Madison Square Garden Sues Wired Magazine Over L.G.B.T.Q. Tracking Report

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 stars 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 ...