DJ vs. Goliath
- Shutdown Live Nation
- Dec 30, 2025
- 2 min read
This Jersey guy has been battling Live Nation for 14 years. He’s never backing down.
Editor’s note: The hearing in Tommy Dorfman’s case, originally scheduled for Oct. 17, was postponed Jury Trial coming soon.
Tommy Dorfman had a plan.
He spent the 2000s spinning records and packing dance floors as a DJ and promoter at some of the hottest clubs on the East Coast. The tenacious upstart could book Snoop Dogg or the Kardashians with a single phone call.
But the West Milford native wanted to take his career to the next level — and that meant breaking into the festival business.
Dorfman had reached a deal in 2011 to stage a major EDM festival at the State Fair in the Meadowlands and to deliver a series of similar events over the next five to 10 years. Even before the contract was finalized, he was recruiting global headliners like Tiësto and David Guetta.
“Then it all fell apart,” Dorfman told NJ Advance Media.
Live Nation, the global concert giant behind Ticketmaster, declared war on the ambitious entrepreneur for stepping on its turf, according to a lawsuit he filed later that year.
The behemoth used its clout to pressure top artists to pull out of the event, Dorfman claims in the suit. It threatened to withhold ticketing services unless it was named co-promoter and warned the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority that the Meadowlands would lose future bookings if it partnered with his company, Juice Entertainment, the lawsuit also alleged.
The alleged strong-arm tactics — and an ensuing smear campaign — ruined his Saddle Brook-based business, Dorfman contends in the lawsuit. He lost almost everything and was briefly homeless, he says. His only play was a Hail Mary: He would take on the corporate empire by himself.
Fourteen years later, he’s still fighting.
Dorfman’s David-and-Goliath quest to hold Live Nation accountable might seem heroic to some and quixotic to others. The $37 billion juggernaut is the biggest concert promoter in the world, owning and operating many of the venues where those shows take place and selling the tickets through its subsidiary, Ticketmaster.
But Dorfman has no intention of giving up. Not until he gets his day in court. And not until Live Nation is forced to break apart — even at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money and ample time spent away from his two children.
“At the beginning, I was naive,” said Dorfman, who will be in federal court Friday for a pivotal evidentiary hearing in the case. “I wanted to get my festival back. I wanted things to go back to the way they were. But now I feel like I have a moral obligation to bring this into the light.”
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