QAnon targeted Hollywood influencer from Columbus. Excerpt from book explains why
Franklin Leonard, the Hollywood influencer who grew up in Columbus, is national news again.
Leonard, a 1996 graduate of Brookstone School and the Ledger-Enquirer’s Page One Awards winner in math that year, is featured in a Feb. 21 story at RollingStone.com.
The article, entitled “Why QAnon Targeted the Creater of Hollywood’s Black List,” is an excerpt from Will Sommer’s new book “Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy that Unhinged America.”
The excerpt tells Leonard’s story about the horrific accusations against him from strangers posting social media messages. The deluge started in October 2018, adding his name to the list of other Hollywood figures targeted by QAnon, including Tom Hanks, John Legend and Chrissy Teigen.
“But they’re famous,” Leonard told Sommer. “I’m not. I’m just some random guy.”
Leonard, while still attending Brookstone, worked as the scoreboard operator at Golden Park during Columbus RedStixx minor league baseball games. After graduating from Harvard University in 2000, according to his LinkedIn account, he worked as communications director for a Congressional candidate, weekly columnist for a newspaper in Trinidad and business analyst for a management consulting firm. Then he landed his first position in Hollywood as a development executive for John Goldwyn Productions in 2004.
He continued as a development executive for Appian Way Productions and Mirage Enterprises, then became director of development and production for Universal Pictures in 2008.
After a two-year stint as vice president of creative affairs for Overbrook Entertainment, Leonard started working at the Black List full time in 2010 as its CEO.
What is the Black List?
Since 2005, the Black List has released an annual survey of film executives choosing their favorite unproduced screenplays of that year.
The attention this list has given to those screenplays has resulted in more than 300 of them being produced as feature films. Together they amassed more than 270 Academy Award nominations and more than 40 wins, including Oscar-winning pictures “Juno,” “The King’s Speech,” “Argo,” “Spotlight” and “Slumdog Millionaires.”
Leonard’s Twitter page has more than 178,000 followers. So he isn’t just some random guy. But he certainly is more behind-the-scenes than in the spotlight.
QAnon, as described by the Anti-Defamation League, is a “decentralized, far-right political movement rooted in baseless conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by the ‘Deep State,’ a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, and that former President Donald Trump is the only person who can defeat it.”
When the QAnon messages directed at Leonard included death threats, he started to worry .
“Leonard became more nervous walking on the street in Los Angeles, fearing that each stranger he passed on the sidewalk was a QAnon believer coming to kill him in Q’s name,” Sommer wrote.
The excerpt goes on to explain Leonard learned the origin of his QAnon targeting came from a blogger who was a rejected screenwriter and “portrayed Leonard as a globe-spanning puppet-master, running the Muslim Brotherhood with an attachment of Iranian allies, in between visits to a ‘Cabal-affiliated’ hotel in Los Angeles,” Sommer wrote.
The Black List is considered a way to increase diversity in Hollywood, so Leonard symbolized the forces the blogger “thought had stopped him from succeeding,” Sommer wrote, “even though the two men never had any direct interaction.”
Leonard told Sommer, “If he spent half the time working on his craft of screenwriting as he did on this stuff, he might have had a successful screenwriting career.”
The L-E didn’t reach Leonard for comment before publication.
This story was originally published February 23, 2023 at 11:40 AM.
