James Dolan keeps pooping on his own parade.
The Knicks owner should still be basking in the warmth of his beloved NBA team’s first championship in 53 years, like the rest of New York. Instead, he’s suing journalists.
Dolan’s corporation, MSG Entertainment, filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday in New York Supreme Court against Wired magazine, for a story published last week titled "Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities." The piece went into detail about the owner's fetish for keeping tabs on many of the Garden's famous visitors.
According to the Wired story, MSG maintained a database of 39,539 celebrities, and "400-ish" of those folks were assigned a "risk score" for security purposes. Wired also found 93 celebs who were identified as "LGBTQIA." The story does not make a guess as to the motivation for the latter designations.
"Why MSG felt the need to label Ricky Martin or Phoebe Bridgers or Geese’s Emily Green in this way is unclear," Wired reported.
The suit names as defendants the publication’s owner, Advanced Magazine Publishers; Condé Nast; the story’s writers, Noah Shachtman and Maddy Varner; and Wired editor Katie Drummond.
The 40-page complaint does not challenge the accuracy of Wired’s reporting or facts and figures. It does allege that the reporters "combed the dark web" and "cherry picked" information that had been "stolen from MSG by an extortionist hacking group" to "manufacture a false narrative portraying MSG as targeting the LGBTQIA community for discriminatory purposes."
"MSG has never used the LGBTQIA-related designation to determine, in any discriminatory manner, whether any person could enter MSG, receive tickets, appear at events, perform at MSG venues, be shown on camera, or be subject to any adverse security or venue treatment," the suit said.
The Wired story, from my reading, does not accuse MSG of any of those things.
The complaint often reads like a press release instead of a legal filing. It boasts that MSG and its subsidiaries have "had more than two hundred employees and guests participate in the New York City Pride March since 2022."
Dolan’s lawyers take a break from trashing the magazine and the story in the lawsuit to add an odd aside trashing Shachtman for "omitting facts" about an unnamed individual’s "ties to child pornography" in an unspecified previous article. The complaint also attempts to discredit Shachtman's journalistic integrity by saying that one of his sources for the recent piece was "a current MSG employee who is contractually required to maintain confidentiality." Sounds like a good get to me!
And also: "This is not the first time defendants have rushed to publish clickbait in place of facts," the lawsuit said, "but it should be their last."
Judging by a statement on the litigation issued by the magazine last night, Wired ain’t done yet with Dolan.
"We stand by this reporting, and plan to vigorously defend against this baseless and ridiculous lawsuit," the statement said. "We look forward to continuing our coverage of MSG, and billionaire James Dolan's use of technology across his entertainment empire. It’s one part of our wider mission and the critical job of journalists, now more than ever: holding power to account."
Dolan’s suit asks for corrections or a retraction of the story, plus unspecified monetary damages and attorney fees. He also asks for a jury trial. Even in a city of millions of folks overjoyed by his team’s accomplishments, finding 12 people who’d take his side on anything could be harder than Dolan guesses.
Disclosure: James Dolan wrote and recorded a fun, self-deprecating song at the author’s request about a decade ago, and for a time would provide surprisingly great comments for stories the author wrote for another publication. But Dolan and the author have not spoken since a 2018 phone call that ended with Dolan claiming (possibly correctly) that the other publication had violated an agreement about how the fun, self-deprecating song could be used, and Dolan yelled (surely correctly), “You’d never work for me!” at the author.
