U.S. Senators Ron Johnson (R-WS) and Rick Scott (R-FL) led a hearing Thursday where testimony from victims of the devastating and deadly fires that swept across California’s Pacific Palisades was heard, including horrifying accounts from reality TV star Spencer Pratt.
Thursday’s senate hearing was part of a congressional investigation into the genesis of the fire and what went wrong before and after the conflagration by the various California governments responsible for warning residents and putting out the flames.
The hearing was led by Senators Johnson and Scott (R, FL), who are looking into the fire. Six Pacific Palisades residents who lost their homes also delivered powerful remarks. California Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff were not at the hearing.
One of those who spoke at the confab was The Hills reality show star Spencer Pratt, who has become a leading advocate for the victims of the fires.
“By the grace of God, my family survived,” he said during his testimony.
“My family has not lost our hope, but we did lose our home and everything we own in the Palisades fire,” Pratt said during the hearing, wearing a hat with the words, “Newsom will never be president.”
“It’s been 10 months,” Pratt said, “and our government leaders, instead of helping us rebuild, have only served to make the rebuilding process so painful and slow that many just quit and are forced out of their hometown through attrition so vultures like Gavin Newsom and [state Sen.] Scott Weiner have a blank slate to remake the Palisades in the vision of their wealthy donors and foreign investors.”
There was an arrest in connection with the fires.
Jonathan Rinderknecht, who was living in California at the time of the fires, but quickly uprooted and moved to Florida, was arrested in Melbourne, Florida, and charged in October.
Prosecutors allege that Rinderknecht started a fire in the Pacific Palisades on New Year’s Day that grew for weeks, eventually killing 12 people and destroying more than 6,000 structures in the Pacific Palisades area.
Rinderknecht’s trial is scheduled for April.
Senator Scott promised to get to the bottom of the failed response to the disaster, writing on Instagram, “What happened in the Palisades fire is devastating, and we will get to the bottom of it.”
Pratt has long-blamed both CA Gov. Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass for the lack of preparedness before the fire as well as the painstaking hurdles many have had to jump through to even begin to rebuild.
“I’m literally their worst nightmare because I have nothing to lose, and all I’m ever gonna do is just post actual facts,” Pratt told Variety in August. “The more of these meetings I take, the more I find out about how preventable this was. It’s actually criminal negligence because in the Palisades fire alone, 12 people died. These people shouldn’t have died.”
“I’m doing this because they destroyed my life…. it’s like, ‘I can’t ever have my life back.’ And when you really see everything laid out and the whole way they’ve spun it, it was just the biggest bunch of lies. Propaganda. This was the most preventable thing that could ever have been.”
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