Do we like Garth Brooks?
Our score: 6 out of 10. A record of speaking up for LGBTQ+ people sits next to a lawsuit that is still undecided and that he denies.
Garth Brooks is the bloke who turned country into stadium rock. "Friends in Low Places" still closes his shows, and in June he headlined London's Hyde Park, his first UK gig in nearly 30 years. He's also famously protective of his own catalogue, and stayed off streaming until a 2016 deal with Amazon Music.
The Hyde Park night was a big one. Reviewers reported a crowd of 69,999, the largest the festival has hosted, and an impromptu cover of Bob Seger's "Night Moves" after a fan held up a sign. Near the end he told the crowd, “I'm not sure what the future is,” and promised he would be back. Then in early June, ABC News relayed reports that he is weighing a sale of his whole catalogue, with a price tag that could reach $2 billion.
On the harm check, he's in good shape. He recorded "We Shall Be Free" in 1992, a song that Dallas Voice's writer reads as a stand for gay rights, and that writer says he sang it again just after the 2015 marriage equality ruling. In 2023, with the Bud Light boycott raging, he said his Nashville bar would stock every brand and be “a place you feel safe in”, and some right-wing social media users threatened to boycott him for it. I found nothing from him on vaccines, climate or migrants in the pages I read, and no harmful co-stars or collaborators flagged.
Now the hard bit. In October 2024 a lawsuit filed under the pseudonym Jane Roe alleged that he raped her in 2019 on a work trip, and also alleged he repeatedly exposed himself and sent sexually explicit texts. Brooks denied it, saying the claims “felt like having a loaded gun waved in my face” and that he is not the man they paint. He had already sued her in Mississippi in September 2024, and nothing in these reports has a court deciding the allegations either way.
Where it stands, as far as I could confirm: in December 2024 a federal judge in California refused Brooks's bid to dismiss her claims, then paused the case until the Mississippi court sorted out its side. In May 2025 the Mississippi judge found a motion to dismiss moot, and what that means for the California case was unclear. I couldn't find a trial date or any later ruling in a source I could open, so treat it as unresolved, with the allegations undecided and his denial on the record.
The good stuff I can source is smaller than his reputation suggests. Fans clearly love the shows, and he told his Hyde Park crowd that the magic came from the audience that day. His bar comments show he was willing to take heat from his own side to keep the place welcoming. That's a nice gesture, though it's not a long record I can pin down from dated pages.