In an interview with The Post, Wasserman blamed an online smear campaign for bad press and said he pitched President Donald Trump on using the Games to build his legacy.
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NEW YORK — Eight years ago, the president of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic organizing committee glimpsed a terrifying future. Casey Wasserman was seated in the stands at PyeongChang Olympic Stadium for the Opening Ceremonies when he learned that hackers had penetrated the Games’ defenses, knocking out internet access and compromising the program used to judge timed events.
Officials patched the hole. But what got Wasserman’s attention is what they found: The bug had been planted four years earlier.
“In Paris, there were 2 billion attempted cyberattacks,” he said in an interview Friday. “In Milan, which was one-tenth the size, roughly 15 billion. And both of those essentially are before AI. That’s only six months ago, right? So now go fast-forward 650 days from now. [What will they do?] I don’t know. I have no idea.”
Whatever is coming for L.A. might not even have been invented yet.
Wasserman shrugged. “Or,” he said, “they’ve already planned for it and executed it, and we don’t know it.”
He believes that the committee is prepared to stop attackers. But he recognizes that, like so much surrounding the Games, it’s not entirely up to him.
After a quarter-century running his namesake sports and entertainment agency, and amid fallout from emails linking him peripherally to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Wasserman has turned his focus completely to the Los Angeles Olympics. He said Friday that he never considered stepping down from the position.
“I don’t think I ever doubted,” he said. “I mean, I really believe I’m the right person for this job, and I don’t think anything has changed that.”
While he was at the Milan Olympics in February, Wasserman’s name appeared in a tranche of files related to Epstein. In 2003, Wasserman emailed flirtatiously with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted on sex trafficking charges. Earlier this year, Wasserman apologized for his correspondence and emphasized that it happened before Maxwell’s crimes became public. Still, some of his clients threatened to leave the company if he did not resign. Multiplatinum singer Chappell Roan said she already had.
So Wasserman sold his stake, and the firm rebranded as the Team. But he said he received immediate support from L.A. 2028’s board and sponsors.
“There was no empirical evidence that anybody was going to behave any differently with the Olympics” because he was attached, he said. “By the way, there was no empirical evidence that they were doing so with the company. We didn’t lose a client. Chappell Roan, still a client of the company. She never left.” (A representative for Roan did not respond to a request for comment before this article was published. Later, a different representative said the singer has indeed left the company.)
“Sometimes noise is just noise,” Wasserman said. “And the truth is, all the noise that was being created online was facilitated via bots. Ninety percent of the comments were bots. Seventy-five percent of those accounts were from countries that don’t speak English.” He said a firm had run an analysis for him and determined: “It was an orchestrated, paid-for campaign.” He said he had identified the organization that paid for the campaign but declined to elaborate.
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“Someone who’s a mentor to me said in that period of time, ‘Never let your memories be bigger than your dreams,’” he said.
Which brings him back to the Olympics.
In reality, everything brings Wasserman back to the Olympics. For him, February’s Super Bowl — which will take place at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles — is a practice run for the Games, as was this summer’s World Cup.
He loved the soccer event, he said, and believes the committee that ran it did a great job. But for him, it served mostly as a frame of reference for how much more challenging the Olympics will be. The World Cup brought some 1,000 athletes from 48 countries to 16 cities. The Olympics will involve approximately 12,500 athletes from 209 countries in one city.
“It pales in comparison to the size of our event,” he said. “So if you just take what happened in L.A., there were six or seven games in L.A. That’s less than there are Rams games. We will do what is essentially two World Cup games a day for swimming for 11 days straight, and then half a mile away at the Intuit Dome, we’ll have four NBA games a day for 17 days. And that’s two sports of 36.”
The logistics are one thing. But Wasserman is not heading the committee because he excels at designing road signs and securing WiFi networks. Part of his value comes from his ability to navigate the politics of the event, specifically with the government.
He will be responsible for helping to avoid an incident such as the one this summer when President Donald Trump asked FIFA to review a red card against U.S. striker Folarin Balogun. The red card was later overturned, although FIFA President Gianni Infantino said he had not taken Trump’s request into consideration.
Wasserman said that Trump had not inserted himself inappropriately in the Olympic discussion and that he had pitched the president on using the Games as a chance to build his legacy.
“He has always loved Hollywood and the industry,” Wasserman said. “So what a great opportunity for him to show the world his vision of patriotism and American excitement and American commerce and delivery and execution and all those things. There is no bigger platform to do that, and so I know [people] laugh when he says ‘These will be the greatest Games’ — you know, that’s his thing — but we actually can do that, and he gets that. And so that has resonated with him a lot, and he understands that we cannot do it without the federal government.”
Wasserman said he had delivered a similar message in his talks with members of Congress. He tells them: The Olympic Games are about red, white and blue, not about red and blue.
“This is one of the few things that is actually not that divisive and not that controversial,” he said, “in a world where everything else seems to be.”
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