Business
Palisades Village to reopen with Elyse Walker rebuilding flagship store
Elyse Walker made a bet in 1999: that residents of Pacific Palisades and Brentwood would rather shop for designer fashions in their neighborhood than drive to Beverly Hills.
Her eponymous boutique, initially just 800 square feet, became the cornerstone of a retail empire that now stretches from Tribeca to Newport Beach, drawing celebrities such as Jennifer Garner and Kate Hudson. It also propelled a renewal of downtown Palisades, with new restaurants and boutiques moving in.
That all changed on Jan. 7, when the Palisades fire leveled Walker’s flagship store and thousands of homes and other businesses.
A man rides a scooter past a burning business in Palisades Village on Jan. 8.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
On Wednesday, Walker proudly announced her next bet on the neighborhood where she raised her two sons.
In downtown Palisades, she and developer Rick Caruso revealed that Caruso’s Palisades Village shopping center will reopen in mid-2026 and that her flagship store, elysewalker, will become its newest marquee tenant.
“I hope that this serves as the catalyst for other retailers and brands and big businesses and small businesses to come back to the Palisades, Malibu, Altadena and Pasadena,” Walker said in an interview. “Twenty-five years ago, we planted seeds in this community, and now we are doing it again.”
Caruso told The Times that later this year, he plans to resume the Palisades Village annual Christmas tree and menorah lighting. He said he will also underwrite the cost of new landscaping and sidewalks in the streets around the shopping center.
The goal, he said, is to create a visible anchor to a town in the midst of a massive recovery and to accelerate the return of a vibrant, bustling community.
“This is a really big deal,” Caruso said. “When a retailer like Elyse opens a store in a community, that’s a powerful voice of confidence that there’s a bright future here. I really do believe with her and our organization, the rebirth of the Palisades is going to be unstoppable.”
The location of Fashion designer Elyse Walker’s former flagship store in Pacific Palisades that was destroyed in the Palisades fire on Jan. 7.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The news came during a frustrating and uncertain period as Palisades residents recover from the devastation of the wildfire and grapple with the mass displacement of their community. Thousands have relocated to disparate parts of Southern California or are scattered across the U.S.
“The fact that we have this hub in the middle of town is a ray of hope that we can get back sooner,” said Chris Feil, a Palisades native who moved six times after the fire before settling in a rental in Manhattan Beach. His wife, Mia Feil, said she gets emotional thinking of what was lost in the blaze. The couple is now in the early stages of rebuilding.
“We’re all sort of traumatized by the loss of our community,” she said, listing the impromptu gathering at restaurants, Saturday baseball games, the annual Christmas tree lighting and the Fourth of July parade. “Having all those things back is truly the lifeline and joy in the neighborhood — that’s what makes the Palisades so special. It’s a small town in a big city.”
Walker chose to open her shop on Antioch Street more than 25 years ago so that she could easily walk to her sons’ school.
“We were between three churches, two coffee shops and five schools — it had nothing to do with co-tenancy yet,” Walker said. “We just knew this was a place where people would be walking around.”
Fashion designer Elyse Walker said she trusts Rick Caruso, right, as she announced the reopening of her flagship store at the Palisades Village on Wednesday.
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Her shop drew well-heeled women from across the region, and she expanded the store’s footprint six times, reaching nearly 6,500 square feet. Her store generated $5,000 per square foot in sales — among the highest in American multi-brand retail. She developed a team of private shoppers and stylists that visited clients in their homes for curated fashions.
Along the way, Walker became an ambassador of sorts to would-be retailers and business owners in the Palisades, such as Cafe Vida, Lemon Nails and Caruso’s Palisades Village, which opened in 2018 and brought a movie theater, Erewhon and Chanel.
“People who live in the Palisades don’t want to leave. It’s a magical place — they nestle into the mountains right by the ocean,” Walker said.
On Jan. 7, Caruso relied on a fleet of private firefighters to prevent the flames from destroying Palisades Village and some nearby properties.
But Walker’s shop was reduced to rubble, the merchandise incinerated by the inferno.
The store had about 30 employees, and Walker said she has been in “sink or swim mode,” trying to keep her staff employed, serve local customers through her shops in Calabasas and Newport Beach and trudge through the arduous task of dealing with insurance.
“The first thing I said to my team: there’s no four walls that can define me, and there’s no four walls that define the magic,” she said.
She recalled the couples who met in the store, the women who learned they were pregnant there, and the local resident whose 3-year-old son had died and who needed a dress for the funeral.
“So much happened in the dressing room of that store, and none of that is gone — those relationships and friendships and trust are still there,” Walker said.
With Walker’s shop opening inside Palisades Village in the spring or summer of 2026, and with new trees, streetscapes and upgraded sidewalks coming to the downtown, Caruso said he hopes the area will be a cradle of redevelopment and a beacon for those vacillating about rebuilding.
“Hopefully, that spurs other landlords to invest in their buildings and spurs other retailers to open up,” he said. “We’re going to be roaring back and before you know it, it’s going to be full of families. These neighborhoods are going to flourish.”
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
A former female staffer who worked for Beast Industries, the media venture behind the popular YouTube channel MrBeast, is suing the company, alleging she was sexually harassed and fired shortly after she returned from maternity leave.
The employee, Lorrayne Mavromatis, a Brazilian-born social media professional, alleges in a lawsuit she was subjected to sexual harassment by the company’s management and demoted after she complained about her treatment. She said she was urged to join a conference call while in labor and expected to work during her maternity leave in violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act, according to the federal complaint filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina.
“This clout-chasing complaint is built on deliberate misrepresentations and categorically false statements, and we have the receipts to prove it. There is extensive evidence — including Slack and WhatsApp messages, company documents, and witness testimony — that unequivocally refutes her claims. We will not submit to opportunistic lawyers looking to manufacture a payday from us,” Gaude Paez, a Beast Industries spokesperson, said in a statement.
Jimmy Donaldson, 27, began MrBeast as a teen gaming channel that soon exploded into a media company worth an estimated $5 billion, with 500 employees and 450 million subscribers who watch its games, stunts and giveaways.
Mavromatis, who was hired in 2022 as its head of Instagram, described a pervasive climate of discrimination and harassment, according to the lawsuit.
In her complaint, she alleges the company’s former CEO James Warren made her meet him at his home for one-on-one meetings while he commented on her looks and dismissed her complaints about a male client’s unwanted advances, telling her “she should be honored that the client was hitting on her.”
When Mavromatis asked Warren why MrBeast, Donaldson, would not work with her, she was told that “she is a beautiful woman and her appearance had a certain sexual effect on Jimmy,” and, “Let’s just say that when you’re around and he goes to the restroom, he’s not actually using the restroom.”
Paez refuted the claim.
“That’s ridiculous. This is an allegation fabricated for the sole purpose of sparking headlines,” Paez said.
Mavromatis said she endured a slate of other indignities such as being told by Donaldson that she “would only participate in her video shoot if she brought him a beer.”
“In this male-centric workplace, Plaintiff, one of the few women in a high-level role, was excluded from otherwise all-male meetings, demeaned in front of colleagues, harassed, and suffered from males be given preferential treatment in employment decisions,” states the complaint.
When Mavromatis raised a question during a staff meeting with her team, she said a male colleague told her to “shut up” or “stop talking.”
At MrBeast headquarters in Greenville, N.C., she said male executives mocked female contestants participating in BeastGames, “who complained they did not have access to feminine hygiene products and clean underwear while participating in the show.”
In November 2023, Mavromatis formally complained about “the sexually inappropriate encounters and harassment, and demeaning and hostile work environment she and other female employees had been living and experiencing working at MrBeast,” to the company’s then head of human resources, Sue Parisher, who is also Donaldson’s mother, according to the suit.
In her complaint, Mavromatis said Beast Industries did not have a method or process for employees to report such issues either anonymously or to a third party, rather employees were expected to follow the company’s handbook, “How to Succeed In MrBeast Production.”
In it, employees were instructed that, “It’s okay for the boys to be childish,” “if talent wants to draw a dick on the white board in the video or do something stupid, let them” and “No does not mean no,” according to the complaint.
Mavromatis alleges that she was demoted and then fired.
Paez said that Mavromatis’s role was eliminated as part of a reorganization of an underperforming group within Beast Industries and that she was made aware of this.
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