” Rodriguez, the city council member, said. “We don’t know what we don’t know, but we know enough.”
The critics have also questioned the reliability of the investigation that LA28 commissioned and paid for but has not made public. “I don’t know if people know this,” said John Manly, a lawyer who has represented high-profile sexual-abuse victims including Simone Biles and other US gymnasts, “but attorneys rarely find their own clients guilty. They act like this investigation is independent and it’s not.”
Wasserman said through a spokesperson that he had nothing to add to his 31 January statement. Neither LA28 nor O’Melveny & Myers responded to a request for comment.
Even before the Epstein revelations, Wasserman’s management of the Olympics had attracted criticism from city officials and public watchdogs, and that has added to the pressure on him to go. Despite concern about cost overruns – an abiding feature of all recent Olympic Games – and the possible impact on city finances, LA28 blew through a deadline last October to define how much Los Angeles can expect to be reimbursed for extraordinary spending incurred while hosting the Games. (City officials say negotiations are continuing.)
More recently, it blew through another deadline to publish a human rights plan to protect vulnerable groups – everyone from athletes at risk of sexual abuse to unhoused Angelenos – during the Games. LA28 told a reporter for a local radio station that it had fulfilled its “obligation to the city” but the plan is still not public. City council members have expressed concern, too, that LA28 might try to circumvent LA’s standard contracting procedures and offer a fast track to vendors it prefers. LA28 did not respond to an invitation to comment.
One of the reasons that LA28’s board members gave for continuing to support Wasserman, according to reporting in the Los Angeles Times, is that they saw him as essential to corporate sponsorships the Games can’t afford to lose. He was, they said, simply “too big to fail”.
To which a strikingly blunt Rodriguez responded: “That’s a bunch of horseshit … We’re the damned city of Los Angeles. We have major international companies with leaders who are well respected and just as qualified [as Wasserman]. We have plenty of talent to draw on.”
