One day after news broke that HBO chairman and CEO Casey Bloys had used fake social media accounts to troll critics who wrote unfavorably about the network’s programming, the executive now claims he’s found a better way to vent his frustrations—by pestering them via direct message.
“Now if I take issue with something in a review or something I see, I DM many of you,” Bloys said Thursday morning, as he introduced a presentation of HBO and Max’s upcoming slate for press in New York.
“Many of you are gracious enough to engage in a back-and-forth,” he continued, “and I think that is probably a much healthier way to go about this.”
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On Wednesday, Rolling Stone uncovered a previously unreported lawsuit that accused Bloys of deploying sock-puppet social media accounts to call out critics who wrote unfavorably about the streamer’s programs. The magazine reported that Bloys and Kathleen McCaffrey, HBO’s senior vice president of drama programming, used what they called their “secret army” on at least six occasions between June 2020 and April 2021.
Bloys and McCaffrey plotted the social media scheme in private text messages, now made public from a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by former HBO employee Sully Temori, Rolling Stone reports. Beyond alleging that HBO retaliated against him after he disclosed a mental-health diagnosis, Temori’s lawsuit also claims that he’d been asked to create sock puppet accounts to troll critics. His attorney, Michael Martinez, told the magazine that the messages demonstrate HBO’s “very petty” work culture,” which he claims “fosters a dynamic of ongoing harassment and discrimination in the workplace.”
Rolling Stone verified the messages using metadata, which linked “the sender of the messages to a phone number registered to McCaffrey.” In four out of six cases, reporter Cheyenne Roundtree observed, the language Bloys and McCaffrey used in their private messages matched the posted comments exactly.
In a comment to the publication, an HBO spokesperson said it did not “comment on select exchanges between programmers and errant tweets.” The report notes, however, that the company didn’t deny the veracity of these messages.
Speaking to gathered press on Thursday, Bloys staved off possible questions about the report at the top of the event. “You may be aware or not aware that there was an article that dropped yesterday… I thought I might as well talk about it up front,” he said with a self-deprecating tone.
Bloys described himself as “very, very passionate” about what he does and added that it’s “very important to me what you all think about the shows.” In 2020 and 2021, the exec acknowledged, he was “working from home, spending an unhealthy amount of time scrolling through Twitter.” And so, he said, “I came up with a very, very unhealthy idea to vent my frustration.”
While Bloys admitted that “six tweets over a year and a half is not very effective,” he also offered a mea culpa to the critics he’d targeted: “I do apologize to the people who were mentioned in the leaked emails and texts,” he said. “Obviously, nobody wants to be part of a story that they have nothing to do with.”
Rolling Stone cited a small number of unsuspecting critics by name within the piece. During one discussion of a tweet from Vulture TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk, Bloys wrote, “We just need a random to make the point and make her feel bad.” During another discussion regarding a tweet from New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik about The Nevers, McCaffrey wrote to Bloys, “I fucking hate these people.”
Speaking with the publication, Martinez framed the sock-puppet operation as part and parcel of the company’s internal culture. “They joke about people outside of HBO, they joke about people within HBO,” Martinez said. “You suffer through some bullying until you can’t suffer anymore.”
