Robert Silverman

Dolan would say it's to stop terrorists and to stop criminals or whatever.

But there's very little evidence of that, very little.

And in fact, what we heard from the NYPD is that they don't supply any facial recognition or any other kind of data to Madison Square Garden for those purposes.

So who does he use it for instead?

Who does he use this facial recognition for instead?

Instead, it's to track a series of people on lists.

Most famously on those lists are lawyers, lawyers who have sued the garden in any way, shape or form.

There's a famously there's a case of a lawyer who was taking her kid to see, I think, the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall.

And just because someone else in her firm had sued Madison Square Garden, she was not allowed to bring her kid to Radio City.

Yeah.

And then there's accidents, too.

So, for example, in our investigation, we found screenshots of a little girl.

Couldn't have been more than, I don't know.

eight years old, who got flagged by their facial recognition system.

Now, it's an accident, of course, but the fact that she got logged in at all is a real problem.

Right.

So the lawsuit was filed by a guy named Donnie Ingrassolino, who's a former New Jersey law enforcement professional, who then went on to work for the Tao Group, which was a series of nightclubs and restaurants that was partially owned at the time by Jim Dolan, although he later divested it.

And then he went on to work for Madison Square Garden proper.

Now, this lawsuit has all kinds of stuff in it, but it also has a couple of really shocking claims, including the surveillance of a trans woman whose only crimes, quote-unquote, seemed to be that she'd gotten too close to players and to Madison Square Garden staffers.

And so we went looking to try to track down that claim and others that are in the lawsuit.