Kanye West arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party on Feb. 9, 2020, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
A man who once served as a property caretaker and security guard to Kanye West has sued the famous rapper for firing him and for allegedly failing to pay him for hours of labor he says he performed amid “dangerous” conditions and increasingly surreal demands.
Tony Saxon filed a 40-page lawsuit in the Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles and alleged Ye asked him to do unsafe things to his Malibu, California, property including removing its windows and electricity.
Over a series of months in the fall of 2021, Saxon alleges the rapper promised to pay him $20,000 a week for some of the projects to stylize his home but when things spun out of control and Saxon’s back could bear no more weight due to injury, the former project manager alleges Ye fired him abruptly.
Saxon, who also lived in one of Ye’s guest homes on the property, said the rapper was often unwilling to communicate with him and it was difficult to relay aspects of the projects he wanted to be completed because of his “preference for shorter text messages, bullet points,” the complaint states.
It was during a “team meeting,” when Ye demanded Saxon have the electricity throughout his house removed and the windows taken out as well. According to the complaint, when Saxon told Ye that he would be unable to move generators inside of the home because it would pose a fire hazard, Ye “raised his voice… threatened plaintiff [and began] claiming he would be considered an enemy if he did not comply.
“Faced with such dangerous demands, plaintiff chose not put others or himself at risk and was subsequently told by defendant to ‘get the hell out,”” Saxon’s lawsuit states.
Saxon told NBC he was expected to make Ye’s house look like a “bomb shelter from the 1910s” and that he wanted to achieve an antique look by tearing out his existing custom bathrooms and windows and “replacing stairs with slides.”
He told NBC they were “sort of building him a Bat Cave where he said he could ‘hide from the Clintons in and the Kardashians in.’”
Saxon alleges he was forced to sleep in “makeshift conditions” before he was fired and Ye demanded he work 16-hour shifts each day.
He was sleeping near “open insulation” at one point, his lawsuit claims.
His boss, however, was telling him he “did not want to be ‘accessible’ to the government” Saxon told NBC.
Ye and his attorneys have not commented on the lawsuit.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
