Mr. Ripley

Excerpted from feature Los Angeles Mag article: https://lamag.com/featured/yashar-ali

“Today, a dusty-skied afternoon in May, he’s dressed in an oversized gray T-shirt, blue sweatpants, and the same San Francisco 49ers cap he sports in his youthful Twitter profile photo, which looks like it might have been snapped for his high school yearbook. (He swears that it was taken just before the pandemic.) Still, he looks about as doleful as a one-eyed dog in an ASPCA ad.”

“There’s a little bit of the Talented Mr. Ripley in him,” says a former colleague. Though he has insinuated in public and in various profiles that he’s the scion of a wealthy Iranian family, public records show that he’s encountered a slew of financial hardships in recent years. He’s been evicted from multiple residences, defaulted on several loans, and has racked up tens of thousands of dollars in tax liens. He seems to have no fixed address, preferring to live in the homes of generous friends. (He’s currently installed in the West Hollywood house of an entertainment-industry power broker.) But sometimes he overstays his welcome. He’s been sued by a member of the Getty family over a financial dispute and fallen out with several other powerful members of San Francisco’s and Los Angeles’s entertainment and political elite.