Britney Spears Sues 8 Insurers Over Cancelled Tour
Pop songstress Britney Spears and her touring company have brought suit against eight insurance companies, alleging the carriers illegally refused to compensate the singer for losses arising from her cancelled concert tour last year.
Liberty Syndicate Management, AXA Corporate Solutions, QBE International Insurance, Markel International, Beezley Furlonge, Talbot Underwriting, Great Lakes Reinsurance U.K., and SR International Business were named in a complaint, filed Feb. 4, in New York Supreme Court, a county level tribunal.
The singer is seeking about $10 million in damages for the insurers' alleged breach of insurance contracts. The companies had no immediate comment about Ms. Spears' legal action.
Ms. Spears explains in her complaint that she had to cancel a significant portion of her 2004 U.S.-international tour, dubbed "Onyx Hotel," after injuring her left knee and having a surgical repair done for floating cartilage in the middle of her tour schedule.
The tour, covering some dozens of cities in North America and Europe, consisted of three "legs" beginning in March and ending in August. The event, according to the complaint, was an expensive and highly crafted production involving special effects, elaborate costumes and complex choreography.
To protect her tour, the complaint says Ms. Spears paid her insurers over $1.3 million in premiums in Feb. 2004 to cover losses arising from possible cancelled performances due to any accidents or illnesses of the singer.
Ms. Spears' suit says she bought contingency insurance to cover abandonment, postponement or cancellation of performances of the tour in the average amount of $380,000 per show, subject to a $760,000 aggregate deductible and a total indemnity limit at the time of $26.8 million.
Ms. Spears had no cancellations for any shows until the end of her second leg of the tour. But last June, she injured her left knee during a music video shoot and underwent a surgical repair, which forced the singer to cancel the rest of her tour.
The insurers have refused to compensate the injured Ms. Spears for losses from the cancelled shows despite the due demand having been made, the complaint says, and some of the companies have purported to rescind the policies.
The key issue that insurers are likely to bring up in their defense is that Ms. Spears, when she purchased the coverage, failed to disclose to insurers that in 1999 she had orthopedic surgery on the same knee she injured last June.
Ms. Spears says in her court papers that this was an "innocent omission" and that one of her doctors who had examined her knee said the new injury didn't involve the part of the left knee where she had her earlier surgery.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, February 11, 2005. Copyright 2005 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
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