The public apology published in the Wall Street Journal for his years of antisemetic comments issued in January by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and his explanation that it was the result of a brain injury and subsequent bipolar disorder are now being scrutinized after his attorneys repeated in a legal filing this week that similar references he made in the workplace were part of his creative process and therefore protected as artistic expression.
The rapper’s attorney, Andrew and Katie Cherkasky, filed in the California Court of Appeals seeking to halt a workplace harassment lawsuit filed by a former Yeezy marketing staffer from moving forward after it cleared an initial hurdle in a lower court. In the suit, the ex-staffer claims that while she worked at his lifestyle company promoting his Vultures 1 album in 2024, Ye compared himself to Hitler, sent her pornographic material and texted calling her a “bitch.” An attorney for the former Yeezy marketing staffer, who is Jewish, said when the suit was filed last year that the rap mogul “waged a relentless and deliberate campaign of antisemitism and misogyny against my client.”
Such antisemitic and misogynistic language from the rapper and star producer has burst into public view several times over the past few years, most notably on his X feed, where last year he wrote missives like, “I LOVE HITLER NOW WHAT BITCHES,” “IM A NAZI” and “Hitler was sooooo fresh.” But in late January, the mercurial rapper placed a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal, taking back some of his antisemitic statements and attributing his hateful rants to a brain injury from a car accident that occurred over 20 years ago; the right frontal lobe of his brain was injured in a car accident, he said, adding that “it wasn’t properly diagnosed until 2023,” when he was told he has bipolar disorder.
“I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people. … I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state and am committed to accountability, treatment and meaningful change,” Ye wrote. His letter received a largely optimistic but cautious reaction regarding his potential future words and actions.
However, this week’s filing in the workplace harassment case, which his attorneys issued just a month after his splashy mea culpa made headlines, seems to skirt accountability for any hateful language used toward the ex-staff member in favor of a unique interpretation of First Amendment rights.
“The communications she challenges — creative directives, conceptual drafts, provocative imagery, marketing strategy and staffing decisions shaping a public-facing message — were not collateral to Ye’s art; they were part of its development,” the filing states. It echoes the prior motion filed in the case to strike her complaint down under California’s anti-SLAPP statute. When the case was before the lower court, the attorneys made the First Amendment argument that “Ye is not merely a creator; he is art. Ye’s public and private personas form a continuous, provocative performance that challenges societal taboos surrounding race, religion, gender, power, politics and censorship.”
The judge overseeing this case didn’t seem to appreciate the filing and its premise, calling it “rife with defects, specious arguments, and misstatements of law” and indicating that his witness declarations were “totally lacking in personal knowledge or proper foundation upon which to base their asserted opinions.” West was left on the hook for the ex-staffer’s attorney’s fees for the time he spent trying to kill the lawsuit, to the tune of $79,000; she’d sought around $20,000 more than that.
Ye’s artistic expression — his life being the art, the argument states — being used as a legal shield raises plenty of questions about parameters and legal limitations. His legal team is doubling down on the notion that this gives the rap mogul carte blanche to use hate speech at will, even to allegedly degrade the staff at his companies. The plaintiff in the case argues that the First Amendment, and the freedoms it affords, don’t include workplace harassment. The Court of Appeals in Los Angeles will be the decider; if the appeal fails, the lawsuit moves to the discovery phase.
In addition to this case, Ye is in court this week in a case over the California home he purchased for $57.3 million in 2021, which was subsequently destroyed and possibly led to the bodily harm of a man who claims Ye forced him to live there around the clock. Both Ye and his wife, Bianca Censori, are expected to testify at the jury trial.