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Happy Boxing Day, and welcome to another special holiday
edition of The Daily Courant, where we’re continuing our year-end recollection of Puck’s favorite stories from the past month. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow, but until then, allow us to direct your attention to Rachel Strugatz’s perspicacious reporting on whether Rhode, Hailey Bieber’s nine-figure beauty business, can avoid Goop’s key man risk; Marion Maneker’s fearless investigation into the latest round of
layoffs at Sotheby’s; Matt Belloni’s epic exploration of the Hollywood legal saga that reveals a sea change in the industry’s P.R. salt mines; Dylan Byers’ insidery analysis of why Disney settled the Trump defamation case; and Tara Palmeri’s exclusive look at the president-elect’s boundary-pushing lawsuit accusing revered Iowa pollster Ann Selzer of “election interference.”

FASHION

A close look at the evolution of Rhode, the Hailey Bieber-founded beauty
brand, which has transformed beyond a celebrity-driven lip gloss line into a thriving nine-figure business with a distinctive presence in the fiercely competitive beauty market. (In many ways, Rachel notes, its cultural and commercial impact is similar to that of Kim Kardashian’s Skims.) Recently, Rhode has savvily leveraged celebrities beyond Bieber in marketing and ad campaigns—while also bringing on high-level executive talent behind the scenes—aiming to eliminate the “key man risk” that has
plagued Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. But can Rhode, which has, so far, been heavily reliant on Bieber, actually cultivate an identity beyond its celebrity founder?

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ART

Just a few months after Sotheby’s secured $1 billion in financing from an
Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, the 280-year-old auction house is cutting staff across its many global offices, including nearly 100 people in New York. Sure, the layoffs may not be a direct condition of the cash infusion, but stipulations attached to the deal may have incentivized the restructuring. As Marion reports, Sotheby’s is on the hook for an 11 percent dividend payment to the Emiratis—and they’d happily take their pound of flesh in more equity if owner Patrick Drahi falls short. The
culling also comes as Sotheby’s shifts focus away from fine art and toward ventures that blur the lines between auctions and luxury retail experiences. With ambitions to leverage its storied brand in new and innovative ways, the question on everyone’s mind is what a leaner, meaner Sotheby’s actually looks like…

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HOLLYWOOD

The publicity firm PMK used to rule the Hollywood talent landscape, and
as recently as the early 2000s, the trio of Pat Kingsley, Leslee Dart, and (until her 2003 retirement) Lois Smith was considered the iron claw of celebrity P.R. And so it was telling to see the parent company of what’s now called R&CPMK sue the latest and largest group of the agency’s defectors—the latest sign that the Hollywood talent P.R. business isn’t what it used to be. Indeed, many in the talent community view the lawsuit as a sign of fear and weakness at PMK, as well as a not-so-subtle
message to its other publicists to stay put—or else. Regardless of whether they exited the “right” or “wrong” way, the lawsuit’s message to the broader community is that this loss really hurt PMK, and the leadership doesn’t have a different way to respond. It’s tough to spin that.

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MEDIA

Bob Iger approved the much-debated decision to settle Donald Trump’s
defamation suit against ABC News for $15 million, plus an additional $1 million to cover the president-elect’s legal fees. Amid the debate surrounding whether this amounted to a “capitulation” to the incoming administration, Dylan reveals some of the internal calculations made by Disney’s general counsel to stop the proceedings—including fears that George Stephanopoulos’s digital correspondence might expose the anchor, the news network, and the parent company to greater scrutiny. “He is sloppy
electronically,” said a source of Stephanopoulos. 

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WASHINGTON

Earlier this month, Trump filed a stunning lawsuit against Ann Selzer—the
“oracular” Iowa pollster whose final pre-election survey incorrectly found Kamala Harrisleading Trump in the state—for “brazen election interference” and consumer fraud. Tara was the first journalist to get eyes on the boundary-pushing legal theory articulated by Trump’s lawyers, and the first to report that the suit had been filed—an unprecedented extrapolitical maneuver designed to intimidate pollsters, as well as journalists, ahead of his return to the Oval.

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