On Wednesday, a judge ordered Yashar Ali, a popular journalist, to repay his former companion Ariadne Getty roughly $233,000 by directing future revenues, including subscriptions to his Substack and donations from readers, to her.
According to reports, Ali borrowed roughly $180,000 from Getty between 2012 and 2014, despite having more than 700,000 Twitter followers and previously working for California Governor Gavin Newsom. But with interest, that sum allegedly ballooned to $232,769! In 2017, Getty filed a lawsuit against Ali for not repaying her, and in April, it was reported that Getty had hired a debt collector to try to garnish Ali’s wages.
California Superior Court Judge Michael Stern determined that Getty is entitled to a portion of Ali’s future revenues from journalism, media appearances, Substack subscriptions, and reader donations to recoup the $233,000 that Ali owes her.
Courthouse News Service said that Ali’s creditor, Arden Silverman, said whatever money is due to him will now be diverted to Ariadne. Silverman did not specify how much of Ali’s income came from his journalism.
The world first learned about Ali’s financial troubles in a 2021 story from Los Angeles Magazine, which said he had been evicted from many residences, failed to pay several loans, and accumulated tens of thousands of dollars in taxes.
The article profiling Ali said his preference was to crash in the houses of friends, many of whom were members of the political and entertainment elite like Getty, Susie Tompkins Buell (Democratic Party megadonor), and Kathy Griffin (comic), and that their relationships often soured.
Their relationship went south after Ali began “borrowing” substantial amounts of money from her in 2012.
After promising to pay Getty back monthly, the newspaper claims he has “made only two of those payments before defaulting.”
