Another class action coming soon Madonna, due to his chronic tendency to start the “Celebration Tour” concerts always later than the time indicated on the tickets. This time the class action lawsuit was brought in the Washington DC court by three spectators of the shows held on December 18 and 19 last year at the Capitol One Arena. In their quote Elizabeth Halper-Asefi, Mary Conoboy and Nestor Monte – these are the names of the three fans – they claim “that they felt cheated and were disappointed by the total and arrogant lack of respect” on the part of the pop star and the promoter Live Nationaccused “of unfair or deceptive commercial practices, breach of contract, unjust enrichment and negligent misrepresentation” for starting both concerts two hours late compared to the 8.30pm initially scheduled.
A time shift which would therefore have forced the three plaintiffs to leave the show before its end, thus depriving them of the opportunity to attend the complete show and for which they had paid not exactly cheap amounts. In fact, according to what was reported by Rolling Stone, Halper-Asefi spent $992.76 on the secondary ticketing site StubHub for one ticket, while Conoboy and Monte would have fetched, respectively, 537.70 and 252.44 dollars for two tickets each on Ticketmaster. If that wasn’t enough, the three disgruntled spectators would also have accused Madonna “of having maintained a hot and unpleasant temperature in the arena during the show and of having sung in playback for a good part of the concert”, which led them to define the singer and Live Nation «the worst nightmare of consumers», as they write in their quote.
According to their lawyers, the problem to highlight is that the delayed start of the show harmed “reasonable people who had made commitments to the babysitter or to work, who did not see the entire concert they had paid for, because they closed the car parks where they had left the car or because public transport was no longer working at that time.” In truth during the December 18 show Madonna would have justified herself – in her own way – for the two hours of waiting inflicted on the fans (“I’m sorry for the delay… no, I’m not sorry, I’m like that, I’m always late”, she would have said), but the apologies did not served to avoid this second lawsuit, after the one brought against her in January by two other spectators for the delay of more than two hours in which she showed up on stage at the Brooklyn concert of December 13th. For now, no official comment has been received from those directly involved.
