New York: Opera Singer Can Sue Metropolitan Opera House for Injuries Sustained in Fall

A prominent opera singer at the Metropolitan Opera House is not an employee of the entertainment facility that featured her in more than 500 performances during his 23-year career; her employment contract was with her personal holding company and not the opera house, held a New York appellate court. Noting that N.Y. Work. Comp. Law § 2(4) provided generally that a professional musician or a person engaged in the performing arts was considered an employee of the establishment where he or she performed, the court observed that there was an important exception that applied to the star opera singer. Where it had been stipulated that the performer was an employee of another employer, she would not be so considered the employee of the opera house. Plaintiff, who sustained injuries when she fell from an elevated platform during a performance of the opera “Faust,” could proceed in tort against the Met. The exclusive remedy provisions of the New York Workers’ Compensation Law did not bar her action.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See White v. Metropolitan Opera Assn., Inc., 2017 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 90 (Jan. 5, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 64.01.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see