A D.C. Superior Court judge has dismissed a $1 million breach-of-contract lawsuit that Richard Grenell filed against jazz drummer Chuck Redd, ruling that Redd never actually signed the contract he was accused of violating.
A Contract That Never Existed
Grenell announced the lawsuit in December, after Redd backed out of a Christmas Eve concert he'd been slated to headline for $6,500. Redd said he was withdrawing because Trump had, in his words, "defiantly and illegally" slapped his own name on the Kennedy Center. Grenell responded by calling Redd "a nobody" staging a "political stunt," then sued him for a seven-figure sum.
The Center's lawyers argued Redd had agreed to a written contract in November 2025. Judge Tanya Jones Bosier disagreed. "I could not find a valid breach-of-contract claim here," she said, according to The Washington Post. "There's no dispute that he did not sign the 2025 agreement."
The lawsuit against Mr. Redd was political retribution, pure and simple, by the Trump Kennedy Center, and the Court correctly saw it as such in dismissing the case.
Lisa Banks, attorney for Chuck Redd
Redd had reportedly turned down a settlement offer in March that would have required him to pay the Center $7,500, perform at this year's Christmas Eve show, and stay silent about why he'd walked away in the first place. He refused all three conditions.
The Renaming Fight Behind It
Congress created the Kennedy Center by statute as a living memorial to the assassinated president, and changing its name legally requires another act of Congress. Trump added his own name to the building anyway in December 2025. A federal judge later ordered the name removed, ruling the venue "must be named for, and is meant to honor, President Kennedy alone" and that "only Congress can change it." Trump's name still hangs on the building's facade, though it has quietly disappeared from the Center's website and from invitations for its June awards ceremony.
That renovation money is central to the administration's justification for the takeover: officials say the building needs the work to survive. But legal scholars have questioned whether appropriated funds give Trump's board unlimited authority over how, or whether, to rename anything in the process.
An Exodus of Performers
Redd wasn't an outlier. Since Trump reshaped the Center's board in early 2025 and installed himself as chairman, a long list of artists has pulled out of performances there, including Issa Rae, Rhiannon Giddens, Peter Wolf, Low Cut Connie, the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington D.C., and Béla Fleck. Lin-Manuel Miranda pulled Hamilton's entire Kennedy Center run last June. Ticket sales across the Center's three largest venues reportedly hit their worst levels in years under Grenell, with thousands of seats going unsold.
MQ's Take
Grenell built his tenure at the Kennedy Center around a story about protecting it from "hard left woke programming," even as drag performances kept selling tickets under his own watch in shows like Chicago and Mrs. Doubtfire. The Redd suit reads less like a contract dispute than a warning shot aimed at anyone who might speak up. A judge just confirmed there was nothing behind it but the warning.
Grenell has since stepped away from the presidency, but the fight over Trump's name on a memorial Congress built for someone else isn't over. It's still working its way through federal court, with the same core question at its center: who actually gets to decide what a national memorial is called.
Source: LGBTQ Nation
Cover photo: Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
