“This thing is on Sunday, where’s this lawsuit? What? Somebody better decide something,” said Michael Bartley on Audacy’s KDKA radio in Pittsburgh Friday of the lawsuit attempting to block the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights scheduled on the White House lawn this weekend.
Within hours, Judge Amit P. Mehta ruled that the matches will go on, according to The New York Times. It said the judge wrote that the suit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, “arrived last minute and failed to show how the event irreversibly harmed the individuals who sued.”
UFC CEO Dana White revealed last summer that he was working with President Donald Trump to being the popular fighting spectacle to the White House. Late last month construction of a massive “Octagon” ring began on the lawn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in preparation for fights on Sunday, June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday.
While the White House UFC fights have garnered significant criticism – including from Audacy’s Jordana Green at WCCO News Talk in Minneapolis – the lawsuit didn’t come until this week. According to the Public Integrity Project, “a Vietnam War veteran and a civic activist,” filed the suit.
Brendan Ballou with the Public Integrity Project argued that the UFC event will be “the first private, for-profit sporting event ever held on White House grounds,” and called it a “volcano of corruption” that would “mark an inflection point in American history.”
However, Mehta (an appointee of former President Barack Obama, as noted by MS NOW) said: “Because Plaintiffs fail to establish both a substantial likelihood of standing and irreparable harm, and because the equities and public interest weigh against emergency relief, Plaintiffs’ Emergency Application for a Temporary Restraining Order or, in the Alternative, an Expedited Preliminary Injunction, ECF No. 3, is denied.”
Mehta acknowledged that the event organizers have put in considerable time to the UFC Freedom 250 event, and have spent considerable money on the venture. His 15-page ruling said the UFC alone spent $60 million and that 700 to 900 workers have been involved in the project. Previously, White said he expects the UFC to lose around $30 million on the White House fights, but that he sees the events as a great promotional opportunity.
“The court rightly rejected an untimely and frivolous effort to halt the historic UFC event hosted to honor the 250th anniversary of our nation,” said Davis Ingle, a spokesman for the White House, in an emailed statement cited by The New York Times.
