The Golden Globes has terminated its policy of paying $75,000 annual salaries to former members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Helen Hoehne, the organization’s president made the announcement on a Zoom call Friday, with the 50 members who will no longer be paid as voting members of the Globes.
The members were offered $102,500 severance and allowed to remain as Golden Globe members through 2026.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Golden Globes described the change in policy “as an acknowledgment that continuing to pay members could add to a perception of bias in voting.”
The organization “was fully meeting its contractual obligations to the voters by offering the severance,” the statement said.
The affected 50 members are a small group of the larger Globes voting body, which is made up of 300 individuals representing 85 countries.
In June 2023, the nonprofit Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. announced it had been acquired by an alliance between Penske Media and Eldridge Industries, known as Penske Media Eldridge, that it would dissolve the embattled HFPA — the small group of international journalists that handed out the Golden Globes for 80 years — and convert the nonprofit’s then 95 members into employees of a new for-profit enterprise.
The change in status came in the wake of a Times investigation in 2021 that exposed a tumultuous organization that had no Black members and raised concerns about its ethics and financial practices. The Times’ probe revealed that the nonprofit made millions of dollars in payments to its own members for committee work and other tasks.
Following the investigation, much of Hollywood cut ties with the HFPA, ultimately leading NBC to pull the show off the air in 2022, and the organization undertook widespread reforms.
Times staff writer Josh Rottenberg contributed to this report.
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