Jeff Shell agreed to step down as president of Paramount Skydance after becoming entangled in a legal battle with a controversial Las Vegas gambler and self-styled “fixer.”

Paramount announced Shell’s departure Wednesday after the two sides negotiated an amicable resolution to the drama. Paramount said its external review into Shell’s conduct, initiated by Paramount’s board of directors, found no violation of securities laws.

Shell also resigned as a Paramount board member to focus on his legal skirmish, the company said.

His departure comes after just eight months on the job.

Paramount Skydance “is grateful for Mr. Shell’s many contributions and to have relied on him as a valued advisor,” the company said in its statement.

The veteran entertainment executive officially joined the media company with David Ellison’s takeover in August, though he had been a key member of Ellison’s team for nearly two years as the group worked to assemble the pieces of the tech scion’s growing empire. Ellison’s Skydance Media acquired Paramount and then pulled off a stunning $111-billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in late February.

Shell brought substantial experience running a media company to Ellison’s inner circle, a group that included former investment bankers and others who haven’t run a large-scale enterprise. But his role within the company long felt awkward because key division managers, including the heads of CBS, the Paramount movie studio and the company’s streaming businesses, reported to Ellison, which left Shell with a nebulous portfolio.

He wasn’t planning to stay on after the company acquires Warner Bros. Discovery, according to two people close to the situation who were not authorized to speak publicly. Paramount hopes to complete that deal this summer.

Shell’s exit this week was prompted by his unlikely association with the high-roller, Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani, who created a public stir after his dealings with Shell went south.

Cipriani sued Shell in Los Angeles County Superior Court on March 9, alleging fraud and breach of an oral contract. Cipriani claimed that he provided Shell with “sophisticated, high-value crisis communications services,” according to his suit.

He alleged Shell spilled corporate secrets, which Shell has denied. Cipriani said he reported Shell to the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission because Shell allegedly had discussed highly sensitive Paramount information with him: Paramount’s $7.7-billion deal last summer to bring UFC mixed-martial arts fights to CBS and other Paramount outlets.

Cipriani accused Shell of failing to deliver on a verbal pledge to help him produce an English-language version of a Roku TV Spanish music show.

Shell maintained Cipriani fictionalized the two men’s dealings, then spread “false and salacious lies to extract a massive payday,” according to a counterclaim filed by Shell. Cipriani has been seeking $150 million in damages.

In his court documents, Shell said the two men met only twice and that Shell owed him nothing.

But the Cipriani controversy made Shell’s future at Paramount untenable, the sources told The Times.

There was just “too much noise,” one of the sources said.

The Ellisons wanted to stay focused on building Paramount and completing their Warner Bros. takeover. The company needs to line up regulatory approvals in the U.S. and abroad.

Paramount’s board last month hired the Gibson Dunn law firm to look into Cipriani’s allegations.

The firm conducted a “complete and thorough” review, Paramount said.

“The facts demonstrated that [Cipriani’s] allegations do not establish a securities law violation,” Paramount said. “Mr. Shell promptly notified PSKY of these accusations and is taking forceful legal action.”

Paramount Skydance, and its board members also named in Cipriani’s lawsuit, plan to respond “to the frivolous and baseless claims against PSKY and its named board members and stockholders,” the company said.

The firm attributed Shell’s decision to step down as “consistent with Mr. Shell’s commitment to prioritizing PSKY’s success.”

His departure comes three years after he was ousted as NBCUniversal chief executive.

NBCUniversal-owner Comcast hired a law firm to investigate him after a CNBC anchor filed an internal sexual harassment claim against him. Shell stepped down, acknowledging that he’d had an “inappropriate relationship” with the journalist, who has since left the company.

The job at Paramount was envisioned to be his second act.

Shell’s dealings with Cipriani began with an August 2024 meeting at litigator Patty Glaser’s Century City office.

At the time, Glaser represented both men and urged Cipriani to “cease” his efforts to drum up damaging stories about Shell, who was trying to recover from the scandal that cost him his job at NBC.

Robert James “R.J.” Cipriani in Amazon Prime Video’s 2025 series, “Cocaine Quarterback.”

(Courtesy of Prime)

Near the end of that meeting, Cipriani pledged to help Shell keep negative publicity at bay, according to sources and court documents.

The two men communicated via text messages, on-and-off, for about 18 months.

“Nobody believed me,” Cipriani said Wednesday. “The best thing I did was cooperate with Gibson Dunn and showed them that the texts were real.”

It’s unclear whether Ellison will look to bring in other experienced media executives or look to senior Warner Bros. Discovery executives following Paramount’s proposed takeover of that company.

Times staff writer Stacy Perman contributed to this report.

The oldest, most enduring cliche about government policy is the one about how budgets are political, not fiscal, documents.

The Trump administration’s budget proposal for the 2027-28 fiscal year, unveiled Friday, seems designed to set a new standard for partisan ideology as a spending standard.

You may have seen news coverage of the budget’s top lines, which call for $1.5 trillion in defense spending next year and cuts totaling $73 billion in nondefense spending. But those figures fail to communicate the raw flavor of the budget cuts or how they’re described in the 92-page document.

Nor do they provide perspective for the magnitude of the defense increase or the damage that would be wreaked upon crucial social programs.

The defense request, for instance, would be a 42% increase over the current year, but it might be better judged as what Todd Harrison of the pro-business American Enterprise Institute describes unhappily as “the highest level of funding for defense in US history, surpassing even the peak funding during World War II.”

Adjusted to today’s dollars, Harrison calculates, the World War II peak was a bit lower than $1.2 trillion.

The administration minimizes the overall budgetary effect of its spending plans by projecting average growth in gross national product at 3% annually over the next decade.

That’s an ambitious goal, to say the least. Over the last 25 years — that is, in this century — U.S. economic growth has reached or exceeded 3% in only three years, including a pandemic-era surge to 6.1% in 2021. Last year it was only 2.1%.

On the other side of the ledger, the nondefense budget would be cut by 10%. But programs the White House has specifically targeted for being contrary to its ideology would suffer far more devastating cuts. Some scientific programs, such those concerned with global warming or the social and economic implications of science, technology and healthcare policies would be slashed by more than 50%.

NASA may be enjoying a moment just now, as its Artemis II spacecraft rounded the far side of the moon Monday, preparatory to heading back to Earth in the first moonshot since Apollo 17 last landed men on the lunar surface in December 1972.

But Trump proposes slashing the agency’s budget by $5.6 billion, or 23%. It gets worse: Trump would cut NASA’s science division by $34 billion, or 47%, canceling more than 40 projects, of which about 20 are currently underway.

“It’s an extinction-level event for science,” Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, told Nature.

Among the programs facing extinction is NASA’s Office of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Engagement, which aimed to interest minority students in those so-called STEM disciplines.

“NASA will inspire the next generation of explorers through exciting, ambitious space missions,” the budget says, “not through subsidizing woke STEM programming and research that prioritizes some groups of students over others.”

The budget leaves unclear how those “exciting, ambitious space missions” will come to pass, since it also cuts $297 million from NASA’s annual spending on space technology.

The proposed cuts to science programs more generally would be devastating. The National Science Foundation, one of the most important scientific grant-making agencies in the world, would lose $4.8 billion, or 55% of its funding.

The language the budget uses to rationalize such cuts speaks volumes about the drivers of its draconian cuts in nondefense spending: It’s an expression of Trumpian culture war hobby horses such as hostility to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The term “woke” or its derivatives appear 32 times in the budget document — as many times as it appears in Project 2025, the far-right roadmap for a second Trump term published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023.

The $8.5 billion in proposed budget cuts to K-12 spending would include the elimination of the $70-million Teacher Quality Partnership, which the budget describes as a program to “train teachers … on divisive ideologies.”

Among those, the budget says, are “inappropriate and divisive topics such as Critical Race Theory, diversity, equity, and inclusion, social justice activism,” and “anti-racism.” Nothing in the document explains why any of those things are considered bad; the terms are merely shibboleths that Trump’s core audience is expected to accept as gospel.

Services for transgender individuals would take a major hit from the budget: Among the $204.5 million in Treasury Department funding for community development initiatives on the chopping block would be support for “gender extremism,” such as for clinics that provide “‘gender-affirming hormone therapy’ and other services to young patients.”

As I’ve reported, Trump has bought heavily into conservative attacks on gender-affirming care, including by spouting claims that I labeled in 2024 as “deranged and despicable,” such as that schoolchildren are being kidnapped by school administrators and subjected to surgery against their will.

Perhaps the most concentrated assault in the proposed budget, as my colleague Hayley Smith reported, is the one aimed at research, development, and construction of renewable energy sources. The budget plan contains no fewer than 20 references to what it calls the “green new scam.”

This is an infantile reference to what’s typically known as the “Green New Deal,” a raft of policies incorporating a transition from fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal to renewables as well as the concept of “environmental justice,” meaning efforts to ensure that the transition doesn’t overly burden disadvantaged communities.

Trump has consistently called for more development of fossil sources, including a revival of coal despite its unrelenting and inevitable glide path toward extinction as a component of U.S. energy generation. The budget plan doubles down on this policy, calling renewables R&D a “leftist” ideology. This is tied to policies “opening up more Federal land and waters for oil, gas, and clean coal development,” the document says. (“Clean coal,” which is to say nonpolluting coal, is a myth, as I’ve reported.)

The budget plan pays tribute to another Trump obsession, the supposed evils of wind power. Cuts to the Interior Department budget would “put a stop to disastrous offshore wind energy projects that harm hardworking coastal communities, precious wildlife, and American military readiness.” None of these assertions about wind power is supported by reality.

Some cuts appear to reflect a determination to exact retribution from agencies that have thwarted cherished conservative goals. The National Institutes of Health, a consistent target of conservative budget-cutters, would lose $5.9 billion, or 12.5% of its budget. That would include major cuts to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was formerly headed by the respected immunologist Anthony Fauci.

The budget drafters couldn’t resist taking a swipe at Fauci, who has been the target of smears from Republicans who have tried to blame him, absurdly, for the COVID pandemic. The budget document accuses Fauci of steering government funds to the Wuhan (China) Institute of Virology, which it called “the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

There’s no compelling evidence that a laboratory was a source of the virus, as I’ve documented: The overwhelming weight of scientific judgment is that the virus reached humans from natural zoologic sources. The budget plan resurrects the long-debunked conspiracy theory that Fauci orchestrated a 2020 scientific paper that judged the lab-leak theory to be “improbable.” The budget drafters assert that Fauci (who retired in 2022) “commissioned” the paper, which is simply untrue.

Another theme percolating through the budget plan is the need to protect our wealthiest taxpayers from, well, taxes. The budget would cut $1.4 billion from the budget of the Internal Revenue Service, reversing a restoration of the agency’s enforcement capabilities undertaken during the Biden administration. Trump cut IRS staffing by 20,000, or 27%. The document asserts that the IRS “has been weaponized against the American people, small businesses, and non-profit organizations.”

According to the Yale Budget Lab, every dollar the IRS spends on audits yields more than $7 in returns. Plainly that’s not coming from average Americans, but from the upper crust.

None of this means that the budget proposal isn’t valuable, to an extent. It’s a convenient one-stop window into Trump’s personal fixations: the elimination of “radical gender and racial ideologies that poison the minds of Americans,” the horrors of “the globalist climate agenda,” the “invasion” of violent criminals from abroad, and so on. In other words, there’s nothing new under the Trumpian sun.