Lawyers: Scott should stay in Astroworld suit
Attorneys representing people killed and injured at the 2021 Astroworld Festival on Monday tried to persuade a Harris County civil district court judge to keep the event’s headliner, rapper Travis Scott, among the defendants in the sprawling civil lawsuit.
“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 he said the artist 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 an 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 beforehand and that efforts to stop the show once the danger was apparent were too slow.
If next month’s trial happens, it will be the first time the concert’s aftermath reaches a courtroom. Last year, a grand jury declined to indict Scott and five other people on criminal charges related to the concert. The families of four of the people killed in the concert have reached settlements over their deaths.
Hawkins last week denied a motion to dismiss two of Scott’s companies from the lawsuit. The motion to dismiss Scott and XX Global, another of his companies, was opposed by both the plaintiffs and by another defendant, ASM Global, the company that manages NRG Park.
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.
Apple again seeks a way out
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 livestreamed the concert; ASM Global, the company that manages NRG Park, which 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 concertgoers from harm,” said Apple attorney David Singh.
The company also pushed back against the victims’ arguments that it had placed livestream cameras within the concert area without permission, pointing to communications that Singh said showed the concert’s organizers knew and approved of the cameras’ location on the morning of the show.
The victims’ attorneys opposed both companies’ efforts to get out of the lawsuit. Hawkins had previously ruled against a different motion by Apple, which argued that the victims hadn’t shown enough evidence to keep the company in the suit.
All the companies said that parts of Texas civil law should protect them from being held liable for the concert, including one case in which a court ruled that a radio station couldn’t be held responsible for the death of a person who died in a drunken driving crash after a show they promoted.
The plaintiffs said that the companies that produced and promoted the show, and the other companies they hired, acted as a “joint enterprise” and should be brought into the trial.
Special master appointed
Hawkins also announced that she had appointed a special master to review “discrete discovery issues.”
The special master, Terry Jennings, a former state appeals court judge, will sift through data obtained by the Houston Police Department as parts of its criminal investigation into the concert.
Some of the defendants have argued that they didn’t release the data personally, but rather that Apple released data to police, and that it should be returned to them instead of allowing the victims’ attorneys to see the information, according to Hawkins’ order.
The police department obtained about 17 terabytes of data, according to Hawkins’ order.
A single terabyte can contain millions of documents and hundreds of thousands of photos.
Hawkins tasked Jennings with reviewing the police data and making recommendations to her.
Attorneys of one of the plaintiffs, Seyth Boardman, told Hawkins in court they were seeking a stay of her orders regarding the special master, which will result in another hearing later this week.
Separately, Wexler told the judge that he was still seeking data from Scott’s cellphone, which he reportedly dropped in the ocean in October 2023. Wexler complained that while Scott’s attorneys had obtained data from the phone, he hadn’t been given everything from it.
Scott’s attorney said the data recovery efforts retrieved 120,000 texts dating back to 2017 and said that all of the “responsive data” from the phone had been produced.
Hawkins told the attorneys to meet on it but indicated that there might be another hearing to resolve the matter.