This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
Call me old fashioned, but I’m of the belief that being a villain on a reality TV show and having your house burn down are qualifications that fall somewhere short of what it takes to be mayor of Los Angeles.
So I’ve been skeptical of Spencer Pratt’s angry, name-calling campaign. In Pratt’s world, Mayor Karen Bass is Karen “Basura,” City Councilmember Nithya Raman is “crazy” and a “serious threat to your kids,” and critical reporters are “media sickos.” It’s a shrill argument for someone hoping to lead California’s largest metropolis, a city I’ve covered since Pratt was a little boy growing up among LA’s more well-to-do denizens.
Still, I figured I owed him a chance, so I picked up his memoir, “Spencer Pratt: The Guy You Loved to Hate,” published earlier this year, to get to know the man behind the caustic candidacy. Here was an opportunity to see Pratt explain himself.
He does not impress. The Pratt of these pages — in his own words — is selfish, undisciplined and unprincipled. He deflects blame, squanders fortunes and complains. A lot. It’s hard to imagine him holding any office, much less one of such consequence.
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 – golden ticket, handed the keys to the global economy. Step Three: world domination.”
Needing money to finance a student film project, Pratt realized a friend had photos from his time dating a Hollywood celebrity — a “wasted resource,” as Pratt describes the pictures. So Pratt peeled the photographs off the friend’s wall and sold them to US Weekly, he says in pages 40-42. “Here I was, twenty years old, turning my buddy’s romantic misery into startup capital.
“Once I see an opportunity, I’m like a shark in the water, a dog with a bone,” he writes on page 66. “I see what I want. I take it.”
Then on page 77: “Girls were supposed to be interchangeable. One exits, another enters. Circle of life in LA.”
And on page 108: “Your dignity gets real flexible when there’s that much cash on the table.”
Once when he was asked by a producer to apologize to a nemesis on his reality TV show, Pratt at first refused. He stood on principle. “I’m not doing it,” he insists on page 124. But the producer persisted. “We’re prepared to offer additional compensation.”
“How much compensation?” Pratt asks. “There was a number. A big number. The kind of 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 proved lucrative. He writes on page 148: “US Weekly paid us $100,000 for that cover, part of a four-cover deal worth $400,000. We’d managed to turn romance into revenue, love into leverage.”
Tossed about by the reality TV business, Pratt and his wife ended up on the outside and sought relief, attending church and going on a buying binge.
“When we weren’t in church, we chased safety the only other way we knew; by spending, by proving just how much money we had,” he writes on page 180. “Five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Birkin bags for Heidi. About the same on designer suits for me. Three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of ammo — endless ammo. Tens of thousands of rounds stacked in the closet right next to my Armani. Faith in God, faith in consumerism, faith in firepower. Our holy trinity of survival. Nothing could have been more American.”
Assured that the “ancient energy” of crystals would make him “more famous than Elvis and Marilyn combined,” Pratt amassed a huge collection, “upward of a million dollars’ worth,” he says on page 182.
He wrote that one of those crystals, a purple sugilite, brought Heidi relief when she was in pain, and that persuaded Pratt of their healing powers: “That’s when I became a Crystal Daddy for real,” he writes on page 192.
In March 2020, while filming a reboot of a reality show, COVID struck and rendered reality TV complicated, because night clubs and restaurants shut down and performers and crew were forced to wear masks.
Even worse, his business, Pratt Daddy Crystals, then selling crystal jewelry at the clip of $250,000 a month, faced its own reckoning. “The government decided we weren’t essential,” he complains on page 265. “California’s lockdown orders were sweeping and absolute. I wasn’t allowed to have employees in the house. Period. Packaging orders. Not essential. Shipping crystals to people who wanted them? Not essential.”
And then the final blow. Pratt and his father watched the Palisades fire bear down on their neighborhood. He blames the government, specifically Gov. Gavin Newsom, but notes with pleasure that his complaints about the response at least got him some attention in Washington. “The villain was now delivering testimony,” he writes on page 278.
In sum, then, the memoir details a candidate for public office who steals, squanders his income, compromises his principles and blames his setbacks on others, especially — in the cases of COVID and the fires — the government. And who makes his living, at least for a time, by selling crystals.
These days, Pratt seems not to want to talk about the portrait he has created of himself. I reached out to him several times, and he ignored my attempts to reach him by text and email.
When the subject came up briefly in an interview with CBS LA, he brushed it off. “The book was a project before I ran for mayor,” he said. “It is not relevant right now.”
Respectfully, that’s not his call to make, though it’s obvious why he’d want to steer people away from this project.
The one thing he’s had going for him since his political launch has been sympathy, but even that suffers on these pages. 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 some $1 million on designer bags and suits, that much again on crystals and $300,000 in ammo.
And the issue of money and principle is presented so blandly in his book — as if people every day just compromise their convictions once the price gets high enough — that it takes a moment for it to register what he’s saying.
Think of it this way: If Mayor Bass or Councilmember Raman were that cavalier about selling their beliefs, we’d be rifling through indictments, not weighing their political prospects.
Newport Academy received numerous state citations before closing Pleasanton clinicsApril 28, 2026 6:00 am