Unlike a good neighbor, State Farm wasn’t there.
According to a new report, an executive at the insurance giant was fired after he was recorded alleging the company hiked homeowners’ rates after this year’s catastrophic fires in Southern California.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the executive was Haden Kirkpatrick, State Farm Mutual’s vice president for innovation and venture capital. He was caught in a “sting” by James O’Keefe’s media company. Kirkpatrick believed that he was on a Tinder date but was being recorded by O’Keefe’s operatives, a sort of activity generally seen as unethical and disreputable in journalism.
“Our people look at this and say, ‘S—, we’ve got like maybe $5 billion that we’re short if something happens.’ We’ll go to the Department of Insurance and say, ‘We’re overexposed here, you have to let us catch up our [rates]’. … He’ll say ‘Nah.’ And we’ll say, ‘OK, then we are going to cancel these policies,’ ” Kirkpatrick said in the recording.
State Farm executive fired over comments about rate hikes https://t.co/srcq158Pv4
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 8, 2025
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Kirkpatrick also insulted victims of the fires, stating that homes should not have been built in fire-ravaged Pacific Palisades but that people want “natural areas around them for their egos.”
State Farm stated to the media that “the individual in the video is no longer associated with State Farm” and that his claims about the insurance company’s practices are “inaccurate and in no way represent the views of State Farm. They do not reflect our position regarding the victims of this tragedy, the commitment we have demonstrated to the people of California, or our hiring practices across the company.”
The company’s California subsidiary had indeed filed for an “emergency 22% rate hike for its homeowners’ policies,” which was the subject of rancor and a recent hearing, the New York Post reported.
Kirkpatrick has a bio on the website of the Digital Insurance Summit, an annual industry conference set to take place in Boston this April. The website, however, lists him as part of a previous event, and he is not listed as a speaker for the 2025 conference. His bio also says that before beginning his work in the insurance industry in 2015, he “spent 15 years in the mobile telecommunications industry where he led numerous functions across sales, marketing, product, and strategy.”
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
