Judas Priest Lawsuit: Subliminal Messages and the 1990 Trial

The Judas Priest subliminal messages lawsuit was a 1990 product liability case in Reno, Nevada, in which the families of two young fans accused the band of hiding a backward-masked command, “Do it,” on the 1978 album Stained Class that drove the pair into a suicide pact. After a bench trial, Washoe County District Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead ruled for the band, finding the sounds that resembled words were an unintentional byproduct of recording and that the plaintiffs had not proven subliminal stimuli could push anyone to that kind of act. The case is formally captioned Vance v. Judas Priest.

The 1985 Suicide Pact Behind the Suit

On December 23, 1985, Raymond Belknap, 18, and James Vance, 20, spent hours drinking, smoking marijuana, and listening to Stained Class before walking to a church playground in Sparks, Nevada, with a sawed-off shotgun. Belknap shot himself under the chin and died instantly. Vance reloaded and shot himself but survived, catastrophically disfigured.¹

Vance lived three more years. He was admitted to Washoe Medical Center on November 15, 1988, slipped into a coma on Thanksgiving Day, and died on November 29, 1988, at 23. His attorney said the pending lawsuit would proceed on the strength of depositions Vance had already given.²

Who Sued and What They Claimed

In 1986, Phyllis Vance and Aunetta Roberson, the mothers of the two men, filed a product liability suit in Washoe County District Court against Judas Priest and CBS Records. They sought $6.2 million in damages: $5 million for James Vance’s injuries and wrongful death and $1.2 million for Raymond Belknap’s death.³

Lead counsel Kenneth McKenna, with co-counsel Vivian Lynch and Timothy Post, built the case on a theory that reached past lyrics. They alleged the band had embedded a backward-masked “Do it” into its cover of the Spooky Tooth song “Better by You, Better Than Me,” and that the hidden command bypassed the listeners’ conscious awareness and compelled the pact.⁴ They also pointed to other alleged hidden phrases such as “try suicide” and “let’s be dead.”⁵

Why the Case Reached Trial

Defense attorney Suellen Fulstone sought blanket First Amendment protection for the album before trial. Judge Whitehead split the question. Overt lyrics, he held, were protected speech, and he barred the plaintiffs from using the lyrics of another Stained Class track, “Heroes End,” as evidence of intent to harm listeners.⁶

Subliminal content, he said, was different. Messages engineered to communicate below conscious awareness did not, in his view, contribute to “dialogue, the pursuit of truth, the marketplace of ideas, or personal autonomy,” and because a listener could not consciously avoid them they amounted to an invasion of privacy.⁷ That ruling let the case proceed on two narrower questions: were subliminal messages actually on the album, and if so, did they cause the shootings?

Inside the Trial

The trial opened on July 16, 1990, before Judge Whitehead sitting without a jury. It ran 19 days and heard 43 witnesses, costing the band roughly a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees alone.⁸

The Plaintiffs’ Evidence

McKenna played “Better by You, Better Than Me” forward, backward, and at varying speeds in the courtroom to make the alleged “Do it” audible. The plaintiffs’ audio witness, William Nickloff, claimed to have identified “Do it” in at least seven places on the album.⁹ It later emerged that Nickloff was a marine biologist who lacked the audio-engineering expertise he had been presented as having.⁶

The plaintiffs’ most credentialed expert was Howard Shevrin, a University of Michigan psychology professor who had studied subliminal perception for more than two decades. He argued that a hidden directive is uniquely powerful because the listener attributes the impulse to their own mind, and that a command like “Do it” could add an “increment” to an existing predisposition toward suicide. Pressed to name experiments actually showing subliminal messages inducing suicidal behavior, Shevrin cited studies that scholars later said did not support the claim.⁷

A school counselor named Mrs. Rusk testified that Vance had told her after the shooting, “We got a message. It told us just Do It.” The judge found her credible. Her account, however, cut against the plaintiffs’ theory: if the young men consciously heard and recognized the words, the message was not subliminal, and as overt speech it would have been protected by the First Amendment.¹⁰

The Defense

Fulstone pushed the focus to the young men themselves. She argued they had lived “sad and miserable lives” whose troubles predated any contact with heavy metal. Cross-examining Phyllis Vance, she drew out testimony about an alcoholic and heavy-gambling stepfather, excessive corporal punishment in childhood, and a documented history of violence, including Vance’s attacks on his own mother.¹¹

She also attacked the science. “The courtroom is no place for reveries about the unknown capacity of the human mind,” she told the court.¹² On the constitutional question, she argued that the risk of ideas triggering “undesirable behavior” in a “small and unstable segment of the population” was “a small price to pay for a free society.”¹³

The band appeared each day in dark business suits. Frontman Rob Halford testified that the sounds identified as backward masking were the result of him exhaling as he sang, and he performed “Better by You, Better Than Me” a cappella from the witness stand to demonstrate no hidden command was in the vocal.⁶ “We’re in music for people to have a good time, not to die,” Halford said. Guitarist Glenn Tipton went into a studio and produced accidental backward phrases from the album including “Hey ma, my chair’s broken” and “Give me a peppermint.”⁸

The defense’s expert psychologist, Dr. Timothy E. Moore of York University, testified there was “no empirical scientific evidence to support the claim that subliminal messages are effective in any way,” calling the theory “pure gobblygook.”¹⁴ Dr. Donald Lunde, a Stanford psychiatry professor, attributed the shootings to the young men’s high-risk behavior and personal histories.⁹

The Ruling

On August 24, 1990, Judge Whitehead issued a roughly 100-page decision rejecting the lawsuit. He addressed the existence of the message and the question of causation separately.

On the recording, he acknowledged that something resembling “Do it” could be heard on “Better by You, Better Than Me,” but only after the location was pointed out and the sounds were isolated and amplified. Examining the 24-track master tapes, he found no tampering and concluded the sound was “the result of a chance combination” of the singer exhaling on one track and a guitar playing on another. “The words were not intentionally formed,” he wrote.³

On causation, he found the plaintiffs had not shown subliminal stimuli could “precipitate conduct of this magnitude.” The strongest evidence at trial, he wrote, showed subliminal effects producing at most anxiety, distress, or tension, nothing approaching a compulsion to commit suicide. He also cited the young men’s independent risk factors: behavioral problems at school, aggression, encounters with the law, drug and alcohol abuse, unstable employment, and violent fantasies.¹⁵

To win, the families needed a “clear, conscious and intentional act” by the defendants. Neither intentional placement nor a causal link was established. Whitehead did not, however, dismiss the suit as frivolous. “The position taken by the plaintiffs in this action was an arguable one,” he wrote, adding that anyone who took the defense verdict to mean the plaintiffs had presented no credible evidence would be mistaken.⁴

The One Thing the Plaintiffs Won: Sanctions Against CBS

Whitehead imposed $40,000 in sanctions against CBS Records for attempting to withhold the original master recordings during discovery, finding the label had delayed delivery of material essential to the case. Judas Priest paid its share of court costs and absorbed losses from canceling tour dates for the roughly six-week trial.³ According to Halford, the label picked up the band’s legal costs, understanding what a plaintiff’s verdict could have meant for the wider music industry.¹⁶

How the Ruling Has Been Used Since

There was no appeal, but Whitehead’s pre-trial holding that subliminal speech falls outside the First Amendment was picked up almost immediately. In Waller v. Osbourne (1991), a federal district court in Georgia cited Vance for its “in depth discussion of subliminal messages” while weighing a similar claim against Ozzy Osbourne over “Suicide Solution.” The Waller court agreed that proven subliminal content would not receive constitutional protection because it is “false, misleading or extremely limited in [its] social value,” but granted summary judgment to Osbourne, finding no evidence such messages existed and holding the song was protected under the Brandenburg v. Ohio incitement standard.¹⁷

Scholars have since treated the Reno proceedings as a warning about “liability science” in court. Moore, the defense expert, later wrote in Skeptical Inquirer that testimony like Shevrin’s, though delivered by a credentialed researcher, was “anomalous with prevailing scientific understanding” and would not have cleared the admissibility bar set three years later in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals.⁷

One thing the decision did not do was foreclose the theory entirely. Whitehead did not rule that music could never incite violence, and he did not categorically bar liability for subliminal content in recorded media. Halford said later he was “a little disappointed” the judge left the question “in limbo.”¹⁶

The Wider Wave of Music Suicide Suits

The Reno trial arrived in the middle of a broader cultural push against heavy metal. The Parents Music Resource Center, founded in 1985, had campaigned against artists it accused of promoting violence and the occult, and its “Filthy Fifteen” included Judas Priest’s 1984 track “Eat Me Alive.”⁸ It was also not the only case of its type. A 1988 California appellate decision in McCollum v. CBS, Inc. had already dismissed a similar claim against Ozzy Osbourne on First Amendment grounds, and Waller followed in 1991. Taken together, these cases tested and largely rejected the theory that recording artists can be held liable when a listener harms themselves after hearing their music.

1
Los Angeles Times. Dream Deceivers Documentary Review
2
Los Angeles Times. James Vance Dies Three Years After Suicide Attempt
3
UPI. Judge Rejects Subliminal Message Suit Against Judas Priest
4
Kenneth J. McKenna. Vance v. Judas Priest
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Rolling Stone. Judas Priest’s Subliminal Message Trial: Rob Halford Looks Back
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El País. When Judas Priest Were Accused of Inducing Two Fans to Kill Themselves
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ResearchGate. Scientific Consensus and Expert Testimony: Lessons From the Judas Priest Trial
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Treble. Judas Priest Better by You Better Than Me Backmasking Trial
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UPI. Subliminal Rock Messages Triggered Suicides, Expert Says
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Glendon College, York University. Scientific Consensus and Expert Testimony: Lessons From the Judas Priest Trial
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UPI. Mother Testifies Son Violent After Listening to Judas Priest Records
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Ultimate Classic Rock. Judas Priest Suicide Trial
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New York Times. Two Families Sue Heavy-Metal Band as Having Driven Sons to Suicide
14
Los Angeles Times. Defense Expert Testifies in Judas Priest Trial
15
The Wind. Judas Priest on Trial
16
Eddie Trunk. Rob Halford Reflects Back on Judas Priest’s Subliminal Message Trial
17
Justia. Waller v. Osbourne, 763 F. Supp. 1144