George Floyd’s family are readying a $250 million defamation lawsuit against Kanye West. This comes after West made untrue, incendiary comments about Floyd’s death in an interview.
Appearing on the Drink Champs podcast recently, West claimed that Floyd had died from fentanyl, rather than police officer Derek Chauvin placing his knee with force on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. West said that Chauvin’s knee “wasn’t even on [Floyd’s] neck like that.”
West then likened Floyd to the designer Virgil Abloh, who died from cancer last year. A reputable doctor said in court last year that Floyd had died from a lack of oxygen and not from the small traces of fentanyl that had also been found in his system at the time of his death.
Following West’s ridiculous comments, Floyd’s family immediately considered legal action, and now it has been revealed that the mother of Floyd’s daughter and the beneficiary of his estate intends to sue West for “harassment, misappropriation, defamation and infliction of emotional distress”.
A press release from the family’s attorneys claimed that West “knowingly [made] blatantly false statements about George Floyd’s death to promote his brands, and increase marketing value and revenue for himself, his business partners, and associates.”
Nuru Witherspoon of Witherspoon Law Group said in a statement, “The interests of the child are priority. George Floyd’s daughter is being retraumatised by Kanye West’s comments and he’s creating an unsafe and unhealthy environment for her.”
West had also made anti-Semitic comments during the Drink Champs interview, claiming that “the Jewish media blocked [me] out”, a said that comedian Pete Davidson is a “heroin addict.” The interview was later removed from online streaming platforms, and the show host, N.O.R.E., has apologised to any listeners who may have been offended by West’s awful diatribe.