A federal judge ordered the Kennedy Center to pay more than $252,000 in legal fees to a jazz musician it sued for canceling his Christmas Eve concert, a lawsuit the court already dismissed as meritless.
Judge Tanya Jones Bosier, a Biden appointee on the D.C. Superior Court, ruled Monday that the Kennedy Center must pay Chuck Redd $252,479 to cover the legal costs he racked up defending himself against the center's $1 million breach-of-contract claim. The center had sued Redd after he walked away from the annual holiday performance he had hosted for nearly two decades.
Redd canceled the show in December after the Kennedy Center's board voted to place President Trump's name on the building's facade. The board had voted unanimously on Dec. 18 to rename the institution the "Trump-Kennedy Center." Redd, who had led the center's holiday "Jazz Jams" since 2006, said the name change drove his decision.
The Kennedy Center responded by suing him for breach of contract, seeking $1 million in damages. Judge Jones Bosier threw the case out in June. She found, according to Breitbart's reporting, that no valid contract existed between Redd and the center, and that the lawsuit fell under Washington's Anti-SLAPP statute, which shields individuals from suits designed to punish them for exercising their speech on matters of public concern.
After the dismissal, Redd's legal team asked the court for $258,325.72 in fees. The Kennedy Center filed a 21-page opposition. The judge was unpersuaded. She trimmed the award by just over 2 percent, settling on $252,479.
Jones Bosier rejected Redd's preferred method for calculating attorney rates, the Fitzpatrick Matrix, which the U.S. Department of Justice uses, and instead applied the Laffey Matrix, the standard favored by the D.C. Court of Appeals. The Laffey Matrix is a fee schedule courts in the District use to set reasonable hourly rates for attorneys in fee-shifting cases. Even under that lower scale, the bill came in steep.
The judge also took aim at the Kennedy Center's litigation conduct. She cited the center's repeated failure to meet filing deadlines throughout the case, a pattern that, in the court's view, added unnecessary cost and delay to proceedings that never should have been brought in the first place.
The case fits a broader pattern of courts pushing back on decisions tied to the Kennedy Center renaming. A separate Obama-appointed judge ruled that Trump's name had to come off the building's signage entirely, holding that a 1964 law signed by President Lyndon Johnson designates the center as a living memorial to John F. Kennedy and bars the board from placing another person's name on its exterior.
Lisa Banks, one of Redd's attorneys, framed the fee award as vindication. She told several outlets:
"No citizen should have to spend time and money fending off baseless and politically motivated lawsuits filed by the Trump Administration."
Banks's characterization of the suit as filed by "the Trump Administration" is her own framing. The lawsuit was brought by the Kennedy Center as an institution, though the center's board had been reconstituted under Trump's leadership. Trump was elected chairman of the board in February after removing 18 Biden-appointed trustees.
The D.C. Superior Court's June dismissal turned on the Anti-SLAPP statute, a law designed to prevent powerful institutions from using costly litigation to silence critics on public issues. The court treated Redd's cancellation as protected expression on a matter of public concern: the renaming of a national cultural landmark.
Redd himself explained his decision plainly when he first pulled out of the concert. He said at the time that seeing the name change on the Kennedy Center website, and then hours later on the building itself, was what pushed him to cancel.
The Kennedy Center has announced plans to appeal the fee ruling. No details about the grounds for appeal have been made public. The center now faces the prospect of spending additional legal resources contesting a quarter-million-dollar fee award in a case it lost on the merits, after a judge found no valid contract existed in the first place.
The broader legal fight over the Kennedy Center's name has produced a string of rulings unfavorable to the administration. A federal appeals court refused to block the removal of Trump's name from the building after the lower court ordered it taken down. That order rested on the 1964 statute, which Congress has never amended.
The renaming controversy drew sharp reactions from the Kennedy family and Democratic lawmakers when it first surfaced. Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family, called the board's decision "beyond comprehension." Multiple artists boycotted or canceled appearances at the center in the weeks that followed.
An earlier ruling blocking the renaming set the stage for the legal environment in which Redd's case played out. The courts have consistently treated the 1964 statute as controlling, and treated efforts to circumvent it as legally deficient.
Redd performed at the Kennedy Center for nearly two decades without incident. He walked away over a policy decision he opposed, as any free citizen might. The center sued him for a million dollars. The court threw the case out, found no contract, and now has ordered the center to cover his legal bills.
The Kennedy Center still has the right to appeal. But so far, every time this dispute has gone before a judge, the institution has come away with less than it started with, and a larger bill. The administration's broader fight over the Kennedy Center's name has now cost taxpayers not just in political capital, but in cold, court-ordered cash.
When the government uses its legal weight to punish one musician for speaking his mind, and a court hands the bill right back, that is the system working exactly as it should.
