Anna Netrebko Loses Second Defamation Lawsuit Against the Met Opera

Anna Netrebko, once billed as the Metropolitan Opera's reigning prima donna, has lost her second attempt to sue the Met for defamation. Judge Analisa Torres of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the supplemental claim last week, according to Reason, which covered the ruling in Netrebko v. Metropolitan Opera Association Inc.

The case traces back to February 2022. Three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Netrebko posted on Instagram that the days were "very sad" and called war "a terrible tragedy," urging "reflection and prayer" for a "swift and peaceful resolution." She did not name Vladimir Putin or Russia specifically.

The Met, run by general manager Peter Gelb, asked her to issue a public denunciation of Putin using language the company had approved. She refused. Instead she posted her own statement saying she opposed the war but also opposed "forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland." That same day she reposted a third party's comment calling Western critics of Russian artists "human shits" who were "as evil as blind aggressors."

Two days later, on February 27, 2022, the Met announced it "can no longer engage with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him" until the war ended and reparations were made. Netrebko posted again on March 1, this time calling the invasion a "senseless war of aggression" and calling on Russia to end it.

It wasn't enough for Gelb. In a phone call on March 2, he told her to specifically denounce Putin by name or be fired. She told him that as a Russian citizen she could not make that statement. The Met announced the next day, March 3, that she would not perform for the rest of that season or the next. She issued a fuller statement on March 30 condemning "the war on Ukraine" and saying she was not allied with any Russian leader, but the Met never rehired her.

Netrebko sued the Met, raising defamation and other claims. The court dismissed her original defamation claim in an earlier ruling. She then amended her lawsuit to allege that after she sued, the Met launched what her filing called a "renewed public campaign" in which Gelb defamed her again, according to Reason. That supplemental claim rested on five statements Gelb made that were quoted in three Ukrainian and Austrian news articles published between June and July 2025.

Netrebko argued those 2025 statements were false because, among other things, she says she did in fact disavow the war through the social media posts detailed above. Judge Torres was not persuaded, and dismissed the follow-up claim as well.

The competing arguments

The Met's position, laid out in its own 2022 statement, was straightforward: it did not want to be seen platforming artists tied to a regime waging what the U.S. and its allies call a war of aggression, and it wanted an unambiguous condemnation of Putin specifically, not general anti-war language.

Netrebko's position, reflected in her own posts at the time, was that she opposed the war but objected to being pressured, as an artist and a Russian citizen, into denouncing a specific foreign leader on command as a condition of keeping her job. The Met is a private employer and the First Amendment doesn't bind it the way it binds government actors. Nothing in these rulings suggests Netrebko had a legal right to keep her contract; the question in this second lawsuit was narrower, whether Gelb's 2025 comments about her to European press met the legal bar for defamation.

The court's dismissal doesn't resolve whether the Met's original 2022 decision to sideline her was fair. It resolves a separate question: whether what Gelb told reporters three years afterward was legally defamatory. Judge Torres said it wasn't.

Netrebko has not said publicly whether she will appeal. The Met, for its part, has not signaled any change in its position that it will not rehire her.