Last January, Spencer Pratt’s house in Pacific Palisades was razed by the raging flames of the Palisades Fire. Now, there has been what he called a “very suspicious fire” in a building in the neighborhood’s tony Highlands where he maintained an office for his crystals company.
Pratt, a former reality TV star who ran a high-profile campaign for Los Angeles mayor that he appeared to concede on Friday, talked to the California Post about the incident, which was first reported by the Palisadian-Post. According to the company’s website, the business sells precious and semi-precious crystal pendants, carvings and chains.
“I want to be careful to not compromise an arson investigation, but this incident is very suspicious,” Pratt told the California Post.
“I will wait for the investigators to make public the details, but this was no accident, and the timing of this … on the heels of all of the contentious election tomfoolery of the last two weeks, it is very suspect, indeed.”
Fire officials have not determined what sparked the blaze, and, in an interview with the Palisadian-Post, the building superintendent said he doesn’t believe the fire is related to Pratt’s campaign for mayor.
A spokesperson for Pratt did not immediately respond to phone calls and a text message seeking comment Saturday afternoon. Pratt suggested in his remarks to the California Post that he believes the fire may have been a politically motivated arson.
“This fire was not an accident, and it would not surprise me in the least if this were a reprisal for my work in opposing Karen Bass and Nithya Raman,” he said.
LAFD Public Service Officer Jamie Stewart told The Times in a phone interview Saturday afternoon that the department received a call at 6:09 p.m. Thursday reporting “a two-story commercial building with light smoke showing.” Stewart added that “arson was notified” and that LAFD arson personnel “did respond and they were on scene” of what he said was a one-alarm fire.
According to the Palisadian-Post, on Thursday, “Multiple firefighting units, including two ladder trucks, were dispatched by LAFD from Fire Stations 23 and 69 in the Palisades and Station 92 in Cheviot Hills to respond to the fire.”
The complex’s superintendent, Oscar Chang, told the local publication that the building was being remediated while waiting for a permit for work on its roof. Eyewitnesses, he told the Palisadian-Post, “saw two guys exiting the building shortly before the fire was reported.”
Chang added that he did not believe the fire was related to Pratt’s political campaign.
“One of the tenants shared a video with me of a homeless person right around the corner,” Chang told the publication, but “no one was living in the building.”
On Saturday morning, Pratt posted on social media about the Thursday fire, which tore through the Highlands Circle commercial complex at 1515 Palisades Drive. The complex was best known as the longtime home of the beloved Italian eatery Casa Nostra Ristorante, which closed a week before the Jan. 7, 2025, Palisades Fire and never reopened.
In the social media posting, he referred to the Los Angeles Times as the El Segundo Times — a derisive moniker referring to the location of its building in the coastal city near LAX Airport — and his repeated allegation that the newspaper “doxxed” him by reporting in April that he was staying in Santa Barbara County, not L.A.
“The El Segundo Times were very eager to dox where my children sleep; they thought that was newsworthy,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Have they reported on the arsonists who set fire to my office in the middle of my election?”
Overhead video footage of the fire posted on the Palisadian-Post’s YouTube channel showed smoke rising from the building as firefighters stood on the roof.
A filing in February with the L.A. City Department of Buildings and Safety proposed work for “change of use from commercial to retail, 2-story” at the property. In September, the department issued a code enforcement violation for “ABANDONED OR VACANT BUILDING LEFT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.”
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