An ex-staffer at the Kennedy Center who refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement after he was fired in March is now adding his insider knowledge of the corruption of the renowned arts center to an investigation by U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

Josef Palermo, hired by ousted Kennedy Center President Ric Grenell in April as curator of visual arts and special programming for the arts center, says he saw “cronyism, incompetence, and a series of bizarre moves that would lead to the Kennedy Center going dark.”  

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Ric Grenell is under Senate investigation for corrupt dealings at the Kennedy Center

Amid “cancellations, shrinking audiences, firings of old staffers and influxes of new ones,” there was “a lot of drama, just not onstage,” the fired curator says in The Atlantic Monthly.

The Kennedy Center was “barely able to function artistically and financially,” he wrote.

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Sen. Whitehouse notified Grenell in a letter last November that he was the subject of an investigation over his management of the arts center.

“Contracts, invoices, and facility use agreements reveal that you operate the Center for the enrichment of your friends and acquaintances, to dole out political favors, and as a playground for the President of the United States and his allies,” Whitehouse wrote of the former ambassador’s management of the living memorial to former President John F. Kennedy.

Trump added his own name to the Kennedy Center in December.

Palermo joined the center last year despite misgivings about the politicization of the institution — “the takeover had felt like an assault,” he wrote — and over the objections of arts colleagues. One “dear friend” called him “the equivalent of a Nazi collaborator,” Palermo added.

He justified taking on the assignment because “the Kennedy Center was too important an institution to abandon.” However, “I quickly started noticing things getting weird,” he said.

After a wholesale purge of board members and the installation of Trump as the center’s board chairman early last year, previous donors fled the center. Grenell’s solution was recruiting a new set of Trump loyalist supporters by selling access to the president.

Management “put together a fundraiser for a preview of Les Misérables where one could pay $2 million to sit in a box seat and attend a private reception with the president,” Palermo says, citing one example of the center’s new political orientation.

He also said the center began selling naming rights to lounges, which had previously celebrated cultural diplomacy and their artistic ties to other countries. These lounges were stripped of their cultural identities and then sold for the highest bidders to rename.

“It certainly would be a shame if we lost this room to a corporation or an individual and it was no longer the [Israeli] lounge,” Grenell told a gathering of Jewish supporters commemorating the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas. Palermo said he was “mortified” by the strong-arm tactic.

“We are grafting political management principles into a nonpolitical organization,” one colleague and veteran Republican fundraiser told Palermo.

Grenell was overt in using the Kennedy Center to hand out political favors, stacking the center’s ranks with a slew of unqualified political appointees, Palermo recounts.

Lisa Dale, the top fundraising officer, was a friend of Trump ally Kari Lake, and was rarely at the center except when red-carpet events were scheduled.

Dale “professed unfamiliarity with the terms ‘permanent collection,’ ‘performance art,’ and ’emeritus’ (as in “emeritus trustees”), concepts that senior leaders at a prominent cultural center ought to know,” Palermo says.

Another appointee was the spouse of a Republican National Committee leader “whose longest professional experience was working as a marketing and events manager at a Toyota dealership in Ireland,” Palermo said.

Grenell was mostly absent from day-to-day management of the center, Palermo said. Grenell never held an all-staff meeting during Palermo’s tenure, but rather spent much of his time on foreign policy freelancing in his second Trump administration role as Special Envoy for Special Missions. Grenell also spent time vacationing with his former Broadway actor boyfriend, Matt Lashey.

“When I inquired with his scheduler in the middle of August if I could get a meeting to discuss my projects, I was told that he would be out of the office for several weeks. We knew where he was — a yacht off the coast of Croatia, then in California — because he posted about it on Instagram,” Palermo said.

Palermo said he slow-walked many requests from Grenell and his lieutenants, including one from the director to “’get rid of everything’ in the permanent collection because we needed all new art for the reopening of the Kennedy Center.”

“I was taken aback by his cavalier attitude,” Palermo recalled. “If the donors of the works didn’t want to pay for their removal, he said, we could put them up for auction or give them away.”

Another order revealed Grenell’s insidious use of the Kennedy Center for his own personal gain.

“One of Grenell’s top lieutenants once texted me about an artist whose work Grenell owned and asked if we could ‘do something with him.’ Displaying that artist’s work could have raised their prices at auction and benefited Grenell, so doing so would have been a potential ethical breach. I ignored the request,” Palermo said.

Grenell’s corruption of the Kennedy Center seems to have taken precedence over programming at the once-revered arts center, though Palermo said Grenell did have two former colleagues at work on a show dedicated to the 250th anniversary celebrations this summer, before the Kennedy Center was shut down: an America’s Got Talent–style talent show.

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