WME Agent Joel Brandt At Center Of Controversy Over ‘To Hell With The Left, Kill Everybody’ Lyrics

Brandt Joel, a high-ranking agent at WME who represents the likes of Jason Momoa and Matthew McConaughey, found himself embroiled in a firestorm of bigotry within the company after he sent, and later deleted, an inflammatory text to a WhatsApp group in response to the killing of six Israeli hostages over the weekend.

On Sunday, the Israeli army announced that it had recovered the bodies of six hostages killed by Hamas militants in Gaza, including an Israeli-American captive.

In a chat group expressing solidarity with Israel that includes WME employees but is not officially affiliated with the company, news of the hostages’ deaths was discussed after someone shared President Joe Biden’s official statement on the incident. In screenshots of the chat group obtained by The Hollywood ReporterWME’s Nancy Josephson and Katie Slater commented on the tragedy of the killings. Joel later texted in response to the news: “Fuck the left, kill them all.”

A source said THR that Joel deleted the message a few minutes later.

Joel, a senior partner at WME who also represents Idris Elba, Justin Timberlake and Mahershala Ali, previously spent four years in the U.S. Navy and served in Iraq before becoming an agent.

A source told THR that this wasn’t the first time Joel had sent confrontational messages in the group chat, and shared a previous post in which he said WME had been “weak” to clients who spoke out about the ongoing war in Gaza. “We saw that every department had clients that we should have fired and didn’t, and it shows that we are weak and have tolerated abhorrent behavior,” Joel wrote via text message, though it’s unclear which clients he was referring to directly and what behavior he deemed “abhorrent.”

Joel added: “This is all a load of rubbish. No one, to my knowledge, has taken a position on this discussion, other than Richard, and answered the question. Fortunately, there are very few exceptions, but we have not fired a single one and that is shameful.”

The bloody and brutal war in Gaza has created a lot of tension in Hollywood, with controversy following those who have spoken out about the conflict. In October, weeks after the October 7 Hamas-led terror attack in southern Israel that left some 1,200 dead and more than 200 prisoners, CAA was engulfed in a firestorm after energy agent Maha Dakhil posted comments on her personal Instagram. On October 18, Dakhil reposted a statement from an account called Free Palestine that read, “You are learning who supports genocide.” Dakhil added, “This is the line for me.” She then posted a photo with the caption, “What’s more heartbreaking than witnessing genocide? Witnessing the denial of genocide.”

Dakhil quickly apologized and remained at the company, but was fired by her client Aaron Sorkin over the social media comments and, immediately after the incident, was forced to resign as CAA’s co-head of films and resigned from the agency’s internal board of directors. She has since returned to a leadership role within the company.

In November, actress Melissa Barrera, a WME client, was fired from Cry VII After a series of social media posts about the situation in Gaza, she wrote: “Gaza is currently being treated like a concentration camp. Everyone is trapped, we have nowhere to go, no electricity, no water… People have not learned anything from our history. And just like our history, people continue to watch in silence as this happens. THIS IS GENOCIDE AND ETHNIC CLEANSING.”

Reports at the time suggested that WME was also considering dropping Barrera because of her stance, but the actress said THR In a March cover story, she said she still feels supported by her representatives. “It’s really hard because I was in a very confused state of mind, but I was very lucky,” she said through tears as she recalled the turbulent moment. “I had a lot of support from the people around me: my team and especially my publicists, they just had my back.”