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Artist News Legal
Taylor Swift’s mother says grope incident resulted in overhaul of meet and greets
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 10 August 2017
Taylor Swift’s mother was among those testifying yesterday during her daughter’s legal battle with former radio DJ David Mueller.
As previously reported, Swift alleges that Mueller groped her during a meet and greet backstage at a concert in Detroit in 2013. Mueller actually went legal first, in 2015, suing the musician for defamation after he lost his job on a local radio station two days after meeting her. He claims that a complaint from Swift’s security team about the alleged grope directly led to him being fired. Swift then countersued for assault and battery.
In her testimony, Andrea Swift, who is also part of her daughter’s management team, told the court that Mueller’s behaviour during the meet and greet upset her to “the extent that I was feeling like I wanted to vomit and cry at the same time”. According to Billboard, she then added: “He sexually assaulted her – right there – that guy”.
The incident resulted in Swift’s team changing the way they organised the musician’s meet and greets, Swift Senior added. “It made us do a bunch of things differently. Our meet and greets are much smaller. We now have metal detectors. We wand people. We now do background checks. It scared us really badly”.
The court hearing in relation to the dispute began on Monday and is expected to run nine days in total.
