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Justin Bieber's Music Did $9M Damage to Woman's Ears, Lawsuit Says

By Andrew Lu on July 17, 2012 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

Perhaps no one can whip up teenage girls into a frenzy quite like Justin Bieber.

Justin Bieber is being sued by an Oregon woman because she claims that Bieber drove his concert audience a little too wild. The woman says that Bieber got the mostly female teen crowd screaming to a fever pitch as he swung over them in a gondola.

With the crowd screaming, Bieber encouraged even more noise, causing Stacy Wilson Betts to suffer extensive hearing damage, the mom claims. Betts had accompanied her daughter to the concert.

According to the lawsuit, Justin Bieber allegedly climbed into a heart-shaped, aluminum steel gondola and was pulled out over the crowd, reports Reuters. As he hung over the audience, Bieber is claimed to have "enticed the crowd into a frenzy of screams by continuously waving his arms in a quick and upward motion." Betts claims that the gondola itself acted as a sound conductor, creating a "sound blast" that permanently damaged both of her ears.

As a result, Betts says that she now suffers a variety of hearing injuries including hearing loss and oversensitivity to certain frequency ranges of sound, reports Reuters. Betts is seeking over $9 million in damages. Strangely, whether Betts is ultimately successful, may depend on the swinging gondola.

Generally, a concert-goer should expect that a concert will be loud. After all, you have loud music and thousands of screaming fans packed into a relatively small space. So one can make the argument that Betts assumed the risk of hearing damage by attending the concert.

However, Betts' claim may be saved if the swinging gondola did in fact act as a sound conductor, creating the sound blast. That's because while someone should expect screaming teenage girls at a Justin Bieber concert, one would not normally expect sound conductors and sound blasts.

If this Justin Bieber lawsuit does reach a courtroom, it will be interesting to see what expert witnesses are introduced to prove the physics of the swinging gondola.

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