Mayor Eric Garcetti, Who Is Still Not Running For President, Has Meet-And-Greet With Billionaire Donor In Hamptons

We're here to remind you again that, nope, L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti isn't gearing up for a 2020 presidential campaign. He's just looking to do a bit of traveling at the moment, and his travels have taken him to the Hamptons in New York, where he's getting drinks with Ronald Perelman (not actor Ron Perlman), the billionaire head of MacAndrews & Forbes. The holding company owns Revlon, among other things. Perelman donated $123,000 to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's reelection campaign in 2014. He also gifted $25 million to the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 to establish the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Political Science and Economics.

So, NBD.

Word of Garcetti's meetup was Tweeted yesterday by New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher:

Rumors of Garcetti's presidential aspirations have been circulating for months. In April, the New York Times included him in a list of Democratic hopefuls for 2020 (they also name dropped Cory Booker and Kamala Harris). Speculation only intensified after Garcetti headed to Wisconsin in June to keynote a democratic convention— Hillary Clinton lost by less than 25,000 votes in the state in 2016. Garcetti hit up another swing state in Florida that same month, attending a conference of city leaders from around the country.

Garcetti's camp, however, has denied the rumors about a 2020 run."He's not running for anything," Yusef Robb, a Garcetti spokesperson, told LAist in June. "During these crazy political and rapidly-changing economic times, Mayor Garcetti wants to help his party and share ideas to make people's lives better."

We emailed Robb to ask about the mayor's time in the Hamptons. How were the cocktails? What was Perelman wearing? Is Garcetti still not thinking about running for president? You know, just some regular, non-probing questions you'd ask your pal about a recent trip. We have yet to hear back at time of publication.

Coming back to Perelman, a 2010 Gawker profile notes that he "was a big Republican backer in his younger years." His support turned to the Democrats in the mid-1990s, a change that the publication attributes to his then-wife Patricia Duff (the pair would later split in a very acrimonious and public divorce). According to Inside Philanthropy, Perelman has a history of donating to cancer research, arts and culture institutions, and organizations that preserve Jewish heritage.