Political campaign memoirs are a careful, codified genre. They’re risk-averse and candor-deficient, meant as media credential and donor signal. The goals are to humanize the candidate, control the narrative and signal seriousness.
Then there’s The Guy You Loved to Hate, the new tell-all from reality TV antihero Spencer Pratt, who in January announced his run, as a populist outsider, for the Los Angeles mayoralty. He’s since taken to referring to his competitors in the race by bullying nicknames of his own coinage, in the manner of President Donald Trump, who likewise first emerged as a national sensation via the 2000s unscripted TV boom.
The Guy You Loved to Hate may be the first time in recorded history that a political candidate has leveraged his opposition research file as a revenue stream. It debuted at No. 7 on The New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction.
Pratt’s book traces his infamous career as a reality television star and more recent turn — after losing his house a year ago in the Palisades wildfire — as a high-profile critic of state and local government officials. It’s an entertaining read which likely won’t win him many votes, candid to the point of shamelessness about the chaotic, amoral character he’s long monetized, both on- and off-screen. Chapter titles include “Fuck Around and Find Out: Survival Strategies for the Despicable.” Its thematic through-line is the rise and redemption of a self-styled villain.
Pratt offers no prototypical hard-luck origin story. Rather, he reveals himself to have been an ultra-coddled child. He recalls a “level of unconditional validation from my parents” which “hardwired something dangerous into my developing brain. A sense of weapons-grade confidence, combined with the belief that desire equaled entitlement.” He adds, “Every minor developmental milestone was a national event. A tooth fell out? Parade. First soccer goal? Fireworks. Every wobble forward in life was met with the kind of fanfare usually reserved for returning war heroes.”
Throughout the book, Pratt portrays himself as an emblematic Southern California character, obsessed with crystals and burritos, New Age notions and get-rich-quick schemes, self-mythology and the power of celebrity. Like a 21st century analog to the ruthlessly clout-chasing Undine Spragg in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, this son of a surfing dentist leveraged private-school friendships with buddies whose fathers happened to be media mogul Peter Chernin and music producer David Foster into his first TV green light — a short-lived Fox attempt at aping The Osbournes called The Princes of Malibu.
Pratt doesn’t hide his privilege. In fact, he peacocks. After a SWAT team bursts into his house (a long story involving guns and Pomeranians), he and wife Heidi seek refuge along with her Birkins at their favored Four Seasons resort in Costa Rica. Not a likely escape plan for most of his would-be L.A. constituents.
At his narrative’s outset, in a “Note to the Reader,” Pratt hams up his paranoiac streak: “If, following the publication of this book, anything happens to me — heart attack, ‘suicide,’ slip in the shower, brakes go out, fall on my head, choke on deli meat … KNOW THAT IT WAS MURDER. AND YES, PLEASE SEEK REVENGE.”
Later, Pratt provides a personal credo that would prompt many political consultants to hand in their resignations. “I come from a looong line of so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ who turned out to be dead-on accurate, because it’s only a conspiracy theory until it becomes breaking news,” he writes. “Then, suddenly, everyone’s acting like they saw it coming all along.”
Many pages are spent on the fakery of MTV’s unscripted phenomenon The Hills, on which he made his fame, as well as Heidi’s well-publicized plastic surgery travails. Yet The Guy You Loved to Hate is most interested in documenting Pratt’s “evolution from mischievous shit-stirrer to full-blown Antichrist.”
There’s a pit stop at USC, where his fraternity pledge master was none other than Owen Hanson, the future international drug kingpin who was recently the subject of Amazon’s docuseries Cocaine Quarterback: “He tried to beat me with a paddle until I finally snapped.” There’s Pratt’s recollection of first bonding with friend and future The Hills castmate Brody Jenner: “He was surprisingly good at psychological warfare, which I respected.” Along the way, he opens up about everything from his hypervigilance about hygiene (“I’m a Howard Hughes-level germaphobe”) and blackmailing his father as a preteen by recording the elder Pratt yelling at him for kicking a soccer ball at his sister’s face (“What if your patients heard this? The dental board?”) to his experience with cocaine (“Verdict? Meh. I don’t need blow. I am blow. My natural state is already dialed to eleven.”)
Pratt also revisits his past rumormongering of an alleged sex tape involving The Hills star Lauren Conrad — she denied it — and how, years earlier, he sold a friend’s pictures of Mary-Kate Olsen partying for some quick cash. “Desperate times, desperate measures,” he explains. “When you really think about it, it was a win-win. Mary-Kate got her rebel rebrand.”
At one point in his tale, Pratt recalls meeting Rob Blagojevich, the disgraced ex-governor of Illinois, on the set of their jungle-survivalist competition series I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here. Not long out of prison, Blagojevich told him, “Kid, stay out of politics. It’s dangerous.”
Apparently, Pratt didn’t listen. Much of his nascent mayoral campaign has focused on sincere, outraged messaging about governmental fraud and waste. Yet it’s unclear how someone so untested in a leadership role — of any sort — expects to oversee the city of Los Angeles’ $14 billion annual budget. Particularly since, by his own admission, he hasn’t been a forward-thinking steward of even his own household finances.
“Ever since I’d met Heidi, every dollar that came in, we’d spent right away,” he recalls in the book. “That’s just how we rolled. No savings account, no backup plan, just direct deposit and vibes. Because what’s money, really? Just energy moving in and out of your life.”
Billionaire L.A. developer Rick Caruso, the former Republican who lost to Bass in the 2022 mayoral election and had been seriously weighing a rematch, told The Hollywood Reporter on Feb. 6 that he thought Pratt was “a very well-intended guy” but “we’ve had somebody that didn’t have the experience to run the city, so I think experience is really important on knowing how to manage a job like that.”
Reading The Guy You Loved to Hate is, if nothing else, certainly an experience. Even if Pratt fails in his political bid, he’ll no doubt have garnered enough colorful material for a fresh final chapter in the paperback edition.