The mother of George Floyd’s daughter has sued Kanye West for $250m in the wake of his controversial comments about Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minnesota police officer.
The rapper sparked new controversy over the weekend by claiming that Floyd died from the drug Fentanyl and that a police officer’s knee “wasn’t even on his neck like that.”
Following the comments, civil rights attorney Lee Merritt, who represented Floyd’s family, took to Twitter to suggest that the family may take legal action against West.
And now Floyd’s family has issued a cease-and-desist letter to West for the comments he made on the Drink Champs podcast, which has now been taken down.
In the lawsuit filed by Roxie Washington, the mother of Gianna Floyd, lawyers said West made “false statements about George Floyd’s death to promote his brands, and increase marketing value and revenue for himself, his business partners, and associates.”
The lawyers also stated that West had used “malicious falsehoods” about Floyd in order to profit from his death and the Floyd family’s trauma.
“The interests of the child are priority,” Attorney Nuru Witherspoon, partner at The Witherspoon Law Group, said.
“George Floyd’s daughter is being traumatised by Kanye West’s comments and he’s creating an unsafe and unhealthy environment for her.”
“Kanye’s comments are a repugnant attempt to discount George Floyd’s life and to profit from his inhumane death,” added attorney Pat D Dixon III.
Floyd, a Black man, was killed in an altercation with police in Minneapolis in May 2020, with a nine-minute video showing Officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on his neck.
West made the claims in an appearance on the Drink Champs podcast on Saturday while discussing Candace Owens’s documentary The Greatest Lie Ever Sold: George Floyd and the Rise of BLM.
The fallout between the Floyd family and West comes just a couple of years after he was a major public ally in their fight for justice and was one of many public figures who joined in the 2020 protests that followed Floyd’s killing.
Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner Dr Andrew Baker told the Chauvin trial that Floyd’s heart disease and fentanyl use were contributing factors to his death, but they were not the direct cause.
The court was told that Floyd died because Chauvin had pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for nine-and-a-half minutes as he shouted “I can’t breathe.” The incident was captured by a passerby on video and quickly went viral, leading to racial justice protests across the country.
West’s recent round of controversy started after he wore a “White Lives Matter” t-shirt at a Paris fashion show.
He then took to Instagram where he posted screenshots of messages in which he stated that rapper Diddy was being controlled by Jews.
After his account was locked he went to Twitter and posted that he was tired and when he woke up he would go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE”, which saw his account there also locked.
West then conducted an interview with right-wing host Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
Unaired footage was then leaked to Vice in which West made a string of antisemitic comments as well as bizarre conspiracy theories.
In one comment, West said that he preferred his children with Kim Kardashian to learn about Hanukkah rather than Kwanzaa because “at least it will come with some financial engineering.”
He then did an interview on the Drink Champs podcast in which he continued to make antisemitic remarks and spread misinformation about George Floyd’s death. The episode has now been pulled from YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music.
In a Monday night interview, he also told News Nation’s Chris Cuomo that a “Jewish underground media mafia” is trying to destroy his career.
