Business

Edison under scrutiny for Eaton fire. Who pays liability will be 'new frontier' for California

Published

11 months ago

January 21, 2025

Edison under scrutiny for Eaton fire. Who pays liability will be 'new frontier' for California

Six years ago, Pacific Gas & Electric filed for bankruptcy after it was found liable for sparking a succession of devastating wildfires, including the blaze that destroyed the town of Paradise and led to more than 100 deaths.

Wall Street investors lost confidence and ratings agencies threatened to downgrade California’s investor-owned utilities, prompting legislators to come up with an innovative solution: the establishment of a $21-billion wildfire fund, split equally between shareholders and utility customers.

Now, after two major wildfires have destroyed thousands of homes and left at least two dozen dead in and around Los Angeles, the state’s wildfire fund would face its first major test if another utility is found liable for sparking the blazes.

Even the lawmaker who spearheaded legislation to set up the wildfire fund is not sure whether his efforts to mitigate the risk to utility companies — allowing them to keep functioning in a state prone to escalating risk of wildfires — is enough.

“This is the most profound test case that the fund will potentially be up against,” said Christopher Holden, a former Democratic legislator who sponsored the bill that created the fund. “This is a new frontier,” said Holden, who lives in Pasadena and had to evacuate during the Eaton fire.

“It was a new frontier when we wrote the bill — and now, just five years later, we’re going through another frontier.”

If investigators determine that a utility company caused the Eaton or Palisades fire, it could send shock waves across the utility industry and the broader insurance market.

Mark Toney, executive director of TURN, The Utility Reform Network, said the massive scope of the L.A. County fires raised significant questions about the fund’s ability to cover insurance liability. Even if the fund is able to bail out utility companies for the fires, it’s uncertain whether it could then cover fires that may crop up in the future.

“Will the fund work right?” Toney said. “Who ends up paying?”

The causes of the fires have yet to be determined.

Investigators looking into the Eaton fire — which caused at least 17 fatalities and damaged an estimated 7,000 structures across Pasadena and Altadena — are focusing on an area around a Southern California Edison electrical transmission tower in Eaton Canyon.

Edison has denied fault in the Eaton fire. In a statement to The Times, the company said that its work to mitigate wildfires had cut the risk of catastrophic fires by 85% to 90% compared with the risk before 2018.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the municipal utility that operates in Pacific Palisades, says it did not opt into the wildfire fund because it would have been too costly for its customers. If the large municipal utility was liable for the Palisades fire, the city of L.A. could face exorbitant financial costs.

But sources with knowledge of the investigation have told The Times that the fire, which started in the Skull Rock area north of Sunset Boulevard, appears to have human origins. Officials are looking into whether a small fire possibly sparked by New Year’s Eve fireworks could somehow have rekindled Jan 7.

Michael Wara, an energy and climate scholar at Stanford University, said the state’s entire insurance landscape, not just California’s wildfire fund, might have to be recalibrated if a utility company were found to have caused a major L.A. fire.

“The big question is how available and affordable is overall insurance?” said Wara, who has served on the California Catastrophe Response Council, the fund’s oversight body. “California, I think, is going to face greater challenges than it has over even the last few years, when it hasn’t been easy for its primary insurers and other entities to access these global reinsurance markets that fund losses after a catastrophe.”

Under California law, utility companies are strictly liable for all damages to real property associated with a fire, including houses.

The wildfire fund is a new model in which the state’s three big owner-operated utility companies — Pacific Gas & Electric Co., San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and Southern California Edison — pay into a fund, which they can then tap into if their equipment is determined to have caused a blaze. When that happens, they are responsible, on their own, for the first $1 billion of losses. After that, the wildfire fund will pay.

“If the wildfire fund did not exist today, Edison might be in real trouble,” Wara said. “We would see something probably similar to what happened to PG&E after the Camp fire.”

Back then, Wara said, utilities were held to a standard of strict liability: If electrical equipment was found to have caused the fire, they were on the hook.

Now, if Edison is ultimately held responsible, Wara said, the company can go to the wildfire fund and get money.

“That’s really important in terms of making sure that the victims are made whole, at least for their property losses,” he said.

Although it is too soon to estimate the damage of the Eaton fire, Wara said thousands of structures have been lost in an area where the average home value is around $1.3 million. Costs, he said, could reach $10 billion.

If officials find that Edison caused the fire but acted responsibly, Wara said, as much as half of the fund’s $21 billion could be depleted.

“That’s half the fund in one fire — five years into the life of the fund,” said Wara, who has served as a wildfire commissioner for California and a member of the California Catastrophe Response Council, the oversight body of the California wildfire fund.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the wildfire fund has so far amassed only $14 billion, because utility companies cannot immediately expect ratepayers to pay their share of half the $21 billion.

“If you are an investor in PG&E or Edison, you might look at this and think, ‘Hmm, I thought the fund was big enough. Maybe now I’m not so sure.’ The fund is there to provide confidence. If the fund isn’t big enough, there will be less confidence.”

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, will lead the investigation into what caused the fires.

Then, the California Public Utility Commission determines whether the utility company acted reasonably or unreasonably and, if so, to what degree.

If a utility was found to have failed to act prudently, Wara said, it would have to reimburse the fund. The amount it would pay, however, is capped on the size of the reimbursement relative to the size of their rate base.

Edison International Chief Executive Pedro Pizarro told Bloomberg Television that state regulations allowed the company’s holder liability to be capped at $3.9 billion.

“The reason the cap is there is if Edison is reimbursing the fund, that’s basically electricity customers reimbursing the fund,” Wara said. “Edison will go to the California Utility Commission and say, ‘We need this money to be expensed in rates.’”

The fund would also have to pay for wrongful deaths, Wara said, but that’s a different kind of claim.

“You have to show negligence, and that may be hard to prove, actually, because Edison may have acted reasonably, and yet the fire still was set by their equipment,” Wara said. “Edison would have a lot of reason to claim that it has acted reasonably, in a sense that it has spent enormous sums to try to reduce the risk, and there’s an agency that’s overseeing all of this and approving and monitoring compliance with its plans.”

Still, even if the wildfire fund bailed out Edison, there could be grave consequences for Edison and other utility companies. If a large portion of the wildfire fund’s $21 billion was depleted, that could affect market perception of the fund, negatively affect utility company credit scores, and plunge investor-owned utilities — which cover about 80% customers across the state of California — into chaos.

On Tuesday afternoon, shares for Edison International, the utility’s parent company, rose less than 1% to $57.27, marking a more than 24% drop in the week since the fires broke out. That represents a more than $7 billion decline in the company’s market cap.

“If the [utility] market collapses, then we’ve got a catastrophic situation,” Holden said. “We have to secure the market going forward.”

Last fall, state regulators criticized Southern California Edison for falling behind in inspecting transmission lines in areas at high risk of wildfires.

Utility safety officials also said in a report that the company’s visual inspections of splices in its transmission lines were sometimes failing to find dangerous problems.

“We have not seen in our telemetry any indication of an electrical anomaly,” Edison International CEO Pedro Pizarro said Monday on Bloomberg Television. “Typically, when you have a fire across infrastructure, you see voltage dropping. We have not seen that in our study.”

Pizarro said Edison had turned off distribution lines near the start of the Eaton blaze before it erupted in a canyon near Altadena, but not the transmission lines. “Transmission lines are larger and stronger,” he said, “and so they can operate safely at higher wind speeds.”

Several of California’s most destructive wildfires in the last decades have been caused by aging electrical equipment. The 2018 Camp fire was caused by 100-year-old high voltage transmission towers. The 2019 Kincade fire was caused by a line built half a century ago. It may be the case, Wara said, that California’s older utility infrastructure, even when inspected, is not up to the job.

“A lot of the transmission system in California is quite old,” Wara said. “There were pulses of construction activity that led to the system we have and the last big one was when Pat Brown was governor.. .If something failed on that tower that caused ground faults, at some point we need to ask ourselves… maybe we shouldn’t be relying on old infrastructure?”

In an era when hurricane-force winds can whip up wildfires that engulf vast areas, Toney questioned whether it made sense for a utility company to be responsible for the fate of every home. Wildfires, he said, are caused not just by faulty utility equipment, but by lightning, arson, even legal fireworks, and then fueled by poor development and insufficient cutting back of vegetation and landscaping.

“It’s a mistake just to isolate utility,” Toney said. “It’s time for a new paradigm. When it comes to the cost of rebuilding, the utilities may not be big enough.”

Business

Student Loan Borrowers in Default Could See Wages Garnished in Early 2026

Published

5 hours ago

December 23, 2025

Press Room

Student Loan Borrowers in Default Could See Wages Garnished in Early 2026

The Trump administration will begin to garnish the pay of student loan borrowers in January, the Department of Education said Tuesday, stepping up a repayment enforcement effort that began this year.

Beginning the week of Jan. 7, roughly 1,000 borrowers who are in default will receive notices informing them of their status, according to an email from the department. The number of notices will increase on a monthly basis.

The collection activities are “conducted only after student and parent borrowers have been provided sufficient notice and opportunity to repay their loans,” according to the email, which was unsigned.

The announcement comes as many Americans are already struggling financially, and the cost of living is top of mind. The wage garnishing could compound the effects on lower-income families contending with a stressed economy, employment concerns and health care premiums that are set to rise for millions of people.

The email did not contain any details about the nature of the garnishment, such as how much would be deducted from wages, but according to the government’s student aid website, up to 15 percent of a borrower’s take-home pay can be withheld. The government typically directs employers to withhold a certain amount, similar to a payroll tax.

A borrower should be sent a notice of the government’s intent 30 days before the seizure begins, according to the website, StudentAid.gov.

The administration ended a five-year reprieve on student loan repayments in May, paving the way for forced collections — meaning tax refunds and other federal payments, like Social Security, could be withheld and applied toward debt payments.

That move ushered in the end of pandemic-era relief that began in March 2020, when payments were paused. More than 9 percent of total student debt reported between July and September was more than 90 days delinquent or in default, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In April, only one-third of the 38 million Americans who owed money for college or graduate school and should have been making payments actually were, according to government data.

“It’s going to be more painful as you move down the income distribution,” said Michael Roberts, a professor of finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. But, he added, borrowers have to contend with the fact that they did take out money, even as government policies allowed many to put the loans at the back of their minds.

After several extensions by the Biden administration, payments resumed in October 2023, but borrowers were not penalized for defaulting until last year. About five million borrowers are in default, and millions more are expected to be close to missing payments.

The government had signaled this year that it would send notices that could lead to the garnishing of a portion of a borrower’s paycheck. Being in collections and in default can damage credit scores.

The government garnished wages before the pandemic pause, said Betsy Mayotte, president of the Institute of Student Loan Advisors, which provides free advice for borrowers. But the 2020 collections pause was the first she was aware of, she said, and that may make the deductions more shocking for people who have not had to pay for years.

“There’s a lot of defaulted borrowers that think that there was a mistake made somewhere along the line, or the Department of Education forgot about them,” Ms. Mayotte said. “I think this is going to catch a lot of them off guard.”

The first day after a missed payment, a loan becomes delinquent. After a certain amount of time in delinquency, usually 270 days, the loan is considered in default — the kind of loan determines the time period. If someone defaults on a federal student loan, the entire balance becomes due immediately. Then the loan holder can begin collections, including on wages.

But there are options to reorganize the defaulted loans, including consolidation or rehabilitation, which requires making a certain number of consecutive payments determined by the holder.

Often, people who default on debt owe the smallest amounts, said Constantine Yannelis, an economics professor at the University of Cambridge who researches U.S. student loans.

“They’re often dropouts or they went to two-year, for-profit colleges, and people who spent many, many years in schools, like doctors or lawyers, have very low default rates,” he said.

This year, millions of borrowers saw their credit scores drop after the pause on penalties was lifted. If someone does not earn an income, the government can take the person to court. But, practically speaking, a borrower’s credit score will plummet.

Dr. Yannelis added that a common reason people default was that they were not aware of the repayment options. There are plans that allow borrowers to pay 10 percent of their income rather than having 15 percent garnished, for example.

The whiplash policy changes around the time of the pandemic were “a terrible thing from a borrower-welfare perspective,” Dr. Yannelis said. “Policy uncertainty is really terrible for borrowers.”

Business

Kevin Costner’s western ‘Horizon’ faces more claims of unpaid fees

Published

6 hours ago

December 23, 2025

Press Room

Kevin Costner’s western ‘Horizon’ faces more claims of unpaid fees

In the midst of attempting to complete filming on his western anthology ”Horizon: An American Saga,” Kevin Costner is facing another legal dispute over the production.

On Monday, Western Costume Co. sued Costner and the production companies behind the epic western, claiming unpaid costume fees and damages to some of the clothing during the filming of the series’ second episode.

“The costumes are costly to replace if damaged or not returned,” states the complaint, which included copies of invoices for about $134,000 in costume rentals. “Without a reasonable basis for doing so and/or with reckless regard to the consequences, defendants failed to pay for the rented costumes and failed to return the costumes undamaged.”

Western Costume, the iconic business based in North Hollywood, is seeking to recover roughly $440,000, including legal fees, according to the lawsuit filed Monday in Los Angeles Superior Court.

A spokesperson for Costner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal and financial problems that have dogged the sprawling western drama, which Costner directed, co-wrote, starred in and partially funded.

In May, United Costume Corp., sued the production, claiming $350,000 in unpaid fees for the first two chapters of “Horizon.” Two months later, the costume firm filed to dismiss the suit with prejudice.

In May, Devyn LaBella, a stunt performer on “Chapter 2,” sued the production for sexual discrimination, harassment and retaliation in Los Angeles Superior Court. LaBella alleged an unscripted rape scene was filmed without the presence of a contractually mandated intimacy coordinator.

In a motion filed in August to get the suit tossed, Costner said he had reviewed LaBella’s complaint and was “shocked at the false and misleading allegations she was making.”

In October, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge denied Costner’s anti-SLAPP motion to dismiss the case. The judge also denied LaBella’s claim that Costner had interfered with her civil rights through the use of intimidation or coercion with respect to her participation in the filming of a rape scene, but allowed several of her other claims to proceed.

The case is pending.

The production is also facing an arbitration claim for alleged breaches in its co-financing agreement with its distributor New Line Cinema and City National Bank, “Horizon” bondholder, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

In June 2024, “Chapter 1” of the planned four-part series was released in theaters followed by a streaming broadcast on HBO Max, but it was largely panned by critics.

In its review, The Times described “Horizon” as “a massive boondoggle, a misguided and excruciatingly tedious cinematic experience.”

It failed at the box office, grossing just $38.8 million worldwide, on a reported $100 million budget.

“Chapter 2” premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last September, but its theatrical release was pulled and remains indefinitely delayed, while the final two chapters remain in production or development, according to IMDb.

Business

Snoopy is everywhere right now — from jewelry to pimple patches. Why?

Published

19 hours ago

December 23, 2025

Press Room

Snoopy is everywhere right now — from jewelry to pimple patches. Why?

As a child, Clara Spars, who grew up in Charles M. Schulz’s adoptive hometown of Santa Rosa, assumed that every city had life-size “Peanuts” statues dotting its streets.

After all, Spars saw the sculptures everywhere she went — in the Santa Rosa Plaza, at Montgomery Village, outside downtown’s Empire Cleaners. When she and her family inevitably left town and didn’t stumble upon Charlie Brown and his motley crew, she was perplexed.

Whatever void she felt then is long gone, since the beagle has become a pop culture darling, adorning all manner of merchandise — from pimple patches to luxury handbags. Spars herself is the proud owner of a Baggu x Peanuts earbuds case and is regularly gifted Snoopy apparel and accessories.

“It’s so funny to see him everywhere because I’m like, ‘Oh, finally!’” Spars said.

The spike in Snoopy products has been especially pronounced this year with the 75th anniversary of “Peanuts,” a.k.a. Snoopy’s 75th birthday. But the grip Snoopy currently has on pop culture and the retail industry runs deeper than anniversary buzz. According to Sony, which last week acquired majority ownership of the “Peanuts” franchise, the IP is worth half a billion dollars.

To be clear, Snoopy has always been popular. Despite his owner being the “Peanuts” strip’s main character and the namesake for most of the franchise’s adaptations, Snoopy was inarguably its breakout star. He was the winner of a 2001 New York Times poll about readers’ favorite “Peanuts” characters, with 35% of the vote.

This year, the Charles M. Schulz Museum celebrated the 75th anniversary of the “Peanuts” comic strip’s debut.

(Brennan Spark / Charles M. Schulz Museum)

But the veritable Snoopymania possessing today’s consumers really exploded with the social media boom of the early 2010s, said Melissa Menta, senior vice president of global brand and communications for Peanuts Worldwide.

That’s also when the company saw the first signs of uncharacteristically high brand engagement, Menta said. She largely attributed the success of “Peanuts” on social media to the comic strip’s suitability to visual platforms like Instagram.

“No one reads the comic strips in newspapers anymore,” Menta said, “but if you think about it, a four-panel comic strip, it’s actually an Instagram carousel.”

Then, in 2023, Peanuts Worldwide launched the campaign that made Snoopy truly viral.

That year, the brand partnered with the American Red Cross to create a graphic tee as a gift for blood donors. The shirt, which featured Snoopy’s alter ego Joe Cool and the message “Be Cool. Give Blood,” unexpectedly became internet-famous. In the first week of the collaboration, the Red Cross saw a 40% increase in donation appointments, with 75% of donors under the age of 34.

“People went crazy over it,” Menta said, and journalists started asking her, “Why?”

Her answer? “Snoopy is cute and cool. He’s everything you want to be.”

Art of the Peanuts characters hangs at the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.

The Red Cross collaboration was so popular that Peanuts Worldwide brought it back this year, releasing four new shirt designs. Again, the Snoopy fandom — plus some Woodstock enthusiasts — responded, with 250,000 blood donation appointments made nationwide in the month after the collection’s launch.

In addition to the Red Cross partnership, Peanuts Worldwide this year has rolled out collaborations with all kinds of retailers, from luxury brands like Coach and Kith to mass-market powerhouses like Krispy Kreme and Starbucks. Menta said licensed product volume is greater than ever, estimating that the brand currently has more than 1,200 licensees in “almost every territory around the world,” which is approximately four times the number it had 40 years ago.

Then again, at that time, Schulz enjoyed and regularly executed veto power when it came to product proposals, and licensing rules were laid out in what former Times staff writer Carla Lazzareschi called the “Bible.”

“The five-pound, 12-inch-by-18-inch binder given every new licensee establishes accepted poses for each character and painstakingly details their personalities,” Lazzareschi wrote in a 1987 Times story. “Snoopy, for example, is said to be an ‘extrovert beagle with a Walter Mitty complex.’ The guidelines cover even such matters as Snoopy’s grip on a tennis racquet.”

Although licensing has expanded greatly since then, Menta said she and her retail development associates “try hard not to just slap a character onto a T-shirt.” Their goal is to honor Schulz’s storytelling, she added, and with 18,000 “Peanuts” strips in the archive, licensees have plenty of material to pull from.

Rick Vargas, the senior vice president of merchandising and marketing at specialty retailer BoxLunch, said his team regularly returns to the Schulz archives to mine material that could resonate with customers.

“As long as you have a fresh look at what that IP has to offer, there’s always something to find. There’s always a new product to build,” Vargas said.

Indeed, this has been one of BoxLunch’s strongest years in terms of sales of “Peanuts” products, and Snoopy merchandise specifically, the executive said.

Bejeweled keychains of Snoopy and Charlie Brown.

Daniella Yacobovsky, co-founder of the celebrity-favorite accessory retailer BaubleBar, reported similar high sales for the brand’s recent “Peanuts” collection.

“Especially for people who are consistent BaubleBar fans, every time we introduce new character IP, there is this huge excitement from that fandom that we are bringing their favorite characters to life,” Yacobovsky said.

The bestselling item in the collection, the Peanuts Friends Forever Charm Bracelet, sold out in one day. Plus, customers have reached out with new ideas for products linked to specific “Peanuts” storylines.

More recently, Peanuts Worldwide has focused on marketing to younger costumers in response to unprecedented brand engagement from Gen Z. In November, it launched a collaboration with Starface, whose cult-favorite pimple patches are a staple for teens and young adults. The Snoopy stickers have already sold out on Ulta.com, Starface founder Julie Schott said in an emailed statement, adding that the brand is fielding requests for restocks.

“We know it’s a certified hit when resale on Depop and EBay starts to spike,” Schott said.

The same thing happened in 2023, when a CVS plush of Snoopy in a puffer jacket (possibly the dog’s most internet-famous iteration to date) sold out in-store and started cropping up on EBay — for more than triple the original price.

The culprits were Gen-Zers fawning over how cute cozy Snoopy was, often on social media.

Yellow and white pouches with Snoopy pimple patches.

Hannah Guy Casey, senior director of brand and marketing at Peanuts Worldwide, said in 2024, the official Snoopy TikTok account gained 1.1 million followers, and attracted 85.4 million video views and 17.6 million engagements. This year, the account has gained another 1.2 million followers, and racked up 106.5 million video views and 23.2 million engagements.

Guy Casey noted that TikTok is where the brand experiences much of its engagement among Gen Z fans.

Indeed, the platform is a hot spot for fan-created Snoopy content, from memes featuring the puffer jacket to compilations of his most relatable moments. Several Snoopy fan accounts, including one dedicated to a music-loving Snoopy plushie, boast well over half a million followers.

Caryn Iwakiri, a speech and language pathologist at Sunnyvale’s Lakewood Tech EQ Elementary School whose classroom is Snoopy-themed, recently took an impromptu trip to the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa after seeing its welcome center decked out with Snoopy decor on TikTok. Once she arrived, she realized the museum was celebrating the “Peanuts” 75th anniversary.

Two red construction-paper doghouses with Snoopy on each roof.

It’s a familiar story for Schulz Museum director Gina Huntsinger.

“Last December, we were packed, and I was at the front talking to people, and I just randomly asked this group, ‘Why are you here?’”

It turned out that the friends had traveled from Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas to meet in Santa Rosa and visit the museum after seeing it on TikTok.

According to Stephanie King, marketing director at the Schulz Museum, the establishment is experiencing its highest-ever admissions since opening in 2002. In the 2024–2025 season, the museum increased its attendance by nearly 45% from the previous year.

Huntsinger said she’s enjoyed watching young visitors experience the museum in new ways.

In the museum’s education room, where visitors typically trace characters from the original Schulz comics or fill out “Peanuts” coloring pages, Gen Z museumgoers are sketching pop culture renditions of Snoopy — Snoopy as rock band Pierce the Veil, Snoopy as pop star Charli XCX.

“When our social media team puts them up [online], there’s these comments among this generation that gets this, and they’re having conversations about it,” Huntsinger said. “It’s dynamic, it’s fun, it’s creative. It makes me feel like there’s hope in the world.”

A white wall with "Passport to Peanuts" art.

Laurel Roxas felt similarly when they first discovered “Peanuts” as a kid while playing the “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” video game on their PlayStation Portable. For Roxas, who is Filipino, it was Snoopy and not the “Peanuts” children who resonated most.

“Nobody was Asian. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not even in the story,’” they said.

Because Snoopy was so simply drawn, Roxas added, he was easy to project onto. They felt similarly about Hello Kitty; with little identifying features or dialogue of their own, the characters were blank canvases for their own personification.

Roxas visited Snoopy Museum Tokyo with their brother last year. They purchased so much Snoopy merchandise — “everything I could get my hands on” — that they had to buy additional luggage to bring it home.

For some Snoopy enthusiasts, the high volume of Snoopy products borders on oversaturation, threatening to cheapen the spirit of the character.

Growing up, Bella Shingledecker loved the holiday season because it meant that the “Peanuts” animated specials would be back on the air. It was that sense of impermanence, she believes, that made the films special.

Now, when she sees stacks of Snoopy cookie jars or other trend-driven products at big-box stores like T.J. Maxx, it strikes her as a bit sad.

“It just feels very unwanted,” she said. For those who buy such objects, she said she can’t help but wonder, “Will this pass your aesthetic test next year?”

Lina Jeong, for one, isn’t worried that Snoopy’s star will fade.

Jeong’s affinity for the whimsical beagle was passed down to her from her parents, who furnished their home with commemorative “Peanuts” coffee table books. But she fell in love with Snoopy the first time she saw “Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown,” which she rewatches every Valentine’s Day.

This past year, she was fresh out of a relationship when the holiday rolled around and she found herself tearing up during scenes of Snoopy making Valentine’s crafts for his friends.

“Maybe I was hyper-emotional from everything that had happened, but I remember being so struck,” that the special celebrated platonic love over romantic love, Jeong said.

It was a great comfort to her at the time, she said, and she knows many others have felt that same solace from “Peanuts” media — especially from its dear dog.

“Snoopy is such a cultural pillar that I feel like fads can’t just wash it off,” she said.

Soon, she added, she plans to move those “Peanuts” coffee table books into her own apartment in L.A.