“Hacks” star Hannah Einbinder has come to the defense of Mark Ruffalo after Paramount accused him of invoking “antisemitic tropes” when criticizing the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger.
It all kicked off on Friday, when Ruffalo shared a clip on Instagram of Paramount board member Safra Catz outlining “really profoundly scary technologies” that Oracle — the tech giant co-founded by Larry Ellison, father of Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, who is involved in the merger’s financing — used to help the Israeli military after the Oct. 7 terror attack. Ruffalo likened Larry Ellison to a “classic oligarch” and warned of the consequences if Paramount and Warner Bros. are allowed to merge, alleging that the Ellisons “are crushing workers and consolidating the wealth of the world for their own power and concentrated dominance.” Of Catz, he said: “Look how she revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”
A Paramount spokesperson then said in a statement that they are “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute. Words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong — they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe. This doesn’t deserve a response in kind — and to be clear, we don’t tolerate prejudice of any kind, against anyone.”
