A judge ordered the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to pay a musician more than $250,000 in legal fees after dismissing a lawsuit the center had filed against him for backing out of a concert late last year, in protest of President Trump’s name being added to the institution.
The musician, Chuck Redd, had canceled a Christmas Eve jazz concert shortly after the president’s name was installed on center’s marble facade. Mr. Redd, a drummer and vibraphonist who had hosted the annual holiday concert for nearly 20 years, wrote an email to a center employee saying that he would feel “profoundly uncomfortable” performing there as long as Mr. Trump’s name was on the building.
Richard Grenell, the center’s president at the time, responded by writing a letter to Mr. Redd threatening to sue him for $1 million for what Mr. Grenell termed a “political stunt.” The center ultimately sued in D.C. Superior Court for an unspecified amount of damages, accusing Mr. Redd of violating his contract.
Judge Tanya M. Jones Bosier dismissed the case in June. She found that Mr. Redd had not agreed to a contract in the first place, and that the Kennedy Center did not appear to have been financially damaged by the cancellation of the concert, which was free. On Monday, the judge awarded Mr. Redd more than $252,000 to cover his lawyers’ fees and legal costs associated with defending against the lawsuit.
The Kennedy Center said in a statement on Tuesday that it planned to appeal the award. Its lawyers argued in court papers ahead of the ruling that the calculation of legal fees by Mr. Redd’s lawyers — they were seeking more than $258,000 — was excessive and “astonishing.”
Mr. Redd’s lawyers in the case included Lisa Banks and Debra Katz, high-profile employment lawyers whose clients have included Christine Blasey Ford in her testimony against Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation process to join the Supreme Court.
In a statement on Tuesday, Ms. Banks said that “no citizen should have to spend time and money fending off baseless and politically motivated lawsuits filed by the Trump administration.”
Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center in his second term led to boycotts by artists and audience members, particularly after its board voted to add the president’s name to the institution. Officials at the center blasted those who pulled out of their commitments and accused them of being politically intolerant. The lawsuit against Mr. Redd, though, was the most aggressive action yet taken against an artist who had withdrawn from a planned performance.
In May, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Trump’s name had been added to the institution unlawfully, without the required permission of Congress, and ordered that it be removed. The center has appealed the decision, though it removed the added letters from the marble, constructing a towering matrix of scaffolding covered in tarps that obstruct part of the original name.
The center is currently in limbo, and it has had a largely bare performance calendar since July as its board considers whether to move forward with the president’s plan to close it for two years of renovations.
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