MoMA keeps security footage about a month, filings show

The Museum of Modern Art keeps its security camera footage for about a month before routinely erasing it, the museum disclosed in court documents — a practice that would have wiped any video of the assaults a nude performer alleged he suffered in a 2010 Marina Abramović exhibition long before he sued.

MoMA revealed the retention period in papers filed in July while fighting to pause the evidence discovery phase in John Bonafede’s lawsuit as it appeals a ruling allowing the case to proceed.

The museum keeps surveillance and security footage for “approximately one month,” unless it must be preserved for a police investigation or for litigation that is threatened or already underway, Lloyd B. Chinn, a Proskauer Rose partner representing MoMA, wrote in a July 6 sworn affirmation.

Incident reports and investigation files are kept about seven years after a security issue is resolved, Chinn wrote.

MoMA is not alone in routinely deleting surveillance footage after about a month. The National Park Service recommends a 30-day limit for recordings that do not document accidents or incidents. South Korea's National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art retains CCTV footage for 90 days.

Bonafede performed nude in MoMA’s staging of Abramović’s Imponderabilia, standing still and silent in a narrow doorway. He sued the museum in New York Supreme Court in January 2024, saying visitors groped him repeatedly as they passed and that MoMA failed to protect him, Urgent Matter previously reported.

His discovery demands sought material that MoMA says may no longer exist. His first request asked the museum to “provide all video recordings depicting Imponderabilia,” including footage from fixed security cameras, surveillance feeds and any archived or backup copies, documents show.

He also demanded MoMA’s policies for retaining and deleting video and any records of footage that had been reviewed, preserved, deleted or overwritten.

MoMA said it issued a litigation hold on December 14, 2023, directing six employees to preserve records about Bonafede’s allegations after he threatened to sue. The exhibition had ended more than 13 years earlier. The museum and Bonafede signed a tolling agreement dated November 22, 2023, which ran until January 22, 2024, the day he filed his initial complaint, documents show.

The footage disclosure surfaced in a fight over how fast the case should proceed.

Bonafede asked the court in May to compel MoMA to search for and produce documents and to set a discovery schedule, telling the judge discovery had stalled. On June 1, MoMA cross-moved to stay all proceedings, including discovery, until the Appellate Division, First Department, rules on its appeal.

Bonafede’s lawyer, Jordan Fletcher, wrote that the museum concedes certain documents and video evidence tied to the assaults “may already have been destroyed,” and that further delay risks the loss of more evidence and the fading of witness memories.

MoMA countered that any missing material resulted from Bonafede’s delay in suing, not the museum’s conduct, and that it had no obligation to preserve anything until it reasonably anticipated litigation in late 2023.

The museum argued its appeal raises unsettled threshold questions that could eliminate or narrow Bonafede’s claims before both sides spend heavily on discovery into events from 2009 and 2010. Chief among them, MoMA said, is whether an institution can be held liable under the city’s Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Act for “enabling” an assault it did not commit.

MoMA also argued Bonafede’s negligence claim is barred by the Workers’ Compensation Law because he was an employee. It pointed to Justice James d’Auguste’s remarks at the October 2024 argument on the motion to dismiss, when he described the negligence claim as “being dismissed under Worker’s Compensation Law.”

The museum said Bonafede’s lawyer conceded a 2010 email in which the performer welcomed being reclassified from independent contractor to employee, a status that would trigger the workers’ compensation bar. Bonafede’s complaint does not take a position on his employment status.

D’Auguste denied MoMA’s motion to dismiss in full on December 11, 2025, allowing all five of Bonafede’s causes of action to proceed despite his earlier comments.

The legal ground shifted while the case was pending. A New York City Council amendment that took effect January 29, 2026, extended the GMVPA’s enabling-liability provision to conduct before 2022 and let people who sued between March 1, 2023, and March 1, 2025, amend their cases to add the claim.

Bonafede amended his complaint in February to cite the new provision. MoMA argued the change did not moot its appeal because his amended complaint is “functionally identical” to the earlier one.

MoMA perfected its appeal on July 14, 2026. Two weeks later, the parties agreed to move the argument from the First Department’s October 2026 term to its December term, with Bonafede’s brief due October 23 and MoMA’s reply due November 13.

Imponderabilia, first staged in 1977 by Abramović and her then-partner Ulay, requires visitors to squeeze between two nude performers standing in a doorway.

In MoMA’s 2010 restaging during Abramović’s retrospective, Bonafede said he was groped seven times by five visitors. In its answer, MoMA admitted mounting the work and that Bonafede reported improper touching to security, but denied it knowingly allowed the assaults to occur.

Bonafede's complaint also alleged that one of the assaults was captured by a camera crew filming his performance, though the court filings do not establish whether that footage still exists.

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