Karen Bass's Campaign Lawyers Helped Influencers File a Complaint Against Nithya Raman

The complaint alleges Raman's mayoral campaign paid influencers without proper disclosure, and Bass's campaign is picking up the legal bill.

Two influencers have accused Nithya Raman's mayoral campaign of paying online creators without proper disclosure, and Mayor Karen Bass's campaign is covering their legal bills. The Los Angeles Times first reported the arrangement on Thursday.

Kaitlyn Hennessy and Beatrice Gomberg filed their complaints with the state's Fair Political Practices Commission and the Los Angeles Ethics Commission. The Times found that the metadata on a draft of the filings, dated last week, showed it had been built with help from the Kaufman Legal Group, the firm Bass's election campaign uses.

Hennessy confirmed to the paper that Bass's campaign pointed the pair to Kaufman, which helped prepare the complaint.

That matters because Bass and Raman are fighting each other for the mayor's office, with about five weeks to go. An accusation can do its damage in the headlines long before any regulator decides whether it holds up, and this one now carries the incumbent's fingerprints.

Bass's campaign told the Times it's paying for the legal work but isn't paying Hennessy or Gomberg for their effort. It said it plans to list the payments in its disclosure reports. Legal experts the Times consulted said that's unlikely to raise an ethics problem, as long as the spending gets reported.

Who the complaint names

The filings take aim at posts by Adam Conover, the comedian and TV personality, and Eric Cheng, an influencer who went to work for Raman's campaign. They also point to a batch of meme accounts, the pages that repost other people's content, sometimes at a campaign's request.

Raman's campaign denies doing anything wrong.

It also denied any wrongdoing by Cheng, and Conover denied it too. Conover told the Times that money the campaign paid to a company connected to him covered video work one of his staffers did for Raman, not his own posts. Raman's filings first listed those payments as online ads before they were amended to say video production services.

A Raman spokesperson said Cheng is paid for his campaign job, not for what he puts on his personal account, and that the campaign checked with Ethics Commission staff on what Cheng had to disclose. The spokesperson added that Cheng announced on his own account that he'd be joining the campaign before he started.

Conover's pro-Raman posts aren't new to regulators. Dylan Kendall, a former City Council candidate, filed complaints about them in May with both commissions, and those investigations are still open. Both agencies declined to tell the Times where either case stands.

The pair's last target

Hennessy and Gomberg have done this before. They filed a complaint against Tom Steyer's campaign for governor, and the FPPC wrapped up that case last month. Regulators found Steyer's campaign had followed the rules but said several influencers it paid hadn't properly disclosed the money. One of them was Cheng.

The stakes for creators have gone up. California is among the few states that make influencers disclose when a political campaign pays them for content, and Los Angeles goes further. Campaigns have to tell the creators they pay about the rule.

A state law signed last month lets the FPPC send suspected violators to law enforcement for possible misdemeanor charges, with fines of up to $5,000 per violation. The L.A. Ethics Commission can fine up to $15,000, or three times the money involved. None of it applies to paid posts for federal candidates.

Hennessy told the Times she and Gomberg are still digging into undisclosed posts in races around the country, including this one. "When you have this undisclosed content, people don't understand that what they're watching is an ad," she said.

Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Marymount law professor and a former president of the Ethics Commission, urged a harder look at filings that land late in a race. "Whenever I see that there's an ethics complaint filed this close to the election, I always pause for a minute," she said.

Source: latimes.com, retrieved October 1, 2026.