Ben Cesario

So the next Monday, they come back with a new lawyer.

The states hired a well-known antitrust lawyer who had only about a week to prepare for leading this case, but he did it.

And they continue bringing the case, even though they would have seemed at that point to be at a disadvantage.

That's exactly right.

I think that they felt that the case itself was strong.

that there was a great deal of evidence that supported the accusation that this company was a monopoly.

But they knew that it was going to be tricky for them to continue this case and said they're worried that this might look strange to the jury, that the jury would be confused.

Why did the federal government leave?

Where did they go?

What's happening?

But they plowed through.

And the first few days, you saw a few hiccups.

They were stumbling a little bit.

But one of their strategies was emphasize the bullying behavior and emphasize the impact on the consumer.

Well, there were the ones about the venues when it came to ticketing, but there were also a lot of examples of things from emails where Live Nation was talking about how do we sort of keep other promoters out of our venues?

There was talk about how they would rather have their venues go dark than

than allow other people to put on a show.

They were renewing leases for underperforming venues to prevent them from getting into the hands of their competitors.

One of the most shocking pieces of evidence, to be honest, was some Slack messages from

two relatively junior employees at Live Nation.