Would-be Taylor Swift concert attacker loses privacy case against Disney
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US singer-songwriter Taylor Swift attending the MTV Video Music Awards at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, California, on Sept 27.
PHOTO: AFP
- An Austrian man convicted for planning a foiled attack on a Taylor Swift concert lost a privacy lawsuit against Disney over showing his parents' home in a docuseries.
- The court ruled the man no longer lived at that address and home addresses do not have the highest legal protection; his name was already widely reported.
- Disney settled separately with the parents, paying them €3,000 (S$4,400) each, and removed the address segment from the series on Disney+ in May.
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VIENNA – An Austrian man convicted of planning a foiled attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna in 2024 lost a privacy lawsuit against Disney on Sept 30 over the fact his parents’ home was shown in the docuseries Taylor Swift: The End Of An Era.
The man, identified as Beran A, was sentenced in May to 15 years in prison. He has been in custody since his arrest in August 2024.
An episode of the series, which first aired in December 2025, showed his parents’ home in a town an hour’s drive from Vienna for a matter of seconds but did not name him.
“He doesn’t live there. He hasn’t lived there for two years,” Judge Nicole Baczak ruled, adding that there was no prospect of him living there again in the near future.
Baczak added that the fact his name had been widely reported in the news media did not matter, and home addresses in general do not deserve the highest level of legal protection.
Beran A did not attend the one-hour trial. His lawyer Ulrike Zeller said he would appeal.
The show is available to stream in Europe on Disney+, but the segment showing the address was removed in May.
A lawyer for Disney, Georg Kresbach, told the court Beran A’s parents had each been paid €3,000 (S$4,400) in compensation for their home being shown in the series in a separate settlement.
He was found guilty in May of various, mainly terrorism-related offences, including trying but failing to illegally buy weapons including a machine gun and hand grenade, and following instructions in an Islamic State video entitled Make A Bomb In The Kitchen Of Your Mom to produce a small amount of the explosive triacetone triperoxide. REUTERS