RIC GRENELL: Trump Kennedy Center Filing $1M Lawsuit Against Musician Who Canceled Christmas Show as Political Protest.
Musician Chuck Redd, this year’s host of the annual Christmas Eve concert, canceled the event following the Center’s board voting unanimously to rename the institution, “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told the Associated Press Wednesday, hours before the event was scheduled to take place.
Grenell, who has worked assiduously to restore the struggling institution, is not taking the politically motivated cancellation lying down.
“Your dismal ticket sales and lack of donor support, combined with your last-minute cancellation has cost us considerably,” Grenell wrote Friday in a letter to Redd obtained by Breitbart News. “This is your official notice that we will seek $1 million in damages from you for this political stunt.”
Grenell hammed the artist for hurting an institution created to promote the arts throughout the nation, not to serve as an insulated haven for liberal elites.
“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” he wrote. “Regrettably, your action surrenders to the sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left, who have sought to intimidate artists into boycotting performances at our national cultural center.”
Protesting against the renaming of the Kennedy Center and stomping away from his Christmas Eve concert was quite a savvy PR move by Redd, transforming his name recognition, heretofore mostly known to hardcore jazz cultists, and getting lots of headlines, which should likely improve his bookings in urban nightclubs. (See also: Hollywood’s full employment act for Alec Baldwin ever since 1998, when the actor “suggested on national television that people stone House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde (R-IL) and his family to death.”