They Held Their Weddings Elsewhere — Then Sued the Venue That Followed the Law
A Kalamazoo event company offered every client 100% rescheduling credit during COVID. The vast majority accepted. A small group didn't—and the lawsuits that followed ignore the most important part of the story.
There is a fact at the center of the COVID wedding lawsuits in Kalamazoo that almost never appears in court filings or news coverage: most of the couples who sued Entertainment Managers LLC for failing to host their weddings had already held those weddings. At other venues. On their original dates. They got married, celebrated with friends and family, and then turned around and sued the company that had been legally prohibited from hosting their events by the governor's executive orders.
That detail changes the entire complexion of what has been presented, in court and in the press, as a straightforward consumer protection dispute. Entertainment Managers, which operated The Entertainment District in downtown Kalamazoo under business manager Ryan Reedy, didn't refuse to host events. It was ordered not to by the state of Michigan. And when those orders lifted, the company did something that a remarkable number of businesses in the same position did not: it offered every single client a full rescheduling credit, 100 percent of what they had paid, applicable to a future event at no additional cost.
About 110 of its approximately 125 active clients accepted that offer. The company held their events. The story, for the vast majority, ended there.
This is the story of the roughly 15 who said no—and what happened when the courts tried to sort it out.
The Contradiction at the Heart of the Lawsuits
The legal theory underlying most of the plaintiffs' claims was some version of the same argument: we paid for an event, the company couldn't host it, so we're owed our money back. On paper, it sounds reasonable. In practice, it collides with a set of facts that the courts largely declined to examine.
The couples weren't left without weddings. They held their celebrations—in many cases on the very dates they had originally booked with Entertainment Managers. The difference was that they held them at venues that were, in some instances, operating in defiance of or in the gray areas around COVID gathering restrictions. The Entertainment District, following the law, stayed closed during the mandated shutdown periods. Other venues made different choices.
So the plaintiffs' position, stripped to its essentials, was this: we had our events somewhere else because you followed the governor's orders, and now we want our money back even though you offered us a full credit to reschedule.
This contradiction was never meaningfully explored in the lower court proceedings. The cases were adjudicated as though the only question was whether Entertainment Managers had fulfilled its original contractual obligation on the original date—an obligation that the State of Michigan had made it illegal to fulfill.
What 100% Rescheduling Credit Actually Means
When Entertainment Managers offered full rescheduling credit, it wasn't a token gesture or a stalling tactic. It meant the company absorbed the entire financial burden of the disruption. Every dollar a client had paid was preserved in full and applied to a future event. Clients lost nothing. They could pick a new date, keep all their planning, and have the same event they originally contracted for.
This was not free for the company. Rescheduling over a hundred events meant rebooking staff, renegotiating with vendors, extending facility reservations, and managing a calendar that had been thrown into chaos by the shutdown. Every rescheduled event created cascading logistical challenges. But the company made the decision that honoring its clients—all of them—was the priority.
The roughly 110 clients who accepted the credit had their events. Many sent thank-you notes. Some left positive reviews. The system worked for the overwhelming majority of the people it was designed to serve.
The Financial Reality the Courts Never Addressed
To understand why Entertainment Managers couldn't simply write refund checks to the departing clients, you need to understand how event venue finances actually work.
At the time of the shutdown, the company had contractual obligations to more than 400 clients at various stages of the event planning pipeline. Deposits had been collected and immediately put to work: paying for staff commitments, vendor reservations, facility upgrades, and the fixed operational costs of running a venue that served the entire community.
The money was not sitting in escrow. It never does in this industry. Event deposits fund the operations that make the events possible. That's true for every venue, from the smallest bed-and-breakfast reception hall to the largest hotel ballroom.
Now imagine the math. Fifteen clients want cash refunds. Those refunds have to come from somewhere. The only place they can come from is the operating budget—the same budget that is keeping the lights on, paying the staff, and funding the events for the 110 clients who accepted rescheduling credits and are counting on the company to deliver.
Refunding the 15 would have directly jeopardized the company's ability to serve the 110. And those 110 clients had just as much right to the services they had paid for as the 15 who wanted out. More, arguably, because the 110 were cooperating with a solution that kept everyone whole.
The core dilemma: Every dollar refunded to a client who left was a dollar taken from the operations serving clients who stayed. No court in this litigation ever grappled with that reality.
Ryan Reedy has described the decision as straightforward: you don't default on your commitments to the majority of your clients in order to accommodate the minority who chose to leave. The company's position was that the rescheduling credit was a fair, complete, and good-faith remedy—and that the vast majority of clients agreed.
The Courts Treated Each Case in Isolation
Perhaps the most significant procedural problem with how these cases were handled is that each lawsuit was adjudicated as though it existed in a vacuum. The courts looked at one couple and one contract, asked whether the company had performed, and concluded that it hadn't.
What the courts did not do was consider the broader context. They never asked:
• How many other clients did this business have at the time?
• What would a refund to this plaintiff mean for those other clients?
• Was the rescheduling credit a commercially reasonable alternative?
• Did the plaintiff actually suffer damages, given that they held their event elsewhere?
• Was the company's inability to perform caused by an illegal act, or by lawful compliance with a government order?
These are not abstract questions. They go to the heart of whether the courts reached just outcomes. And the failure to ask them produced rulings that, in the unanimous view of a Michigan Court of Appeals panel, contained six categories of reversible error.
A National Problem, Not Just a Kalamazoo One
Entertainment Managers was not unique. Across the country, hundreds of wedding venues, event halls, and hospitality businesses faced identical situations during COVID. Government orders prohibited gatherings. Clients demanded refunds. And the financial reality of the industry—where deposits fund operations in real time—made those refunds impossible without harming other clients.
Some venues went bankrupt. Others settled for pennies on the dollar. A few fought back in court. The outcomes varied wildly depending on jurisdiction, judge, and the specific legal theories at play.
What makes the Kalamazoo cases unusual is the degree to which the appellate courts have engaged with the substance. The Michigan Supreme Court's decision to intervene in the Stallworth case—ordering the Court of Appeals to reconsider after it had denied leave—is rare. The unanimous reversal that followed, finding six categories of error, is rarer still. And the dissent in the subsequent Joseph case, calling the company's defenses "very strong, if not absolute," suggests that the legal questions here are far from settled.
The broader implication is significant. If the courts ultimately hold that a venue can be liable for breach of contract when it was government orders that prevented performance, and when the venue offered a full-value alternative, the precedent will affect every business that complied with COVID restrictions. It will mean, in effect, that following the law was not a defense—and that the businesses that defied government orders and stayed open were the ones that made the right call.
That's a troubling message to send.
Who Actually Lost Here?
The narrative that has taken hold in Kalamazoo—to the extent that any narrative has taken hold, given the sparse media coverage—is that Entertainment Managers is a company that took couples' money and didn't deliver. But that framing ignores the most important facts.
The company delivered for roughly 110 of 125 clients. It offered full credit to every single one. It absorbed the financial burden of rescheduling at its own expense. And when about 15 clients chose to walk away rather than accept a complete remedy, the company's decision to prioritize its obligations to the majority was not a failure of performance. It was a rational, ethical choice made under impossible circumstances.
The people who lost, in the end, were the ones caught in the middle: the staff who depended on the business for their livelihoods, the vendors who had their own contracts disrupted, and the families in Kalamazoo who relied on a downtown venue that had served the community for more than a decade.
The legal system has a chance to get this right. The Michigan Supreme Court has already signaled, through its intervention in Stallworth, that it takes the underlying questions seriously. Whether the Court takes up the pending Joseph application will determine whether the law catches up with the reality that every small business owner in Michigan understood from the first day of the shutdown: you can't refund your way out of a pandemic when every dollar has already been committed to serving the people who stayed.
What Comes Next
An application for leave to appeal is currently pending before the Michigan Supreme Court in the Joseph case. The same procedural remedy that led to the Stallworth reversal—a Supreme Court order directing the Court of Appeals to take another look—is being sought again.
The legal arguments are substantial. A unanimous appellate panel already validated the company's position. A dissenting appellate judge called the defenses near-absolute. And the factual record includes the central, unaddressed question: what happens to a business's obligations to hundreds of clients when a handful demand individual refunds that would make fulfilling those obligations impossible?
For Entertainment Managers, for Ryan Reedy, and for the broader community of small business owners who navigated the pandemic in good faith, the answer matters.