Ye is asking a judge to exclude out-of-workplace social media posts attributed to him and to conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos as evidence in the upcoming trial of a lawsuit filed by a former security guard at the rapper’s Donda Academy.
The plaintiff in the Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit is Benjamin Deshon Provo. Ye was formerly known as Kanye West.
In his lawsuit filed in April 2024, Provo contends Ye, now 49, chided him for wearing his hair in dreads, which Provo practiced in keeping with his Muslim faith. Provo worked at Donda Academy and for Yeezy, Ye’s apparel company.
On Tuesday, Ye’s lawyers filed court papers asking Judge Brock T. Hammond to find that many of the posts have nothing to do with the case. Many of the subject postings are attached to Ye’s attorneys’ court papers and in some of them the singer talks about loving Adolph Hitler, being a Nazi and Ye’s support for Diddy.
“The court should not permit plaintiff to transform this action into a referendum on Ye’s or Mr. Yiannopoulos’s public personas or everything either individual has ever said, posted, reposted, followed or allegedly communicated,” Ye’s attorneys contend in their court papers.
Yiannopoulos is a Ye political adviser who later claimed credit for setting up the 2022 dinner meeting between the rapper, President Trump and conservative commentator/influencer Nick Fuentes.
The Ye lawyers say their concern about prejudice to their client is especially significant because both Ye and Yiannopoulos entered the period of Bravo’s employment as public figures with “pre-existing and widely publicized personas for provocative and controversial public commentary and social-media activity.”
The public stands existed independently of Bravo and long before the employment relationship alleged in the plaintiff’s lawsuit, according to Ye’s attorneys’ court papers.
In addition, many of the posts were not written by Ye or Yiannopoulos and instead originated from accounts apparently impersonating, parodying, reposting or commenting upon the artist, according to Ye’s lawyers’ pleadings.
So, the posts should therefore be excluded, or Bravo’s attorneys must at least offer proof to the judge outside a jury’s presence that the materials are authentic, admissible and relevant, the Ye attorneys further state in their court papers.
In his suit filed in April 2024, Provo alleges that members of the rapper’s management team required Provo to choose between “critical aspects of his self-identity and financial stability.”