On the Shelf
The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain
By Spencer Pratt
Gallery Books: 304 pages, $30
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Spencer Pratt is accustomed to being labeled a villain, but a more fitting descriptor might be “cockroach.”
Comparing the reality TV villain-turned-Snapchat star-turned-Los Angeles mayoral candidate to pestilence is not meant to be an insult. Instead, it is a testament to his survival, particularly in a city that views its lower-tier celebs as more wood for the chipper. And yet, despite every reason he has had to vanish from the face of the Earth, Pratt not only has endured but become a bona-fide master of reinvention.
The 42-year-old Pacific Palisades native attributes his many lives to having an unparalleled amount of energy, a strain of inner bombast that could be likened to strobes of light and patterns behind closed eyelids.
“My natural disposition doesn’t come with an off button… It just sits in my chest like a nuclear reactor, keeping me moving, keeping me scheming, keeping me launching myself into the sky,” he writes in his compulsively readable new memoir, “The Guy You Loved to Hate.” “Sometimes I’ll land to a standing ovation. Sometimes I’ll face-plant in front of everyone. Either way, I’m fun to watch. At least, that’s what everyone keeps telling me.”
Typically, the more controversial a celebrity becomes, the more they might be inclined to hide away — at least until people’s attention has shifted. But not Pratt.
“I’ve been as public about everything I could possibly be for years,” he tells the Los Angeles Times about his decision to publish a memoir.
Speaking from his temporary home in Santa Barbara, Pratt is wearing a Pacific Palisades T-shirt and a baseball hat emblazoned with a hot-pink, bedazzled “Heidiwood.” “But it’s so piecemeal — on this podcast or in that interview,” he continues. “And in such a fragmented world, I might as well still have [‘The Hills’ producer] Adam DiVello editing my life.”
No matter what you think of Pratt, an unapologetic lightning rod who stubbornly defies categorization, you can’t argue his entertainment value. Where you know him from is a Rorschach test for when you came of age. Millennial reality TV junkies know Pratt best as the OG onscreen villain from Seasons 2 through 6 on the MTV juggernaut “The Hills,” which chronicled the messy, aspirational L.A. lives of young proto-influencers from 2006 to 2010. Very online Gen Z-ers have no doubt stumbled upon Pratt’s prolific Snapchats and TikToks where he talks about his love of hummingbirds, burritos, crystals and his wife of 16 years (and former ‘Hills’ castmate), Heidi Montag. They have two children, Gunner, 8, and Ryker, 3, who arrived in the world before and after Pratt and Montag appeared on MTV’s 2019 “Hills” reboot titled “New Beginnings” before it tanked after two seasons.
More recently, Pratt has gained a fresh following as “the guy who fights for California,” thanks to his social media tirades against Los Angeles city officials for their alleged mishandling of last year’s wildfires, which destroyed his and his parents’ Palisades homes. Though Pratt still claims to be apolitical, on the one-year anniversary of the wildfires, he announced his plans to run for mayor.
“My voter registration is Republican, but I am running with no labels — no D or R next to my name,” he says. “The mayor should serve the city, not a political party.”
Sometimes, there’s an overlap in audience. “I was recently in a hunting-fishing store with my son buying a fishing pole,” Pratt says. “And the guy selling the ammo was like, ‘I just want to tell you, I was telling my wife that God really picked the perfect person for this fight for California, because you were always the guy on that reality show that had the receipts!’ ”
Spencer Pratt.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
At the time of Pratt’s announcement, a rep for Mayor Karen Bass issued a scathing response, insinuating that the bid was little more than a publicity stunt.
“It’s no shock that in advance of his imminent book release, a reality TV ‘villain’ who once staged a fake divorce to boost ratings and spent the last summer spewing post-fire misinformation and disinformation to pump up his social media following, would now announce he’s running for Mayor,” campaign strategist Douglas Herman said.
Responding to the allegation that his mayoral bid was an attempt to publicize his book, Pratt tells the Los Angeles Times that each event occurred independently of each other, though there is some connective tissue. When we first spoke in mid-December, Pratt had not yet reached a decision to run. Later, he revealed over email: “For the better part of 2025, I wondered who was going to step up and challenge Karen Bass in the Mayor’s race. Around Christmas Day, I realized no one was stepping up, and if I wanted this done, I would have to do it myself.
“Two things can be true. I wrote this book because Karen Bass let my house burn down. If through sharing my story I could start the process of rebuilding what we lost, then passing on that opportunity would be neglecting my responsibilities as a husband and father. Separate and apart from that, I am running for Mayor because Karen Bass let my house burn down and sent me on a journey of discovery regarding her failed leadership.”
Political infrastructure isn’t the only system Pratt has worked hard to uncover. Within the pages of “The Guy You Loved to Hate,” which came together with the help of culture journalist and ghostwriter Caroline Ryder, he deconstructs what the memoir describes as the compulsory, wholly unregulated nature of 2000s reality TV, which launched him and Montag to fame but also turned them into pariahs.
When Pratt first appeared on “The Hills” in 2006, he wasn’t exactly a stranger to reality TV. He’d already co-created and starred on the short-lived “The Princes Of Malibu,” which ran for six episodes in 2005. This time, Pratt was cast as Montag’s Playmate-chasing boyfriend with commitment issues. His earliest episodes portrayed a club-going early 20-something who, seemingly whenever Montag’s back was turned, was chatting up other women.
Behind the scenes, Pratt had already fallen hard for Montag, who’d been cast on “The Hills” as lead protagonist Lauren Conrad’s ostensible sidekick and peer at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising. Pratt writes how utterly taken he was with Montag, whom he first met through high school friend and “Princes” star Brody Jenner, who was then dating “Laguna Beach” alum Kristin Cavallari. Despite being head over heels for Montag (to this day, he never misses a chance to talk up his partner, earning him the Gen Z stamp of “wife guy”), Pratt was more than willing to fulfill the onscreen role of shady Casanova. He thought “The Hills” could use a shot of adrenaline that Conrad, a “Laguna Beach” holdover (or, “Ambien in human form,” as Pratt writes) failed to provide. Plus, it didn’t hurt that the more drama Pratt caused, the higher his MTV paycheck.
According to Pratt, MTV was not satisfied with him merely portraying an unfaithful boyfriend. They wanted full toxicity. Pratt lists numerous examples of excessive producer manipulation on “The Hills,” but the one that traumatized him and Montag the most early on was in Season 2, where Pratt is seen berating Montag into moving in together. (Offscreen, Montag was already living with Pratt at his parents’ house in the Palisades.)
Pratt writes how executive producer Sean Travis encouraged him to be “at his absolute worst here. Show us that cold, controlling side.” When Pratt expressed hesitation at this — “There’s a difference between being a fun player and being edited into some psycho who’d emotionally torture the girl he loved,” he writes — Pratt remembers Travis calling “The Hills” creator Adam DiVello, who Pratt remembers as “hav[ing] this supernatural ability to manipulate us into doing exactly what would deliver maximum carnage.” In the book, Pratt alleges that DiVello would remind cast members that if they followed orders, any rating boost could result in considerable financial bonuses, among other juicy incentives.
When the producers didn’t get the take they desired, they’d film it again — and again and again. To the point where filming a reality show more resembled police coercion, he says. “They would break you by attrition,” Pratt tells me.
It might sound ironic that for a guy born and raised in Los Angeles, who matriculated among dozens of Hollywood nepo children at the prestigious Crossroads School in Santa Monica, Pratt would be so unprepared for his turn on camera. But once you crack into “The Guy You Loved to Hate,” it becomes clear that while Pratt was always ambitious and had proximity to the rich and famous, he was not born with certain layers of protection that could have shielded him from causing permanent reputational damage to himself (and others).
As a child in the Palisades, Pratt grew up comfortably upper-middle class. His father, William “Skip” Pratt, is a dentist, and his mother, Janet, a homemaker. Pratt’s older half sibling on his mother’s side, Kristin, has never been in the spotlight, but his younger sister, Stephanie, actively courted it. (By Season 3 of “The Hills,” Stephanie Pratt had become a series regular and good friend of Lauren Conrad.)
Pratt and his siblings attended the prestigious Crossroads Academy in Santa Monica, “where the children of Oscar winners and studio bosses learned alongside regular kids like us,” Pratt writes. “Crossroads was where Hollywood royalty sent their children to learn that the world belonged to them. I was there to learn it didn’t quite belong to me, yet.”.”
It was at Crossroads where Pratt met his future ride-or-die Brody Jenner, the son of Olympian Caitlyn Jenner and songwriter and beauty pageant winner Linda Thompson, and stepbrother of the not-yet-famous Kardashian sisters. In the years following graduation, Jenner and Pratt would team up to produce “The Princes Of Malibu,” but only after Pratt, who was attending USC, almost flunked a course in business trigonometry. Up until that point, he’d been sure he was destined to be a brilliant Wall Street investment banking scion.
When his business school dreams fell flat, Pratt turned to filmmaking, but realized that the cost of getting a movie off the ground required thousands of dollars, which he didn’t have. What he did have, however, was a rarified type of access to the children of famous people. So Pratt sold a few candid shots of Mary-Kate Olsen partying at college to Us Weekly, which he’d taken from his friend Max Winkler’s (son of Henry) bedroom wall after Olsen and Winkler, who briefly dated in 2002, broke up. The photo reveal, Pratt argues in the book, was a win-win for all involved. He walked away with $50,000, and child-star Olsen got a rebellious rebrand.
Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt in 2009 at Perez Hilton’s 31st birthday party in West Hollywood.
(Matt Sayles / Associated Press)
This is all to say that well before his villainous arc on “The Hills,” Pratt was willing to cross a few lines to get ahead. Still, he had limits. The mask that producers asked him to wear was beginning to eat his face.
In 2007, all hell broke loose when Season 3 of “The Hills” opened with Conrad screaming at Montag that her former best friend “knew what [she] did.” As more episodes came out, “The Hills” was bending reality to make it seem like Montag and Pratt had purposefully invented a rumor that Conrad had a secret sex tape with on-again, off-again boyfriend Jason Wahler.
The truth, according to Pratt, is more complex. Pratt writes how in the spring of 2007, Conrad allegedly called Montag, panicking that her ex, Wahler, was threatening to release a sex tape of the two of them. Overhearing this, Pratt texted his friend and gossip blogger Perez Hilton to leak the tidbit, not thinking it would ever come back to bite him. When the sex-tape rumor story inevitably dropped on Hilton’s blog, and the recently launched TMZ, Speidi (as Pratt and Montag were now known) became enemy No. 1, not just in the world of MTV, but on a genuine global scale. (Conrad denied any sex tape existed at the time.)
Pratt and Montag were growing increasingly isolated. For a while, Pratt worked to monetize the negative attention by calling the paparazzi on himself and Montag, who also agreed to elope in order to keep themselves on “The Hills.” They needed the money, and with their reputations taking such a beating, this was the only source of income they could really count on. By his final episodes, Pratt appeared to be suffering from near-psychosis, clutching crystals to his forehead and exploding into fits of rage, which ultimately got him and Montag kicked off the show in the middle of its final season.
After “The Hills” was canceled in 2010, Pratt and Montag quickly ran through all of their savings; in 2015, the couple declared bankruptcy, having spent most of their $10-million net worth. They jumped on a few other reality shows, including “Celebrity Big Brother (UK)” in 2013. Pratt went back to USC to complete his undergrad degree. While there, a writing professor told him what he and Montag had done on “The Hills” wasn’t trash but, rather, performance art.
A few years later, Pratt launched and ran a crystal shop. He engaged with fans directly on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram. In 2018, Taylor Swift personally invited him, Montag, and baby Gunner to come see her Reputation tour as a thank you for Pratt playing “Look What You Made Me Do” so many times during his Snapchat sessions.
In January 2025, Pratt revealed that he was earning a few thousand dollars a week from the 5,000 videos on his TikTok. When last year’s wildfire consumed their home and belongings, the couple made around $20,000 on TikTok live, where fans can donate directly. Streams of Montag’s 2009 pop album, “Superficial,” soared. Even writing this book was partially a business-first decision for Pratt, whose main goal at the moment is to rebuild his family’s Palisades house.
Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt in 2025 at the premiere of “The Accountant 2” in Hollywood.
(Jordan Strauss / Invision / Associated Press)
“I am obviously very nervous, because everyone wants a New York Times bestseller,” Pratt says. “One thing I learned with Heidi’s music is it took 15 years for everyone to be like, ‘ “Superficial” is a cult classic.’ Even though I would like [the book] to be a No. 1 hit, I’ve learned that true art will maybe take more time. … I do know that the story is very unique to a time. Our goal in writing the book was that one day it would be taught in, like, TV film class at USC or something about the blending of culture and entertainment.”
Pratt also says he’s looking forward to taking a break from talking about the wildfires as he works to promote “The Guy You Loved to Hate.”
“I’m excited to go on talk shows and just get to feel like a reality star-type person again,” he says. “I really did like making Snapchats and dancing to Taylor Swift [before the fires]. Even when my life was so heavy, I didn’t take it seriously. … And now I have to take life so seriously, which is a real adjustment.”
You might wonder: If Pratt feels like such a broken record these days, why even make a bid for mayor?
Well, he can’t escape himself. Pratt will always be that obsessive guy who is thinking 10 steps ahead. When you live that way, it must be frustrating when other people can’t keep up. “If I hear one more time, ‘The wheels of justice turn slowly’ ” Pratt says with a sigh. “I’m like, why? Excuse me, they don’t need to. I always say to these people, ‘We’ll get new wheels.’ ”
Brodsky is an L.A. culture and music writer. Her forthcoming biography of Stevie Nicks, “Lessons & Lace,” published by Penguin Random House, debuts in September.
