Former Kennedy Center employees accused the iconic performing arts venue's leadership in a letter to Congress of halting planned waterproofing repairs earlier this year. In the Thursday letter, David Seide, an attorney representing the whistleblowers, shared internal documents which he said challenged the Kennedy Center board's claims…
Page D2From§Eachthe early evening edition — 26 September 2026
Kennedy Center board halts its own repairs, then blames the damage to close the building
As it ran on the front
Filed with Congress on Thursday: a letter from former Kennedy Center employees, represented by attorney David Seide, laying out internal documents that challenge the board's story about the building's own leaks. That story is worth walking clause by clause, because the documents don't just add detail — they reorder the sequence the board gave the public.
Start with the sequence the board offered: the roof leaked, so the building closed. The building did not fail on its own schedule. It failed on the schedule set by the decision to stop fixing it.…
…(cont) Rewind to see how the season sounded before anyone in Congress had that paper trail. On Sept. 16, Kerry Kennedy, sister of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., went on CNN and called the coming shutdown a "tragedy," telling Erin Burnett that Americans "love the Kennedy Center" and "love the arts." The next day, a photographer caught President Trump on Air Force One studying a printout that read "Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED," and the word going around the criticism was narcissism. By Sept. The vote did not.
All together now: the board cites water damage as an emergency; the family calls the emergency narcissism; the employees hand Congress the paperwork showing the water damage had a start date, and leadership set it.
None of this claims the leaks were invented. What the letter insists on is a start date: the halt to the repairs came months before the closure it was later cited to justify. Congress now has the letter. The building, presumably, still has the hole.
“They didn't have a burst-pipe problem, they had a schedule problem — stop the fix, wait for the ceiling to leak, then call the leak the emergency. That's not maintenance, that's manufacturing your own excuse to lock the doors. Next time somebody tells you a building's too broken to save, ask who pulled the repair crew first.”
“Look, capital projects get rescheduled all the time, that's just how large-scale waterproofing works — you don't want crews up on scaffolding mid-season. And the board voted, that's due process, that's — okay, closing the building over damage you yourselves paused fixing, that's not the talking point I want to be reading off this card. Next question.”
The receipts
President Donald Trump is coming under heavy criticism after a photograph taken on Wednesday suggested that his threats to destroy the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts are very real. Shortly after attending a Wednesday night rally in North Carolina, Trump was caught on camera by photographer Brendan Smialowski…
The family of former President Kennedy slammed President Trump for his ongoing legal battle to put his name on the Kennedy Center and to close the building for planned renovations. The Kennedy Center board, handpicked by Trump, voted Tuesday to close the main building, but Trump said the renovations will not happen as long as...
· RFK Jr.'s sister knocks Trump on Kennedy Center shutdown from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
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