Madison Square Garden is famous for basketball, concerts, and overpriced snacks.
Now it can apparently add “mystery celebrity spreadsheets” to the list.
The internet lit up after reports surfaced that an MSG database allegedly tracked and categorized hundreds of celebrities, famous Knicks superfans, and even some people connected to Taylor Swift’s wedding guest list.
Apparently somebody looked at a normal contact list and thought, “You know what this needs? More categories.”
According to reports, some entries included labels such as “LGBTQIA,” “DO NOT HOST,” and risk ratings ranging from low to high.
Nothing says “welcome to the world’s most famous arena” quite like sounding like airport security mixed with a fantasy football draft board.
The reaction online was swift and brutal.
Fat Joe is a superfan, both of the New York Knicks and their controversial owner, Jim Dolan. The rapper celebrated with Dolan in Cleveland when the team clinched its first finals appearance in decades. When the Knicks organization came under intense scrutiny over aggressive security measures for game 3 of the NBA finals, Fat Joe stuck up for the boss.
“Shoutout to Mr. Dolan, greatest team owner in the game,” he told reporters at the time. “They villainize Mr. Dolan, like, almost like a Bruce Wayne, like a Batman movie and this is Gotham City … This man takes care of us.”
People buy tickets to watch basketball. They do not expect to discover their favorite arena may have been keeping notes that sound like they came from a spy movie written by an intern.
Within Dolan’s organization, however, some have a different view of Fat Joe. An internal Madison Square Garden database of VIPs labels Joe a “medium risk,” one of roughly 400 celebrities given a risk score. Many of those celebs are courtside fixtures at Knicks games: Edie Falco, Mark Ronson, John Turturro, and Tracy Morgan, to name a few. That makes the 400-ish entries unusual. The vast majority of the 39,539 entries in the so-called “talent” database—which tracks boldfaced names in business, technology, politics, media, and sports, along with their guests—are not marked with a risk score at all.
The database doesn’t provide an explicit explanation for Fat Joe’s “medium risk” designation. But as WIRED has previously documented, MSG security keeps close tabs on what is said online about Dolan and the Garden’s management. Some fans have been targeted by MSG for criticizing the mogul; MSG security even asked local law enforcement to visit a teenager in Colorado after one tweet. “They scared the crap 💩 out of some 14 year old kid in Colorado,” an MSG security staffer texted in a message reviewed by WIRED.
What exactly moves someone from low risk to high risk?
A source with knowledge of the matter tells WIRED that Garden security has performed social media sweeps for prominent people looking for complimentary tickets to games. If you’re a celebrity and you’re marked with a risk score—even as a low risk—it means “you’ve done something in the publicity world, the social media world, that has caught the attention of the wrong people,” the source continues. The talent database, which has entries dating back to December 2020 and includes updates as recent as early June of this year, makes repeated reference to “SM concerns.” Physical security threats—potential harms to people or property—are documented in a separate database, the source says. (The source adds that these sorts of databases are common at arenas.)
According to the source, Fat Joe was flagged because of his connection to another legend of New York City rap, Jadakiss, who had been critical of Dolan in the past. (“It seems like he’s always more happier when the team sucks,” Jadakiss said in 2020.) Jadakiss is designated as a “medium risk.” The other members of his hip-hop trio, the Lox, are also in the database but don’t have a risk score.
“It’s a really, really paranoid, terrible system,” the source says.
In 2026, apparently even celebrity guest lists come with scouting reports.
