Reporting from California: "It stressed me out more than any other story that I've published”

Peter Kiefer is a Los Angeles-based journalist who reports on business, politics and entertainment. He has written for The Ankler, The Hollywood Reporter and Los Angeles Magazine. In a previous life, Kiefer reported from Italy for the New York Times. He joins us today to discuss a story he wrote for LA Magazine in 2021, “The Curious Rise of Twitter Power Broker Yashar Ali,” which went viral.

Peter Kiefer, welcome to The Reporters.

Hey, thanks Scott, happy to be here.

We're gonna be taking a kind of a crazy deep dive into a story that came out in 2021, in LA Magazine — a story by a journalist, but also about journalism and this strange world where media meets politics, meets big money, meets celebrity, meets Twitter, and how all those forces come together and manifest in the form of this compelling and weird and kind of disturbing person who you profile. It’s part profile, part investigation. It's at times hilarious. It's also reflective of a very particular moment in recent memory. Tell us a little bit, if you can, about the figure at the heart of the story.

Yashar came to my attention in the same way I think he came to everyone's attention, which was through his Twitter feed. I remember that you and I sat right next to each other in the [Hollywood Reporter] newsroom. And it was around that time that he sort of emerged. It felt like there was a moment before Yashar was present in all of our lives, at least via Twitter. And then there was the moment after Yashar, because he kind of just exploded onto the scene.

And just to be clear, we're talking about Yashar Ali, The Yashar Ali Twitter personality.

Yes. This was not his birth name, but he's known as Yashar Ali. He came to my attention around 2017 or 2018 because he was a prolific, and extremely deft, user of Twitter. He was tweeting dozens of times a day and he had this uncanny ability to be very much in the zeitgeist of the news.

“He built virtual relationships with some of the most powerful people in politics, popular culture, and journalism. And they were real. He used them to his advantage."

In the process he built up a huge following on Twitter. And it wasn't just that he was breaking news and following current events and unearthing things on the Internet and sharing them. He also shared intimate details about himself and about his life. That’s part of why he was able to be so effective on that platform.

He would also retweet people all the time. Remember, this is Twitter pre-Elon. It was still an important thing back then. People were still trying to figure it out. I think that we were all collectively realizing the power of the platform. Yashar was able to harness it in a way that showed how powerful it could be. You just couldn't ignore him. He was everywhere.

The whole thing was mysterious to me. He seemed simultaneously random but also incredibly influential.

He started out as an online persona, and then he morphed into a journalist. You and I came from an era where we had toiled as journalists for decades, and we didn't have huge followings. We just kind of let our work speak for itself. I think we understood that it was cool and powerful to have a big following, but we also knew that sacrifices had to be made often to try and build up those types of following. What Yashar showed is that if you have the following, it could be an extremely powerful and influential tool.

So, he was on your radar, but why did you decide to write about him? What tipped you off that there might be something to say?

Much of his journalism targeted individuals in the media and celebrities and took them down. He was very effective. Through his journalism and his Twitter feed, he emerged as a powerful and very feared figure. He had effectively toppled a number of powerful figures. I noticed this and was disturbed by a lot of it. I felt like in certain instances, it didn't seem right — and not just what Yashar was doing, but this was happening in this larger sort of cancel culture moment. I think it was sort of peak cancel culture.

I cover politics in California and I was calling sources up in the Bay area to talk about an unrelated story about the governor. One of the questions I always ask at the end of a conversation is: “Do you think there's any great story that's just hanging out there?” Two separate individuals said, “Who's gonna write the story about Yashar Ali?” Both of them said there was a huge story to tell about him.

I was off to the races.

Give us a sense of just how well connected he is.

It's remarkable who he had in his immediate Rolodex. He was regularly texting and talking with people as high as Jeff Zucker, who at the time was the president of CNN. He was close with Jake Tapper of CNN. Maggie Haberman [of the NYT] is a close friend of his or was a close friend of his. Megan McCain was a close friend of his. Chrissy Teigen was a very close friend of his. Top publicists and PR people who worked in entertainment and in politics were close friends of his. It ran the gamut. Top executives at news networks spoke to Yashar regularly, I found out later. He was tireless in his networking. It was unbelievable.

At first I didn't believe that he actually had real relationships with a lot of these people. But when I started my reporting, it turns out he did. I wasn't expecting anyone, or very few of them, to actually get back to me. Almost all of them did — all the names that I had just mentioned, and more. Yashar didn't go out in public often. He built virtual relationships with them through social media, emailing and texting.

By using his cell phone and his computer, he was able to cultivate dozens, if not hundreds of relationships with some of the most powerful people in politics, popular culture, and journalism and media. And they were real. And he used them to his advantage. That was fascinating to me. What troubled me was how he ultimately wielded that power.

You don't often get that kind of immediate response when you reach out to people asking for comment about this or that person. That really stuck with me in your story because I thought, “Why?”

It took me a while to ultimately get to Yashar and actually have him participate in the piece. But once I did, I asked him, “Who do you think would be good secondary voices for the story?” He promptly sent me a list of over 30 people and it was like a “Who's Who?” of those spheres of power in America today. Executives, politicians, celebrities. It was crazy. He explained in this spreadsheet what his relationship was with these individuals. I was like, this can't be true. These people can't all have relationships with him. And they did. There was something very sort of seductive about having a relationship with Yashar. He was able to use that power and use it very effectively.

About a third of the way into the story, we get to the heart of the conflict. You reveal that Yashar has a bit of a past. And while he has been very effective at bringing other people down, he's been very adept at keeping his own past shrouded in secrecy and ambiguity. Not only does he have a past, a private investigator had been poking around, a bit like you. Tell us a little bit about what you found.

He had very serious financial problems and had some liens out on him. He had borrowed money from a very prominent individual who had taken legal measures to try and recoup what she alleged was a loan that was never paid back. There were issues with some prominent wealthy patrons who he had ingratiated himself with. They had invited him into their lives and their homes for extended periods of time. He had pretty bitter fallings out with them. And then there were people who had been the targets of some of his journalism, who felt that they had been unfairly targeted. I ran into another group of sources, a number of whom were journalists, who felt that he was not practicing the most ethical form of journalism.

Yashar had made some enemies over the years who were [eager] for someone to start poking around. He had grown so powerful. His notoriety as a journalist had soared in a very short period of time. A lot of the people that I ended up talking to were more than happy to provide information about Yashar because they were unhappy with him for a range of reasons. No one had tried to piece together the whole story. I was really conscious of trying to be honest and fair and to present both sides. Yashar feels very different about this, but I think it was ultimately a balanced piece.

If memory serves, it was a fraught reporting process. What were some of the hurdles that you ran into?

I reached out to him almost immediately and didn't hear back. I thought I was just going to do a write-around profile without the participation of the subject. There had been one or two small, sympathetic stories about Yashar but no one had done the big takeout. The first challenge was that he wasn't talking to me. As you know, it's just inherently harder when the subject you're writing about, A.) Isn't talking to you and B.) Has shown himself to be hostile.

The second challenge was that Yashar was deeply feared — and I think to a degree still is. He had shown himself to be kind of ruthless when he went after individuals, both on his social media feeds and in some of his journalism. He had toppled powerful people. He did some reporting that got Sharon Osborne canceled. He got Barbara Fadita at ABC News fired over accusations that she had acted inappropriately with colleagues. He published a story about a Netflix executive and something that happened with Danny Masterson, that this Netflix executive had literally had nothing to do with and ultimately got him fired. He directed his ire at the NYT food writer Alison Roman for her Halloween costume. His followers seemed to hang on his every tweet. It wasn't just that he had hundreds of thousands of followers. He had the ability to send them after people that he deemed to be villains. That's a long way of saying that people were scared of Yashar. A lot of people that I reached out to were just unwilling to talk to me honestly about him.

About halfway into my reporting, I started noticing that Yashar was raising money on his Twitter feed. He had this philanthropic component to his Twitter feed where he would raise money or try and compel people to raise money. He was very into animal rights and would often tout various nonprofits that were raising money to help elephants and orangutans.

During the holidays, he started to ask people as followers to send him personally money and he said that if you send me a certain amount of money, I will distribute it to the causes that I deem to be the most fair and equitable. I'll make sure that the money goes all to the right places. He would repeatedly ask people to send him cash.

You don't see that very often on Twitter. People often set up GoFundMe’s. There are other platforms where people can raise money with a rigorous process about showing where your money's going. On Twitter, it was just basically like: “Venmo me cash and I will distribute it,” which is just weird.

At that point, I was aware that Yashar had had some financial problems. He'd been evicted from several apartments, allegedly for not paying rent. He had this outstanding debt that he hadn't paid back. [The person he allegedly owed] was coming after him through the court system. And now he's asking people to send him cash. And I'm like: “That's weird.”

I went on his Twitter feed and I noticed that Monica Lewinsky had followed Yashar. When he'd asked for people to send him cash, she had said: “I just sent you some money. God bless you, Yashar.” Something along those lines.

I was curious to speak with somebody who was giving him money. I reached out to Monica and I didn't hear back. But within an hour or so, Yashar reached out to the then-editor of Los Angeles Magazine, Maer Roshan. Yashar said, “Can we talk?”

That ultimately led him to sitting down with me on two occasions. And that was a key moment. We were able to get him to participate in the story. Within a week or two, Yashar and I had set our first face-to-face interview. Then the story kind of took off.

You lead with this encounter where you meet Yashar for the first time in person. What was he like? Were your were your impressions?

The first thing he said to me was, “Are you happy now?” I was back on my heels a little bit. We were at an outside table. This was near the tail end of the pandemic. Once the conversation started, I did my best to tell him what I was working on and what my intentions were, that this was gonna be a thorough, in-depth profile. And then he was actually quite candid. I had a wide range of questions and he was very vulnerable. He wanted to connect. He's very charming. He's a wonderful conversationalist. I could see very quickly the intelligence and the charm and why people could be seduced by him. He was very kind and polite. He wasn't just telling you his point of view; he was eliciting yours.

Can you give me an example?

It's hard to find people who are really good listeners, who actually listen. And Yashar was a really good listener. He was obviously the subject of the interview, but what became clear was that he wanted to ultimately learn a little bit more about me. He's smart. He can make quick, very quick references about all sorts of things, political topics, cultural things. He's very, very quick and very, very sharp. He wasn't afraid to share his rawest emotions. As the interview progressed we got into some stuff about his family,

His family is Iranian. He grew up outside Chicago. He had spent time in Iran but he was a devout Catholic as well. He's gay. His profile is very, very interesting and very complicated. When we started talking about personal stuff, he started to cry. In hindsight, I think that was one of his tools. He knew that by showing vulnerability, he can make connections with people. But also, I think he honestly is that way. I rarely encounter somebody cry so early in the reporter-subject relationship.

And he also knew everybody! He organized a birthday party for Hillary Clinton in New York City. He worked for [California governor] Gavin Newsom for many years. He lived in this orbit of power and elite wealth and celebrities. I was quite charmed by him.

But you could also tell that he struggled with some mental health problems. He has ADHD. It was an intense conversation right out of the gate. In that process, we started building our own sort of trust in one another.

As the reporting process moved on, I had to talk to him about some of the tougher stuff. I saw a different side of him, which wasn't as vulnerable.

Did your appraisal of his charm and intelligence and warmth change?And how did he respond when you started asking him about the lawsuits and the allegations of financial impropriety and broken relationships?

He employed a number of rhetorical tools to try and defend himself and undermine my reporting. He did cop to the fact that he's been bad with money, and that a lot of that had to do with his ADHD. So there was at least a slight admission that some of this stuff was out of his control.

One of the other challenges with this reporting was that Yashar was a former political operative who talked to the media a lot. Then, as a journalist who had bylines, Yashar understood the rules of engagement quite well with how reporters talk to sources. So, many defenses that he provided were off the record. I couldn't use them. When it came time to try and get him to respond to the tough stuff, he kind of melted down. He was in denial of the fact that the story was going to include those types of things. He just kept saying, “You can't do that, you can't do that.” And I said, “Yashar, we need to move past this. This is part of the story. I promise you it's going to be a balanced piece, but I can't ignore these things.” He would get very, very emotional about it all.

You've been a reporter for a long time. You worked overseas. You worked for the New York Times in Italy. You've done a lot of different stuff. How did your experience with Yashar stand out?

It was really a stressful story for a lot of reasons. When I was having some of these tough conversations with Yashar, he took to his Twitter feed and said that he was having suicidal ideations. That was very disturbing and hard. I had put in an enormous amount of work and this was the first time I had encountered a subject who was thinking about hurting themselves.

“It stressed me out more than any other story that I've published.”

I ultimately think the story was very honest and very fair. I tried to paint a picture of an individual who was extremely complicated with amazing talents, but who had clearly hurt some people along the way. But it was really hard. What are the sort of ethics surrounding this whole thing?

This was the hardest story for me to ultimately get to a place where I was comfortable publishing. I was so worried about what the repercussions could be. It definitely stressed me out more than any other story that I've published.

How do you contend with a story where such a substantial part of it relies on an unreliable narrator?

You have to share with the readers a lot more of the process and include a lot of the craziness that went into actually reporting it out, to allow the reader to enter into the process of what it's like. You can bring them into the process, which I think helps them understand and see for themselves that, hey, it's hard to get at the real truth here, but we're going to try, we're going to do our best to get there. But in that process, we want you to know additional information about the things that we experienced in putting this story together.

This is instructive. A lot of thought and careful consideration goes into a story like this, where you're dealing with a really complicated person and a lot of different moving parts.

So the story comes out and I remember it went viral. A lot of people came out and basically said: I always had questions about Yashar…

It was a relief. It was an overwhelmingly positive response. I got a huge outpouring of people reaching out to congratulate me. It was ultimately a story about the state of the media and the state of technology and the blurring of the lines of many spheres of modern life, and how people can come along with the right tool set and convince people of all sorts of things. It went off like a bomb.

But I was also expecting some blowback just because Yashar is beloved by many of his followers. And that didn't materialize at all.

I also think it let the air out of this tension that people felt about how journalism was being conducted. I think people felt uneasy about the level of sycophancy and the clubby nature of certain elite circles and media. I did my best to peel back the curtain about how things were being conducted and who was in the cool club and who wasn't in the cool club. I think a lot of people felt a sense of relief that somebody noticed it as well, and had the guts to write about it and expose it. I think it made people feel like they weren't crazy.

I think it was brave to take it on at that time. It was the pandemic. It was also the height of a lot of the most intense kind of social justice activism. It was a very fraught time in America. I think there was something about that story that tapped directly into that vein and allowed people to talk about a lot of things, I think it functioned as a release valve of sorts.

I seem to recall that Yashar himself kind of disappeared for a while. Tell us a little bit about what happened after the story came out.

He kind of stopped tweeting. And it was like this new level of intrigue, like, did you cancel the canceler-in-chief?

And then he slowly started tweeting again. He started dipping his toes into the social media feeds again. He would get a little bit of blowback from certain quarters. People would bring up my story and then he would kind of go quiet again and then he would come back again with a couple more tweets. He never really acknowledged the story in the immediate aftermath. I think he just sort of ignored it.

Around the year anniversary, he filed a defamation lawsuit against LA Magazine. Ultimately the suit got tossed. Our story was solid.

Now, I have to say, Yashar is very prominent. He's prominently back. He's very active on Twitter, now known as X. People are always asking, “When are you gonna do the follow up?” And I'm like, “I'm not doing the follow up.” And they're like, “Well, someone should, because Yashar is back.” So it's kind of funny, people who were fans of the piece just kind of shake their heads going, does anyone learn anything? Or do we all just sort of end up going back to the same rhythms and patterns that we're supposed to fall into?

Well, it's a fantastic story. And it's a valuable journalistic tool.

Thanks.

You ready for a quick lightning round?

Sure, shoot, let's do it.

Okay. Peter Kiefer's daily required reading list.

Matt Drudge. The Drudge Report. I can't quit the guy. I just can't.

Your favorite opinion columnist.

I have been a long fan of Andrew Sullivan. I definitely have strongly disagreed with Andrew over the years, but I always found him to be a worthwhile read.

I agree. Okay, your guilty media pleasure.

I'm going to go with the Daily Mail. I don't know what they call that column on the right-hand side, which is where they have all of the sort of celebrity gossip, the un-elevated trash of popular culture that the Daily Mail does such an unbelievable job of packaging in such a addictive way.

Your favorite research tool.

LexisNexis, when I'm lucky enough to have an account or access to an account, which isn't always. It's expensive, but powerful.

Words of wisdom for aspiring reporters.

Stoke your curiosity. That is the engine for all of this. If you have an innate curiosity about the world and an unending need to learn more about all sorts of different things, then it's a good profession for you. But you gotta work to keep it alive and well and never get too old and feel like certain areas are not worthy of an inquiry. Everything is worthy of inquiry.

Your number one don't do for aspiring reporters.

Sleep with your source.

That's brilliant. What book or two or three are you reading right now?

I start a lot of books. I'm not very good at finishing them right now because of all the childcare that's going on in our household. I'm reading a book by George Saunders [A Swim in a Pond in the Rain] where he breaks down the fundamentals of storytelling, but told from three Russian novelists. I'm making my way through a history of Hollywood called City of Nets, which is quite excellent. It's about the history of LA and the entertainment industry in the 1930s and 40s.

Peter, it was great having you here. Thank you so much for sharing all your insights.

Fun to be on your show. It's awesome. Let's do it again.