On Aug. 19, 2023, Jonathan Daniel Brown sent a concerned email to two agents at Gersh.
Brown, 36, had once been an actor, and had some success, most notably with a role in 2012’s hit comedy Project X. But finding himself disillusioned with the acting world, he transitioned to producing, most recently with the comedy horror Fuck My Son!, the title of which drew titters ahead of its TIFF premiere.
But Brown was not in a laughing mood when he wrote his email to Gersh, an agency to which he has no formal ties. He had been tracking one of Gersh’s clients, Dasha Nekrasova, for some time. The 34-year-old actress, born in Belarus and living in the U.S. for 30 years, is also co-host of the popular Red Scare podcast.
Launched in 2018 with Anna Khachiyan, a Moscow-born cultural critic who immigrated to the U.S. in 1990, the podcast originally was associated with the socialist ideals of the Bernie Sanders-loving “dirtbag left,” as the movement called itself. But over the years, it evolved into a reaction against liberal woke-ism and found itself gravitating to figures on the far right.
Brown took notice and grew increasingly dismayed at who Red Scare invited on the podcast. In that first email to Nekrasova’s agents, he pointed out their client hosted “a white nationalist guest who uses the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert. BAP has been recently chronicled in both the New York Times and The Atlantic for his Neo-Nazi beliefs.”
He continues: “In the Red Scare episode I have linked, Dasha and BAP discuss ‘Black Crime.’ After that, BAP refers to the city of Chicago as ‘Chicongo’ and Indians as ‘Pajeets,’ calls mixed-race Americans ‘Mulattos’ and ‘Chimps,’ makes various horrible comments about Africa, calls Barack Obama gay and uses the slur ‘Obongo,’ praises white nationalists Richard Hanania and Steve Sailer, uses a number of slurs for Jews and even defends Hitler.
“Other white supremacists and fascists who have recently appeared on the show,” Brown wrote, “include Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones, far-right podcaster The Perfume Nationalist, alt-right technologist Curtis Yarvin and Steve Bannon. As an independent film producer and a member of the Jewish community, I cannot sit by in silence anymore. I ask that you do the right thing and condemn this hate. This cannot be what our industry is about.”
The email received no response from Gersh, though Brown did notice a Gersh agent began watching his Instagram stories. And so for two years, Brown kept listening to Red Scare and kept emailing Gersh with warnings that their client was platforming dangerous hate speech.
“You have Bronze Age Pervert. You have Curtis Jarvin. You’ve got all these really nasty, fascist bastards — and they are actively trying to infiltrate mainstream Hollywood via these ‘It’ girls,” Brown says in a phone interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
But it was a two-and-a-half hour Red Scare episode released on Oct. 10 featuring avowed antisemite and white nationalist Nick Fuentes that took Brown past the boiling point.
“You have someone [in Fuentes] that is calling for the expulsion and the deportation of all immigrants. This is somebody that actively hates Jewish people, that says Hitler was right, that the Holocaust was a hoax, and even if it wasn’t a hoax, it probably should have happened. And then you have [Nekrasova] supporting this. And then you have Gersh: ‘We’re going to make her a star.’ These are Jewish agents. What the fuck is wrong with them?” he says.
Fuentes has been making the rounds lately. The extremist head of the antisemitic “Groyper” movement has found some momentum in recent months, filling an attention vacuum left by Charlie Kirk’s September assassination.
After Red Scare, he appeared on the Tucker Carlson Show podcast, where he found a sympathetic forum in Carlson to espouse his thoughts — particularly his anti-Israel views. The appearance drew rebukes from within the Republican Party, but President Trump said Sunday, “You can’t tell him who to interview.” (Trump himself hosted Fuentes and Kanye West, another open antisemite, at a dinner in Mar-a-Lago in 2022, a summit that drew much outrage. Trump claimed to know nothing of Fuentes’ views.)
Jonathan Daniel Brown
Phillip Van
Brown emailed Nekrasova’s agents yet again and copied Gersh’s majority owners, Bob and David Gersh.
“And once again, they ignored me,” he says.
And so he shifted strategies. He decided to post about Fuentes’ appearance on Red Scare on his Instagram Stories. In that post, he tagged Matt Grobar, a journalist with Deadline. Tagging Grobar appeared to change things internally at Gersh. Brown noticed an account for Gersh Communications began tracking his Instagram Stories.
“Dasha got dropped shortly after that,” Brown says.
But Brown was not done. Several days earlier, it had been reported that Nekrasova had been cast in Iconoclast, the feature film directing debut of actor Gabriel Basso, who starred in Netflix’s The Night Agent and prior to that played future U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance in Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy.
(Vance received criticism for not condemning Fuentes’ appearance on Tucker Carlson — particularly as Fuentes has made racist comments about second lady Usha Vance.)
Brown knew one of the producers of that film and texted him when the Fuentes episode was released.
“Be careful,” he wrote. “Dasha just did a podcast with Nick Fuentes. Bad idea to be associated with anyone who is openly pro-Hitler.”
“Oh wow,” the producer responded. “The other producer is Jewish and is friends with her. IDK her.”
When news broke that Gersh dropped Nekrasova, Brown texted the Iconoclast producer again.
“I hope you find an excellent actress to replace her,” Brown wrote.
“Yes. She is being replaced right now,” the producer responded.
Gersh and Nekrasova both declined to comment for this story.
