Baby one thing about it… Kanye’s lawyers STAY busy.
Kanye West truly does his part in making sure that the legal system is being productive. According to TMZ, Nichol Lechmanik is suing West for assault, battery and negligence. You may remember in January, Ye got into a heated confrontation with paparazzi as he was driving away from his daughter North West’s basketball game, along with his new wife Bianca Censori.
Apparently, Ye noticed he was being followed and stopped to confront the photographers. Lechmanik wasn’t even the first photographer Ye argued with, but soon enough his attention turned to her. According to Lechmanik, Ye was angrily confronting a different paparazzo, going through the man’s pockets and she claims she feared the rapper might have had a weapon on him.
In the lawsuit, Lechmanik says she was terrified he would come after her next and he did. Video shows Ye approaching her as she sat in the driver’s seat of her car, recording him with her phone and yelling, “You all ain’t gonna run up on me like that!”
Ye told her, “If I say stop, stop with your cameras.” Then he ripped her phone out of her hands and tossed it, she then says it landed into oncoming traffic.
While obviously this could have been handled differently, it’s a well known fact that paparazzi can get out of line a lot of times. Also, I can’t just not point out the whole “scary Black man” trope that’s being insinuated here, but Ye didn’t do himself any favors in that regard. Like… she thought he “might have a weapon,” really?
Anyway, the incident was caught on video, so expect a settlement. Although Ye was named a suspect in local law enforcement’s battery investigation—and despite a long history of beefing with photographers—he was never charged. What do you guys think? Should Ye have to pay up on this one or was he simply advocating for his privacy?
