The owners of Madison Square Garden have filed a defamation lawsuit against Wired magazine, claiming an article it published this month had manufactured a “false narrative” that the company was tracking the L.G.B.T.Q. community for “discriminatory purposes.”
The article, published on July 9 and titled “Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities,” describes an internal “talent database” maintained by the Madison Entertainment Corporation that contains information about roughly 40,000 V.I.P. guests from the business, tech, entertainment and sports worlds who frequent the arena in Midtown Manhattan.
The database also includes information about the race, gender identity and sexual orientation of a small number of those celebrities, according to the article’s authors, Noah Shachtman and Maddy Varner. Ninety-three guest entries are marked as “L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.,” including those for the singers Ricky Martin and Phoebe Bridgers.
Why exactly the venue notes this information in its database “is unclear,” the authors wrote.
Prior Wired reporting from Mr. Shachtman and Robert Silverman has described Madison Square Garden’s extensive surveillance operation, including its use of facial-recognition technology, and claimed that the security team put in place by its billionaire chief executive, James Dolan, tracked a transgender woman throughout the arena over a two-year period.
The M.S.G. Entertainment lawsuit argues that the July article and its promotion “falsely implied” that the arena, where the Knicks play and many starts perform, intended to “identify, track, rank, exclude or discriminate against L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. celebrities, artists, guests, fans and patrons because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Instead, the “opposite is true,” according to the lawsuit, which claims that Madison Square Garden and “its affiliated entities” have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Pride and L.G.B.T.Q. organizations while partnering with Pride-associated sports and youth programs.
Besides Wired and other affiliated corporate entities, the lawsuit also names Mr. Shachtman, Ms. Varner and Katie Drummond, the magazine’s global editorial director, as defendants.
The suit seeks compensatory and punitive damages as well as the “correction or retraction of the false and defamatory statements and implications,” among other remedies.
When reached for comment on Saturday, a spokeswoman for M.S.G. Entertainment referred to a Thursday news release from the company, which describes the July article as “unethical and inflammatory.”
Wired magazine did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Beyond tracking some celebrities’ sexual orientations, Madison Square Garden’s talent database also assigns a “risk score” to roughly 400 V.I.P.s, according to Mr. Shachtman’s and Ms. Varner’s reporting.
For example, the rapper Fat Joe, a huge Knicks fan, is labeled “medium risk,” as is Anna Wintour. The hip-hop stars Freddie Gibbs and Lil Jon are “high risk,” while some celebrities, like the rapper Lil Tjay, are banned from the arena altogether.
The database was part of a much larger collection of company documents, including internal emails and other corporate information, released in June by the hacker group ShinyHunters, which often engages in cyberextortion.
The data was leaked after Madison Square Garden “failed to reach an agreement” over a ransom request from the group, according to three class-action lawsuits recently filed against the company.
In its lawsuit against Wired, M.S.G. Entertainment claims that the data stolen by ShinyHunters — including the information about some guests’ sexual orientations — was taken from a standard customer relationship management, or C.R.M., platform, “the purpose of which is to serve M.S.G.’s customers and to further inclusion,” including by extending invitations to L.G.B.T.Q.-related events.
