Spencer Pratt Accuses CBS of Handing Interview Footage to Karen Bass Camp

Spencer Pratt is done with CBS — and he wants everyone to know it. The Hills alum and longshot Los Angeles mayoral candidate took to X on Saturday to accuse the network of handing footage from his recent on-camera interview to incumbent Mayor Karen Bass’s PR team, claiming they used it to turn his campaign into a political “sideshow.”

The interview was filmed at Pratt’s scorched Pacific Palisades lot — the site of his home, destroyed in the devastating January 2025 fires that leveled nearly 7,000 structures and killed 12 people. For Pratt, it wasn’t just a backdrop. It was the reason he’s running.

CBS pushed back hard. Sources told TMZ that no footage handoff occurred and that the network planned to air the full interview. Whether viewers found it to be the “Hills demo reel and hit piece collab” Pratt described is another question — but his frustration clearly runs deeper than a single segment.

Pratt declared he’ll never speak to CBS again — not even if he wins the mayor’s office and serves two full terms. That’s eight years of silence, should the stars align.

The Debate That Started It All

The CBS accusation came hot on the heels of a combative Los Angeles mayoral debate, where Pratt went after Bass directly over her handling of the Palisades fire — and specifically over what he called her lies about the conditions on the ground that day.

“A lot of people talk about climate change and hurricane-force winds,” Pratt said during the debate. “The winds in the Pacific Palisades never reached higher than 40 mph. For those first six hours, they didn’t go above 27 miles per hour.”

Bass fired back: “He talked about the winds — that is just completely inaccurate. If that were accurate, then the planes would have been able to fly. And so if the winds reached close to 100 miles an hour and the planes were unable to fly.”

Pratt didn’t let it go. “She is referencing the Altadena fire,” he shot back. “She is an incredible liar. Everyone on their phones, Google it. 40 weather stations in the Pacific Palisades. It never went above 40 miles per hour.” When a moderator tried to cut him off for name-calling, Pratt responded: “Yeah, but no name calling? She just lied though… No more lying. We need the truth.”

It was a chaotic moment — but then came the fact-check.

CBS’s Own Reporting Backed Pratt Up

In a notable turn, CBS News fact-checked the exchange and landed squarely on Pratt’s side. “Weather modeling reviewed for my reporting shows winds in the Palisades during those first several hours of the fire were, in fact, under 40 miles per hour,” the CBS reporter noted. “Planes could and did fly. Stronger winds intensified later in the evening. And that distinction matters because the earliest hours of a wildfire are often the most critical for containment.”

According to CBS’s own reporting, the fire was first logged at 10:30 a.m. Helicopters were dropping water within 15 minutes. Planes arrived within the hour. Bass’s claim about 100 mph winds grounding aircraft simply didn’t hold up.

The second fact-check hit even harder. Bass had argued during the debate that her being in Ghana when the fires broke out “didn’t matter” — that she managed the crisis just as effectively from overseas. CBS’s reporting told a different story: Bass left for Ghana knowing dangerous fire weather was forecast. Her office described her to emergency managers only as being “out-of-state.” While she was abroad, her team continued posting social media content that made it appear she was in Los Angeles — creating confusion during the fire’s critical opening hours. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley didn’t initially know the mayor was even out of the country. And after Bass was briefed on the growing disaster, she still attended a cocktail reception in Ghana and went more than an hour without responding to messages from L.A. officials asking for help.

For Pratt, who has been living with the wreckage of the fires both literally and politically, the fact-check felt like vindication. Whether it translates to votes is a different matter entirely — but it’s not nothing.

The full CBS interview has aired. The fact-checks are out there. And Spencer Pratt, reality TV’s most committed villain-turned-candidate, is still standing in the rubble of his old neighborhood, making his case.