Would-be Taylor Swift concert attacker loses privacy case against Disney
- A man jailed for a foiled Taylor Swift attack lost his privacy suit against Disney over his parents' home in a documentary
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 Wednesday over the fact his parents’ home was shown in the docu-series “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.
Taylor Swift lands top trophy at MTV’s Video Music Awards
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 ($3,400) 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 machinegun 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.
Comments