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A former Yeezy and Donda Academy employee claims Kanye West wanted to install a jail at his school to “cage” students, threatened to punch him during a “temper tantrum,” and gave preferential treatment to white employees, according to a new lawsuit obtained by Rolling Stone.
Trevor Phillips filed suit against the rapper, who now goes by Ye, on Tuesday in Los Angeles, joining a number of former employees who are suing the 46-year-old. The 42-page complaint gives a behind-the-scenes look at what Phillips says it’s like to work for the eccentric artist, including spontaneous firings, a late-night summons to Nobu, watching The Batman on mute, and awkwardly navigating Ye pretending to masturbate. He is seeking at least $35,000 for what he labels as whistleblower retaliation, discrimination based on race and a hostile workplace, among eight other causes of action. (A rep for West did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)
From the start of his nine-month employment in November 2022, Phillips, who is Black, says it was “immediately apparent” that Ye “treated the Black staff considerably worse than white employees” and would “scream and berate Black employees, while never even as much raising his tone at the white staff.”
Coming on board weeks after Ye’s fallout with Adidas and Gap over his antisemitic remarks, Phillips claims Ye continued to “double down” and make similar statements throughout his employment. Ye also threatened to go after the LGBTQ+ community “next,” according to the suit, because “gay people are controlled by Bill Gates so that they don’t have children for population control.”
Some of Ye’s “dangerous rhetoric” was repeated in front of Donda Academy students, according to the suit, and Ye allegedly once told two children that he wanted them to “shave their heads and that he intended to put a jail at the school – and that they could be locked in cages.”
When Phillips tried to push back against Ye’s “bigotry,” the artist “responded mercilessly, with incessant harassment, humiliation, and attempts to both mentally control, and destroy, Phillips,” the lawsuit filed by Shegerian & Associates claims. “Kanye’s ill-will towards the plaintiff ultimately culminated in a vulgar lashing in front of schoolchildren and their parents. Kanye even threatened Phillips with physical violence.”
Phillips says he was hired in November 2022 to work for the fashion line Yeezy, around a month after the rapper paraded a “White Lives Matter” shirt down the runway at his brand’s Paris Fashion Week show. The widespread criticism from the spectacle led to Ye unleashing a stream of antisemitic rhetoric, which prompted Adidas and Gap to sever their business relationships with Yeezy. Phillips’ role on what Ye dubbed the “Vertically Integrated Crew” was to now oversee projects related to “growing cotton and other plants to use as materials” for Yeezy projects. But because of the continued fallout, Phillips’ job quickly blended into work for the rapper’s private Christian school Donda Academy and a future self-sustainable community project.
Phillips was expected to be on call 24/7 for his all-encompassing role, according to the suit, and although he was promised pay of $100 per hour, Phillips allegedly made far less than that and some payments were delayed after the Yeezy bank accounts were frozen, the suit claims.
One of Phillips’ first tasks was to convert one of Ye’s Calabasas properties into a new campus for Donda Academy after a landlord broke their lease with Ye over his antisemitic comments. But by January 2023, Phillips says Ye scrapped those plans and instead wanted a dilapidated church to be the new facility. Given a deadline of a matter of weeks, Ye allegedly told Phillips he…
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