rips

NIKKI Glaser did not hold back on the Hollywood elite as she returned as Golden Globes host for the second time.

Nikki, who, first hosted in 2025, shocked fans with jokes that ranged from Leonardo DiCaprio’s dating history to jabs at the DOJ over the Epstein files.

The 41-year-old previously told TMZ that she would not be playing it too safe with her jokes.

“Never too safe, you know. Safe enough. I want the job again,” she said. “I don’t want to ruin anyone’s night but I’m gonna have some fun.”

Taking to the stage for the 83rd annual Golden Globes on Sunday night, the comedian didn’t hold back in her opening monologue.

EDITING AND THE EPSTEIN LIST

“There are so many A-listers — and by A-listers, I do mean people who are on ‘A list’ that has been heavily redacted,” Nikki said as the room erupted in chatter.

read more on the golden globes

LOOSE LIPS

Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner caught awkwardly kissing at Golden Globes

“The Golden Globe for best editing goes to … the Justice Department!”

The joke comes as attention around revealing all of the information regarding sex offender Jeffrey Epstein continues to grow. More than 20,000 new files were released in November, but Americans were disappointed to find some documents were redacted with information blacked out.

After the Epstein list jab, Nikki took aim at CBS News. CBS and the Golden Globes announced in March 2024 that the two entered a five-year deal for CBS to broadcast the award show on its network and streaming service, Paramount+.

“And the award for most editing goes to CBS News,” Nikki said. “Yes, CBS News, America’s newest place to see BS news. We needed another.”

The dig comes off the back of CBS News making numerous programming and editorial changes in recent months.

Nikki went on to make jokes about some celebrities in attendance, including Leo, George Clooney and the iconic duo Kevin Hart and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

LEO DATING HISTORY DIG

“What a career you have had! Countless iconic performances,” she said to Leo.

“You’ve worked with every great director, you’ve won three Golden Globes [and] an Oscar.”

“The most impressive thing is that you were able to accomplish that all before your girlfriend turned 30,” Nikki quipped. “I mean, it’s just insane.”

Leo has made headlines for reportedly having a dating track record of women around the age of 25.

HOSTS OF THE GOLDEN GLOBES

Comedian Nikki Glaser returns to host the Golden Globes for the second time in 2026. She follows a long list of Hollywood heavyweights who have led the show in past years. Here are former hosts of the Golden Globes

Nikki Glaser – 83rd Golden Globe Awards (2026)

Nikki Glaser – 82nd Golden Globe Awards (2025)

Jo Koy – 81st Golden Globe Awards (2024)

Jerrod Carmichael – 80th Golden Globe Awards (2023)

Tina Fey & Amy Poehler – 78th Golden Globe Awards (2021)

Ricky Gervais – 77th Golden Globe Awards (2020)

Sandra Oh & Andy Samberg – 76th Golden Globe Awards (2019)

Seth Meyers – 75th Golden Globe Awards (2018)

Jimmy Fallon – 74th Golden Globe Awards (2017)

Ricky Gervais – 73rd Golden Globe Awards (2016)

Tina Fey & Amy Poehler – 72nd Golden Globe Awards (2015)

Tina Fey & Amy Poehler – 71st Golden Globe Awards (2014)

Tina Fey & Amy Poehler – 70th Golden Globe Awards (2013)

Ricky Gervais – 69th Golden Globe Awards (2012)

Ricky Gervais – 68th Golden Globe Awards (2011)

Ricky Gervais – 67th Golden Globe Awards (2010)

Faye Dunaway & Tim Curry – 51st Golden Globe Awards (1994)

Louis Gossett Jr., Leslie Nielsen & Jane Seymour – 50th Golden Globe Awards (1993)

Jacqueline Bisset & Pierce Brosnan – 49th Golden Globe Awards (1992)

*NOTE: From most of its history until 1995 (and again from 1996–2009), the Globes did not have a host in the modern sense; instead, a pair of emcees or presenters opened the show.

Leo, who was nominated for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for his role in One Battle After Another, is currently dating Vittoria Ceretti, a 27-year-old model. The pair’s romance started in the summer of 2023.

The romance followed a slew of relationships with women in their 20s. from Camila Morrone and Nina Agdal to Toni Garrn and Kelly Rohrbach.

Fans had mixed reactions to the joke.

“This is actually really funny,” one person wrote on X.

“Those jokes are so tired,” said another.

“Isn’t that joke old?” another X user said.

“Nikki Glaser making such a good joke about Leonardo DiCaprio, i laughed so hard, SAY GIRL,” another person wrote.

NESPRESSO ROAST + DYNAMIC DUO

Nikki also singled out George in the crowd, who is nominated for Best Performance by a Male Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy for his role in Jay Kelly.

“I’ve always wanted to ask you this question, and I know this is unprofessional, but I might not get a chance to do it again, so here goes: My Nespresso has been coming out watery. I’m wondering is that a pot issue? Or you think it might be the filter? Could you troubleshoot it for me later?”

The coffee-themed roast was a play on George’s longtime role as spokesperson for Nespresso.

George was seen laughing and playing along with her joke, nodding and mouthing a response to her.

Nikki then went on to call out an iconic acting duo, Kevin and The Rock, who have starred in several movies together, including Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.

Nikki referred to Kevin as The Rock’s “plus one-half,” calling the pair her “favorite comedy duo.”

“You’re like like Steve Martin and Martin Short for people under 50 IQ,” Nikki said. “You know what I mean? We need movies too.”

Kevin was spotted laughing at the joke and clapping at Nikki’s jokes.

Steve and Martin were in attendance for the Golden Globes with nominations for their show Only Murders in the Building. Cameras panned to the actors who erupted in laughter after the joke.

Reporting from Muscatine, Iowa — Five days away from the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum was greeted here by a packed room of supporters and a battery of cameras and reporters, suggesting that his long-shot presidential campaign, once just a wisp on the radar screen, had finally found a spark just when it needed it the most.

It was just a day earlier that a new CNN-Time poll showed Santorum in third place, surging past rivals Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. The poll seemed to confirm what had been felt here for days—that social conservatives here, a key to success in this state, were finally beginning to rally around a single candidate.

And so Santorum awoke to a changed world. For months, the former Pennsylvania senator had criss-crossed the state with little return on his investment, and had been, for all intents and purposes, an afterthought in the political conversation.

But Gingrich’s decline in the state seems to have given Santorum an opportunity. And Thursday he seemed to be relishing the moment, speaking to the media at length and passionately addressing the overflow crowd at a restaurant here along the Mississippi River.

“We’ll turn this country around and Iowa will be the spark that did it,” he told the crowd.

While Santorum spent most of his time criticizing President Obama, he took some shots at Ron Paul, a favorite to win next Tuesday’s caucuses. He warned the crowd that Paul’s foreign policy beliefs jeopardized the nation’s security, saying Paul would dismantle the U.S. Navy.

“Congressman Paul would take every ship we have and bring it into port,’ Santorum said. He also suggested that Paul, a Texas Republican, would be ineffective as president. “He’s passed one bill in 20 years,” he said.

And in a sign that Santorum was now being taken more seriously as a threat, he was ripped on the campaign trail by Rick Perry for requesting earmarks as a senator. Perry’s campaign also cut a new radio ad attacking Santorum.

In his remarks in Muscatine, Santorum resisted the suggestion that he was merely a candidate for evangelicals and other social conservatives, highlighting his national security credentials and emphasizing his role in reforming welfare while in the Senate in the 1990s. “We’ve got a pretty broad message. It’s not just focused in one area,” he said. “We’re excited that we’re resonating beyond the social conservatives.”

But, inevitably, talk returned to matters of faith and family, Santorum’s most comfortable zone. He was asked about his opposition to same-sex marriage. He restated his support for traditional unions and blasted liberals who, he said, “want to drive faith and the conclusions that come from faith out of the public square and out of the public law.”

He invited supporters of gay marriage to “come to the public square, make your case” but to not condemn him for his beliefs. Santorum, of course, has notoriously been victimized by an online effort to connect his name with a gay sexual act.

He said that it’s the “birthright” of every child to have a “mom and a dad.”

Santorum disputed the argument that he would be a poor candidate in the general election against Obama, arguing that his blue-collar Pennsylvania roots would help him do well in Midwestern swing states. He served in the House and two terms in the Senate before being routed by Democrat Bob Casey in 2006, knocking him from public life.

Afterward, one attendee, Steve Maher of Muscatine, said he was now leaning toward caucusing for Santorum over Bachmann. “The thing that concerns me about Bachmann is not so much her as a candidate but her organization,” he said, referring to the defection of Bachmann’s Iowa campaign manager, Kent Sorenson, to Paul’s camp. And, he said, he had soured on Gingrich, who has been the target of a blitz of negative ads in the state. “I’m suspicious of his backround,” he said. “Some of the ads are starting to get to me.”

“I’m looking for someone where I don’t have to worry about their morality or integrity,” Maher said.

Earlier in the day, Santorum spoke to about 40 people at an event in Coralville, Iowa. He’ll wrap up the campaign day in Davenport.

WASHINGTON — Republican Sen. Ben Sasse told Nebraska constituents in a telephone town hall meeting that President Trump has “flirted with white supremacists,” mocks Christian evangelicals in private and “kisses dictators’ butts.”

Sasse, who is running for a second term representing the reliably red state, made the comments in response to a question about why he has been willing to publicly criticize a president of his own party. He also criticized Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis and said Trump’s family has treated the presidency “like a business opportunity.”

The comments were first reported by the Washington Examiner after it obtained an audio recording of the senator’s comments, which has been posted on YouTube. Sasse spokesman James Wegmann said the call occurred Wednesday.

Other Nebraska Republicans, including U.S. Rep. Dan Bacon and state GOP executive director Ryan Hamilton, told the Omaha World-Herald that they disagree with Sasse’s characterizations of the president.

“Sen. Sasse is entitled to his own opinion,” U.S. Rep. Adrian Smith, another Nebraska Republican, said in a statement. “I appreciate what President Trump has accomplished for our country and will continue to work with him on efforts which help Nebraska.”

Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh declined to comment on Sasse’s remarks, the World-Herald said.

Sasse has positioned himself as a conservative willing to criticize Trump at times, and he is seen as a potential presidential candidate for 2024. His comments Wednesday were in response to a caller who asked about his relationship with the president, adding, “Why do you have to criticize him so much?” Trump carried Nebraska by 25 percentage points in 2016.

The senator said he has worked hard to have a good relationship with Trump and prays for the president regularly “at the breakfast table in our house.” He praised Trump’s judicial appointments.

But he said he’s had disagreements with Trump that do not involve “mere policy issues,” adding, “I’m not at all apologetic for having fought for my values against his in places where I think his are deficient, not just for a Republican, but for an American.”

Sasse began his list with, “The way he kisses dictators’ butts,” and said Trump “hasn’t lifted a finger” on behalf of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.

“I mean, he and I have a very different foreign policy,” Sasse said. “It isn’t just that he fails to lead our allies. It’s that we, the United States, regularly sells out our allies under his leadership.”

Sasse said he criticizes Trump for how he treats women and because Trump “spends like a drunken sailor,” saying he criticized Democratic President Obama over spending.

“He mocks evangelicals behind closed doors,” Sasse said. “At the beginning of the COVID crisis, he refused to treat it seriously. For months, he treated it like a news-cycle-by-news-cycle PR crisis rather than a multiyear public health challenge, which is what it is.”

The setting looked almost cozy: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and a podcast host seated inside her home in two comfy chairs, talking about President Trump, ICE raids, public schools and the Palisades fire.

The recording session inside the library at Getty House, the official mayor’s residence, lasted an hour. Once it ended, the two shook hands and the room broke into applause.

Then, the mayor kept talking — and let it rip.

Bass gave a blunt assessment of the emergency response to the Palisades and Eaton fires. “Both sides botched it,” she said.

She didn’t offer specifics on the Palisades. But on the Eaton fire, she pointed to the lack of evacuation alerts in west Altadena, where all but one of the 19 deaths occurred.

“They didn’t tell people they were on fire,” she said to Matt Welch, host of “The Fifth Column” podcast.

The mayor’s informal remarks, which lasted around four minutes, came at the tail end of a 66-minute video added to “The Fifth Column’s” YouTube channel last month. In recent weeks, it was replaced by a shorter, 62-minute version — one that omits her more freewheeling final thoughts.

The exact date of the interview was not immediately clear. The video premiered on Nov. 25, according to the podcast’s YouTube channel.

Welch declined to say whether Bass asked for the end of the video to be cut. He had no comment on why the final four minutes can’t be found on the YouTube version of the podcast.

“We’re not going to be talking about any of that right now,” he told The Times before hanging up.

Bass’ team confirmed that her office asked for the final minutes of the video to be removed. “The interview had clearly ended and they acknowledged that when they took it down,” the mayor’s team said Tuesday in an email.

In the longer video, Bass also talked about being blamed for the handling of the Eaton fire in Altadena, which is in unincorporated Los Angeles County, outside of L.A. city limits. Altadena is represented by L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, not Bass.

“No one goes after the Board of Supervisors,” Bass said on the original 66-minute video. “I’m responsible for everything.”

Bass, in an interview with The Times, said she made those remarks after the podcast was over, during what she called a “casual conversation” — a situation she called “unfortunate.” Nevertheless, she stood by her take, saying she has made similar pronouncements about the emergency response “numerous times.”

In the case of the city, Bass said, the fire department failed to pre-deploy to the Palisades and require firefighters to stay for an extra shift, as The Times first reported in January. In Altadena, she said, residents did not receive timely notices to evacuate.

“The city and the county did a lot of things that we would look back at and say was very unfortunate,” she told The Times.

Bass was out of the country on a diplomatic mission to Ghana when the Palisades fire first broke out on Jan. 7. When she returned, she was unsteady in her handling of questions surrounding the emergency response.

Both the response and the rebuilding effort since the fire have created an opening for Bass’ rivals. Real estate developer Rick Caruso, who lost to her in 2022, is now weighing another run for mayor — and has been a harsh critic of her performance.

Former L.A. schools superintendent Austin Beutner, who is running against Bass in the June 2 primary election, called the mayor’s use of the word “botched” a “stunning admission of failure on behalf of the mayor” on “the biggest crisis Los Angeles has faced in a generation.”

“She’s admitting that she failed her constituents,” Beutner said.

Bass isn’t the first L.A. elected official to use the word “botched” in connection with the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. Last month, during a meeting on the effort to rebuild in the Palisades, City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said that Bass’ office had mishandled the recovery, at least in the first few months.

“Let’s be honest,” she told one of the mayor’s staffers. “You guys have to be the first to acknowledge that your office has botched the first few months of this recovery.”

Bass has defended her handling of that work, pointing to an accelerated debris removal process and her own emergency orders cutting red tape for rebuilding projects. The recovery, she told Welch, is moving faster than many other major wildfires, including the 2023 Lahaina fire in Hawaii.

“It’s important to state the facts, especially because in this environment … there’s a number of people out there who have been very, very deliberate in spreading misinformation,” she said.

Bass, who formally launched her reelection campaign over the weekend, has been giving interviews to a growing list of nontraditional outlets. She recently fielded questions on “Naked Lunch with Phil Rosenthal + David Wild.” She also went on “Big Boy’s Off Air Leadership Series” to discuss the Palisades fire and several other issues.

On “Big Boy’s Off Air,” Bass said she was in conflict with then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley over her handling of the fire. When she ousted Crowley in February, she cited the LAFD’s failure to properly deploy resources ahead of the fierce winds. She also accused Crowley of refusing to participate in an after-action report on the fire.

Bass told Big Boy, the host of the program, that firefighters “were sent home and they shouldn’t have been.”

She also called the revelation that the Jan. 1 Lachman fire reignited days later, causing the Palisades fire, “shocking.” The Times has reported that an LAFD battalion chief ordered firefighters to leave the burn area, despite signs that the fire wasn’t fully extinguished.

Bass said that had she known of the danger facing the region in early January, she wouldn’t have gone to Long Beach, let alone Ghana.

Asked where blame should be assigned, Bass said: “At the end of the day, I’m the mayor, OK? But I am not a firefighter.”

On “The Fifth Column,” Bass spent much of the hour discussing the effect of federal immigration raids on Los Angeles and the effort to rewrite the City Charter to improve the city’s overall governmental structure. She also described the “overwhelming trauma” experienced by fire victims in the Palisades and elsewhere.

“To lose your home, it’s not just the structure. You lost everything inside there. You lost your memories,” she said. “You lost your sense of community, your sense of belonging. You know, it’s overwhelming grief and it’s collective grief, because then you have thousands of people that are experiencing this too.”

In the final four minutes, Welch told Bass that he viewed the Palisades fire as inevitable, given the ferocious strength of the Santa Ana winds that day. “As someone who grew up here, that fire was going to happen,” he said.

“Right,” Bass responded.

Welch continued: “If it’s 100 mile an hour winds and it’s dry, someone’s going to sneeze and there’s going to be a fire.”

“But if you look at the response in Palisades and the county,” Bass replied, “neither side —”

The mayor paused for a moment. “Both sides botched it.”