With his two reportedly sold-out concerts in Russia canceled amid a messy dispute, Kanye West is looking for better news on the legal front in California.
The artist now known as Ye has filed a new motion in Los Angeles seeking to dismiss the wrongful termination and harassment lawsuit brought by a staffer involved in Ye’s now-defunct and highly controversial K-12 private Christian school, Donda Academy. A trial is scheduled for January.
The staffer, Murphy Aficionado, sued Ye in November 2024, alleging that his job as a Yeezy project manager became a living “nightmare” after Ye purportedly hired him in late 2022 at $125 an hour. Aficionado claims he routinely worked 70-hour weeks and sometimes slept at the office to meet Ye’s demands, including work on a plan to move Donda Academy to a new “decrepit property” without the necessary permits. His lawsuit includes a text in which Ye allegedly wrote, “I need to pay you for your time.”
Aficionado alleges in his lawsuit that Ye subjected him to a daily barrage of bigoted and antisemitic remarks, yelled at him, and made disparaging comments about his Filipino tattoos. According to the complaint, Ye told him on one occasion, “The Jews are out to get me. They froze my bank account. The Jews got Kim and my kids,” referring to his now ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.
In his new motion for summary judgment, Ye is asking the court to resolve the case in his favor without a trial. He argues that Aficionado never worked for Yeezy and instead taught only a temporary, part-time engineering class at Donda Academy that ended when the school shut down. Ye says Aficionado was paid $52 an hour for the teaching job and that the school’s principal never heard him complain about his working conditions.
“There was never any employment relationship between Yeezy and plaintiff. Plaintiff did not submit an employment application, receive an offer letter, there is no record of his onboarding, he has no personnel file, he was never provided an employee email account, he had no work schedule, or supervisory assignment,” the new motion obtained by Rolling Stone argues.
According to the new filing, Aficionado’s claims should fail because, although his discovery responses identify Ye as his alleged harasser, they “describe no particular incident, identify no particular comment connecting the alleged conduct to a protected characteristic.”
“Plaintiff’s sensational allegations in the complaint read more like material for tabloid headlines than a case supported by evidence,” the new filing states. “When required under oath to identify the facts supporting his claims, plaintiff supplied rote conclusions and vague assertions. His responses identify no particular discriminatory comment or harassment incident, no dated sequence connecting a complaint to an adverse decision, and no compensation rate or formation date for the alleged contract.”
Attempts to reach Aficionado’s lawyers for comment were not immediately successful Thursday. Ye’s lawyers did not respond to a request for further comment. A hearing on the motion is set for Dec. 17.
In his lawsuit, Aficionado described meetings at the Beverly Hills Waldorf Astoria that he said left him deeply disturbed. At one alleged meeting, in November 2022, Aficionado encountered Ye’s wife, Bianca Censori, topless in the suite and tried to leave, but Ye ordered him to stay, the lawsuit claims. Ye then referred to a lawyer who had just departed as “a Jewish spy,” and later left Aficionado waiting while he had loud sex with Censori in a nearby bedroom, the complaint alleges. Aficionado said Ye returned wearing a T-shirt bearing a swastika and asked, “Don’t you like my shirt?”
The lawsuit is not the first filed by a purported Yeezy project manager alleging mistreatment. At a trial last March, Tony Saxon was awarded $140,000 for injuries he suffered while working at Ye’s $57 million Malibu beach house.
