A judge has ruled that the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. must pay a jazz musician $252,000 in legal fees and costs, following the organization’s unsuccessful lawsuit against him for pulling out of a concert in the wake of a rebranding to include Donald J. Trump‘s name.
Chuck Redd hosted and performed at the Kennedy Center’s annual Christmas Eve concerts for years, but he bowed out of performing at last December’s planned gig, citing “the defiant and illegal name change happening to the Kennedy Center.” The Kennedy Center — or the Trump Kennedy Center, as it was then temporarily known — subsequently sued Redd for breach of contract, only to have the suit thrown out in June.
In a statement Tuesday, Lisa J. Banks, one of Redd’s attorneys, said: “The Trump-controlled Kennedy Center tried to silence opposition to its illegal name change by filing a meritless lawsuit against jazz musician Chuck Redd. The court rightly dismissed that breach of contract lawsuit, finding there was no contract and no damages, and was brought against Mr. Redd based on his protected opposition. Now the court has ordered the Kennedy Center to pay Mr. Redd’s legal fees, which is appropriate as no citizen should have to spend time and money fending off baseless and politically motivated lawsuits filed by the Trump Administration.”
The org, which has been taken over by Trump allies, made a show of threatening to sue Redd, and then following through on it. “This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt,” Richard Grenell, then-president of the center, told Redd in a letter after he backed out.
In June, D.C. Superior Court Judge Tanya Jones Bosier tossed the lawsuit, saying there was no signed contract to be breached. While Redd had been in talks to perform on Christmas Eve 2025, as in past years, “I could not find a valid breach-of-contract claim here,” Jones Bosier said in dismissing the suit. “There’s no dispute that he did not sign the 2025 agreement.” The Kennedy Center had argued that he had “agreed to a written contract” to play the gig for $6,500, regardless of whether he actually signed it.
According to Redd’s attorneys, the Center had secretly offered to settle the lawsuit against Redd before the judge threw it out, saying they would drop it if the jazz musician paid them $7,500 and played on Christmas Eve 2026 with no political commentary or discussion of his reasons for backing out in 2025.
Prior to Monday’s ruling, attorneys for the Kennedy Center had argued that the amount being requested was “out of all proportion to the issue at stake,” but Jones Bosier found that $252,000 was reasonable for the amount of work Redd’s lawyers had had to put in.
On May 29, a federal judge ordered the removal of Trump’s name from the façade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in ruling that the board’s move to add Trump’s name to the center was illegal. The exterior of the Kennedy Center is still covered by a tarp after worked pried Trump’s name off the building, and a judge has asked the board to explain why the covering has not been removed.
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