He has a reasonable case. Not saying I’d buy it, but it’s not ridiculous.
Superstar rapper Travis Scott should not be held responsible for planning failures before the 2021 Astroworld tragedy or the delayed process of ending the show as it spiraled into disaster, his lawyer told a Houston court Monday.
Scott is asking a judge to dismiss him from the case brought by the parents of Madison Dubiski, a 23-year-old who was one of 10 festival-goers who died.
All 10 were killed by compression asphyxia, which means they were unable to fill their lungs with oxygen because they were so tightly packed into an area in front of the stage during Scott’s set.
The hearing came as the first lawsuit stemming from the disaster nears trial on May 6. The trial’s outcome could serve as a bellwether for hundreds more relating to deaths and injuries at the festival.
Scott and his business partner in the ill-fated festival, the international concert conglomerate Live Nation, also argued Monday that if they are forced to go to trial, they should be allowed to attempt to shift blame for poor crowd management to the Houston Police Department and Houston Fire Department.
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Scott’s attorney, Stephen Brody, downplayed the role the rapper played in the planning and lead-up to the festival. Scott’s duties were limited mostly to marketing and creative matters, Brody argued. The litany of planning missteps the plaintiffs have identified do not apply to him, Brody said.
Even Scott’s demand that he be the sole performer to use the stage where the crowd crush happened, which experts say may have contributed to the overcrowding there, was approved by the venue operator, Brody said.
On the day of the performance, when concertgoers were packed so tightly that many could not breathe, Scott’s lawyer argued that in the specific case of Dubiski, there was no way Scott could have saved her life by stopping the show earlier.
On the night of the festival, 37 minutes passed between when police and fire declared it a “mass casualty” event and when Scott’s performance came to an end.
Although there is much debate over why the show took so long to stop, Dubiski was transported to a medical tent before the point when Scott was told to end his performance, Brody said.
“Tragically, Madison Dubiski is already receiving care in the medical tent, according to plaintiffs’ expert, by 9:55 that night. So whether the show had been stopped at 10 p.m. or 10:11 p.m., tragically would have made no difference to Ms. Dubiski,” Brody said.
Plaintiffs’ lawyer Noah Wexler pushed back on the idea that Scott’s role in the lead up to the festival was limited.
“This event was Travis Scott’s festival, Travis Scott’s event, and it was created through his tour agreement with Live Nation,” Wexler said.
Wexler noted that several festival organizers had tried to stop the event from ending with Scott’s solo performance on a stage reserved for him alone, only to be overruled by people in Scott’s camp.
“It was Travis Scott demanding to be the only one playing at the conclusion of this oversold festival, knowing that all the patrons would migrate to that stage and there would be nothing else to attract them to,” Wexler said.
See here, here, and here for some background. The Chron has more.
“This event was Travis Scott’s festival and it was crafted through his tour agreement with Live Nation,” said Noah Wexler, one of the attorneys representing the victims, responding to arguments that Scott wasn’t central to the concert’s planning.
Monday’s hearing came three weeks before the planned start of the first trial related to the concert tragedy where a crowd crush killed 10 people and injured scores of others. District Court Judge Kristen Hawkins did not make a decision on Scott’s involvement on Monday.
Scott’s attorneys in March filed a motion asking for Hawkins to issue a summary judgment in favor, arguing that he couldn’t be held responsible for the planning and security of the concert because he primarily acted as a performer. Brody said there were examples of Scott stopping the show four times, but said the artists wasn’t aware of the greater peril in the crowd until the show had ended.
“He did what he does at all of his performances,” said Steve Brody, one of Scott’s attorney. “If he sees in issue in the crowd, he does stop. He stopped four separate times.”
Motions filed over the first part of this year have laid out two main arguments about responsibility for the disaster: that the people planning the concert knew about safety concerns before hand and that efforts to stop the show once the danger was apparent were too slow.
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Wexler argued that Scott’s agreement with concert promoter Live Nation gave him a large degree of control of the show. Scott’s attorneys argued other people were trusted with the responsibility of planning and security.
“There’s no evidence of extreme or outrageous conduct on the part of my clients,” Brody said.
Scott, a Houston native, wasn’t present in the courtroom. Instead, dozens of attorneys, their staff members and reporters watched more than three hours of arguments about who should and shouldn’t be on trial on May 6.
Scott wasn’t the only defendant who argued they should be removed from the case. Monday’s hearing also included arguments for summary judgment by lawyers from Apple Inc., which live-streamed the concert; ASM Global, the company that manages NRG Park also made arguments seeking summary judgment; B3 Risk Solutions, the staffing company hired to provide a safety management team to the concert and Unified Command LLC, which set up the festival’s closed circuit cameras and command center.
Apple’s attorney accused the victims’ attorneys of attacking the company’s First Amendment rights through arguments that blamed the tech company for building up hype for the show and accused it of ignoring the crisis in the crowd.
“A live-streamer at an event has no affirmative duty to ensure an event is safe or to rescue concert-goers from harm,” said Apple attorney David Singh.
Both stories have more so go read the rest of each. This is all pretrial stuff, the actual trial starts in May. Expect it to take quite some time.
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