Travis Scott's Lawyers Hit Out At 'Exploitative' Documentary On Astroworld Tragedy
Travis Scott’s legal team has been hard at work trying to help their client get through the fallout of November’s Astroworld tragedy, where 10 people were killed and hundreds more were injured. But while they’re navigating massive lawsuits, they’re also trying to quell any slanderous publicity that might jeopardize their client in a legal way.
Scott’s lawyers most recently came out against filmmaker Charlie Minn on Friday (April 29), whose Astroworld-focused documentary Concert Crush: The Travis Scott Festival Tragedy is set to hit Texas theaters this weekend. According to TMZ, Scott’s legal counsel believes the film is a “farce financed by and containing content from members of the plaintiff’s legal teams, who, weeks after a tragedy, sought to exploit and benefit financially from it, with the clear goals of making money and swaying future juries and public opinion.”
It’s unclear if the “Antidote” rapper himself has any thoughts on the film, but Scott’s lawyer’s referred to Minn’s movie as “a profit play and a publicity stunt, with no support from the film industry [and] no distribution.” They called the filmmaker “a director with no respect from his field who has been termed a ‘trauma pornographer.’”
Minn, who lives in El Paso, Texas, has been referred to as a “trauma pornographer” before. He’s often covered violent and traumatic happenings in and around the El Paso area, including the 2019 Walmart mass shooting that killed 23 people. The filmmaker has previously been criticized online for “sensationalizing” mass violence and has been accused of harassing El Paso locals in order to promote his film or get information.
While it seems Minn’s film is moving forward anyway, Hulu didn’t want any smoke from Travis Scott‘s lawyers and shelved an Astroworld documentary they had planned to release in December, a month after the tragedy.
“This was an investigative local news special from ABC13/KTRK-TV in Houston that originally aired on November 20th,” a spokesperson for Hulu told Variety after removing the documentary. “This was not a Hulu documentary and has since been removed to avoid confusion.”