Madison Square Garden Entertainment Corporation filed a defamation lawsuit on July 16 against Wired Magazine over an article published last week that claimed the midtown Manhattan arena used surveillance to track celebrities’ race, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
According to the Wired article, published on July 9, celebrities and other dignitaries who have attended home games at Madison Square Garden were assigned “risk” scores, ranging from “low risk” to “DO NOT HOST.” The article also alleges the database labeled nearly 100 people as “LGBTQIA.” There are nearly 40,000 entries in the “talent” database, each with specific labeling designations.
The lawsuit obtained by USA TODAY Sports and filed in New York State Supreme Court also names Wired contributing editor Noah Shachtman, co-author Maddy Varner and Wired Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond as defendants and alleges the article was “unethical and inflammatory.” MSG alleges in the lawsuit that Wired and the article’s authors continued to promote the piece in the days following publication “without concern for the truth and with the intent to cause maximal public impact.”
“Wired combed the dark web, obtained data stolen from MSG by an extortionist hacking group, and cherry-picked fragments of that data to manufacture a false narrative portraying MSG as targeting the LGBTQIA community for discriminatory purposes,” the lawsuit reads.
The magazine also reported in April that security staff for New York Knicks owner James Dolan tracked a transgender woman’s movements using that surveillance and spying on her for the better part of two years. A class-action lawsuit filed against MSG claims that this private data leak was a direct byproduct of owner Dolan’s surveillance operations after The ShinyHunters collective, a hacking group, released 45 GB worth of data on June 16.
Madison Square Garden’s lawsuit says that the implication that the company maintained a database with a sexual orientation field for exclusionary, discriminatory, security, or risk-based purposes is “a lie” and that Wired constructed a false narrative drawn from a standard customer relationship.
“Defendants knew there was no nefarious “list” of gay celebrities, and Defendants knew that the stolen data contained dozens of fields per customer—including mundane fields such as address, phone number, and dietary restrictions—used for relationship management purposes, not discrimination,” the lawsuit says.
In the 40-page lawsuit, MSG is seeking a jury trial, along with compensatory, presumed, special, and punitive damages; a correction or retraction of the false and defamatory statements and implications; and attorney’s fees.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Madison Square Garden sues Wired over article alleging celebrity ‘risk scores’
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