The president of the Kennedy Center is demanding $1 million in damages from a performer who canceled a scheduled Christmas concert at the Washington, DC, venue in protest of its recent name change.
Chuck Redd has led the Kennedy Center’s “Jazz Jams” Christmas concert since 2006. But last Friday, he pulled the plug on this year’s performance following Donald Trump’s hand-picked board of trustees voting to rename the venue “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 confirmed to The Associated Press.
Now, Kennedy Center president Rick Grenell has responded by saying he plans to seek $1 million in damages from Redd over what he called “this political stunt.”
“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,” Grenell wrote in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.
