Disgrace insurance markets in everything

According to a Vulture article, Comenos then put together a squad of researchers in India to do the same thing: comb the trashiest ends of the web for iffy tweets, racial slurs and ill-advised sexts sent by about 27,000 prominent figures. These are then fed to a team of data specialists in Boston who crunch the numbers, based on 224 factors, and generate a “risk score” out of 100 for each person to gauge how close they are to getting permanently cancelled (shamed, rejected or boycotted for offensive behaviour or language).

Comenos’s company is called SpottedRisk: a “disgrace insurer” backed by Lloyds of London and touting for business from studios and brands badly burned by a celebrity shooting themselves in the foot – and damaging whatever project they were involved in. These losses have been substantial. Tiger Woods’ 2009 car crash, plus revelations about his infidelities, cost him $22m in brand contracts – and the shareholders of those brands up to $12bn. Meanwhile,#MeToo has escalated Hollywood blacklisting. After sexual abuse allegations against Kevin Spacey in 2017, Ridley Scott reshot the thriller All the Money in the World with Christopher Plummer in Spacey’s role – at a cost of $10m. Another Spacey movie, The Billionaire’s Boys Club, ploughed on with its planned release regardless of increasing public disgust at its star. It made £98 on its opening night.

SpottedRisk says its payout for Spacey would be about $8m – a number generated by combining his risk score with its “outcry index” to gauge public reaction. Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein would merit $10m payouts, while Roseanne Barr is relatively small change at $6m.

Here is the full Catherine Shoard article, via Michael, note that Donald Trump and R. Kelly are considered “uninsurable.”