A California judge pulled from her musical knowledge, quoting a Taylor Swift song in denying Metallica’s insurance lawsuit related to a string of 2020 cancellations in South America.
Metallica had sought a legal ruling when their insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London did not cover their losses for canceling six dates in 2020 due to COVID restrictions for travel. The insurance company had stated that there was a clear exclusion in their contract for any losses accrued from “communicable diseases.”
Per Billboard, Justice Marcia Stratton stated that it was “absurd to think that government closures were not the result of Covid-19.” She then added in her written ruling, “To paraphrase Taylor Swift: ‘We were there. We remember it all too well.'”
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“There was no vaccine against Covid-19 in March 2020 and no drugs to treat it,” she continued. “Ventilators were in short supply. N-95 masks were all but non-existent. Patients were being treated in tents in hospital parking lots. The mortality rate of Covid-19 was unknown, but to give just one example of the potential fatality rate, by late March, 2020, New York City was using refrigerated trucks as temporary morgues. People were terrified.”
What Metallica Was Arguing?
After a Los Angeles judge ruled against Metallica in December 2022, the band appealed the ruling. They had argued that a jury might have found a different cause for the concert cancellations other than COVID. Their legal team pointed to the fact that venues eventually re-opened in 2022 “despite the ongoing presence of COVID.”
But, in her ruling on Monday (March 18), Billboard reports that Stratton said that Metallica’s argument failed because “much had changed” by spring 2022.
“People were in a position to make a more accurate cost-benefit analysis of restrictions versus potential illness,” the justice wrote. “The fact that governments chose to lift restrictions at that point, two years after COVID-19 was first discovered, does not in any way call into question their reasons for imposing travel restrictions early in the pandemic.”
Metallica initially submitted that they suffered a $3,234,569 loss from the canceled shows.
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