Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities

Fat Joe is a superfan, both of the New York Knicks and their controversial owner, Jim Dolan. The rapper celebrated with Dolan in Cleveland when the team clinched its first finals appearance in decades. When the Knicks organization came under intense scrutiny over aggressive security measures for game 3 of the NBA finals, Fat Joe stuck up for the boss.

“Shoutout to Mr. Dolan, greatest team owner in the game,” he told reporters at the time. “They villainize Mr. Dolan, like, almost like a Bruce Wayne, like a Batman movie and this is Gotham City … This man takes care of us.”

Within Dolan’s organization, however, some have a different view of Fat Joe. An internal Madison Square Garden database of VIPs labels Joe a “medium risk,” one of roughly 400 celebrities given a risk score. Many of those celebs are courtside fixtures at Knicks games: Edie Falco, Mark Ronson, John Turturro, and Tracy Morgan, to name a few. That makes the 400-ish entries unusual. The vast majority of the 39,539 entries in the so-called “talent” database—which tracks boldfaced names in business, technology, politics, media, and sports, along with their guests—are not marked with a risk score at all.

The database is part of a much larger trove of documents published last month by ShinyHunters, a criminal hacker collective. 404 Media was the first to report on the hack and the release of the VIP roll. But the extent to which Madison Square Garden labeled many of the Knicks’ most visible, loyal fans with a risk score hasn’t been previously revealed, nor has the rationale MSG used to do so.

The database doesn’t provide an explicit explanation for Fat Joe’s “medium risk” designation. But as WIRED has previously documented, MSG security keeps close tabs on what is said online about Dolan and the Garden’s management. Some fans have been targeted by MSG for criticizing the mogul; MSG security even asked local law enforcement to visit a teenager in Colorado after one tweet. “They scared the crap 💩 out of some 14 year old kid in Colorado,” an MSG security staffer texted in a message reviewed by WIRED.

A source with knowledge of the matter tells WIRED that Garden security has performed social media sweeps for prominent people looking for complimentary tickets to games. If you’re a celebrity and you’re marked with a risk score—even as a low risk—it means “you’ve done something in the publicity world, the social media world, that has caught the attention of the wrong people,” the source continues. The talent database, which has entries dating back to December 2020 and includes updates as recent as early June of this year, makes repeated reference to “SM concerns.” Physical security threats—potential harms to people or property—are documented in a separate database, the source says. (The source adds that these sorts of databases are common at arenas.)

Garden security cast a wide net in its search for anything remotely negative that someone posts online, the source says. “It doesn’t have to be that serious. You could just be critical of the team or the place itself,” the source notes. “You could post that you had a hard time getting in and you really didn’t like the way you were treated at one of the gates. Which is really nothing, right?”

According to the source, Fat Joe was flagged because of his connection to another legend of New York City rap, Jadakiss, who had been critical of Dolan in the past. (“It seems like he’s always more happier when the team sucks,” Jadakiss said in 2020.) Jadakiss is designated as a “medium risk.” The other members of his hip-hop trio, the Lox, are also in the database but don’t have a risk score.

“It’s a really, really paranoid, terrible system,” the source says.

The talent database provides a window into how MSG internally views its famous, rich, and powerful visitors—its well-curated “celebrity row” and its hordes of high-profile fans. The comedian (and longtime Knicks obsessive) Adam Pally is “not to be hosted”—Garden lingo for getting free tickets—“due to previous comments.” Pally has at times been critical of the team’s management.

Iconic hip-hop producer and DJ Pete Rock, whose Instagram is a nonstop ode to the team, is nevertheless marked “DO NOT HOST” in the database. After beloved Knicks enforcer Charles Oakley was forcibly escorted from the Garden, Pete Rock says he called for a boycott of Dolan on Twitter. “None of the other owners are as petty as Dolan is,” Pete Rock tells WIRED in a direct message, before addressing his comments to Dolan: “You can’t stop me from being a Knick fan, but your controlling behavior towards people is very unprofessional.”

Daisy Jones and the Six actor Will Harrison is flagged because “GF wrote NYT article.” (Harrison isn't public about his romantic life in the way many stars are, and we couldn’t find an article that was in any way a match.) In the spring of 2024, actress and model Julia Fox appeared courtside in an extremely revealing outfit; by early April, she was barred from getting complimentary tickets. Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and global editorial director of Vogue, always dresses impeccably when attending Knicks games and has no record of disparaging Dolan. She’s labeled as “medium risk.”

People of concern are ranked on a scale, the source explained. “Flag” is the lowest, an indication to discuss the VIP with a supervisor. Next is “low risk”—that’s the marking for Falco, Morgan, and Ben Stiller, their fellow Knicks ride-or-die. After that is “medium risk” (the actor Lily Allen, her ex David Harbour, and the country singer Morgan Wallen) and “high risk” (the hip-hop stars Freddie Gibbs, Lil Jon, DaBaby, and A Boogie Wit da Hoodie). The rapper Lil Tjay, who recently was involved in an altercation at the Garden’s Hulu Theater, is “BANNED FROM MSG,” according to the database.

Five of the publicly identified attendees at Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Madison Square Garden wedding were marked as “low risk”: the musicians Ice Spice, Selena Gomez, and Benson Boone, the TV host Michael Strahan, and the actor Mariska Hargitay.

The talent database also tracks some celebrities’ race, gender identity, and sexual orientation; 93 entries are marked as “LGBTQIA.” Why MSG felt the need to label Ricky Martin or Phoebe Bridgers or Geese’s Emily Green in this way is unclear.

“I’ve never met James Dolan. I don’t know the higher-up leadership at Madison Square Garden. But, like, there does seem to be a bit of a pattern here,” says Evan Greer, director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, citing WIRED’s reporting on the Garden’s minute-by-minute surveillance of a trans woman. “They just seem overly interested in queer and trans people in their venue,” Greer adds.

The talent database also seems to hint at how MSG might use complimentary tickets to boost its political agenda. Listed are 32 political candidates who are or were “supported by MSG PAC,” along with hundreds of current and former elected officials. The database also includes a column noting each entry’s “claim to fame.” For nearly 60 people, that involves signing a letter or testifying in support of a renewed permit for Madison Square Garden that Dolan was looking to secure in 2023. That list includes union leaders; a lobbyist; the brother of a brain cancer patient, who had been helped by a charity that works with MSG; and the owner of Don Pepi Pizza, an eatery in New York’s skeevy Amtrak terminal, in Penn Station, which sits beneath the Garden.

None of them, it should be noted, have any kind of risk score.

Also in the hacker collective’s data dump is a second, far larger database. It contains over 10.5 million entries peppered with people’s personal information, which appears to be pulled from the Garden’s Salesforce customer management system. Some entries were added as far back as 2012, and others were edited as recently as June 6. In this database are 9,782,361 unique emails, 2,820,221 unique phone numbers, and 2,956 entries