The actor and presenter Jameela Jamil hit out at the “rich, white celebrities” who opted to vote for billionaire former Republican Rick Caruso for mayor of Los Angeles.
Mr Caruso, a real estate tycoon who promised to “clean up” the city with a controversial plan to force people experiencing homelessness into massive shelters, currently has a narrow lead over Rep Karen Bass with under the half the vote counted.
Given that later-arriving ballots in Los Angeles tend to favour progressive candidates, Ms Bass may well prevail. But the race exposed major faultlines in LA politics, splitting the loyalities of the city’s celebrities. British-born Jamil, in an Election Day post on Instagram, did not hold back.
“The man became a Democrat THIS year after being a life long Republican,” Jamil wrote of Mr Caruso. “He ran as an independent when he entered public politics for a while and just switched. This man has funded pro life politicians, and has pretty upsetting plans for how he’s going to ‘clean up’ LA... It says a LOT about your faves who they choose to endorse.”
Mr Caruso spent nearly $100m of his vast fortune on his campaign, outspending Ms Bass by a margin of nearly 10-to-one and closing what was once a wide polling gap in the final weeks of the race. He enjoyed the public support of the likes of Katy Perry, Chris Pratt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paris Hilton, Mario Lopez, and a number of other ultra-rich celebrities.
Perry, in an Instagram post of her own, wrote that she was voting for Mr Caruso because Los Angeles “is a hot mess atm.”
“I don’t agree with all of her political decisions but @karenbassla is a proper politician with a background as a social worker,” Jamil wrote. “She has worked from the ground up and actually cares about the WHOLE community, and it’s frankly astonishing that she has managed to fight Caruso off this long without the funding he has in his own bloody bank account to promote himself.”
Jamil was not, by any means, the only celebrity who lined up behind Ms Bass. Alyssa Milano voiced her support for the Congresswoman, as did Mark Hamill, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Norman Lear and Rosario Dawson.
Housing, crime, and public safety have been central issues in races up and down the West Coast over the last year, with progressive candidates struggling to fend off better-funded, more conservative candidates promising, in some cases, to effectively criminalise homelessness.
Jamil wrote in her post that “rich, white celebrities” were endorsing Mr Caruso “because they are tired of seeing unhoused people, from their limos.”
Mr Caruso vowed throughout his campaign to end “street homelessness,” though it is not clear how he could do that as mayor without the support of a more progressive city council.
