A lawsuit concerning Ye’s, formerly known as Kanye West, botched attempt to remodel a Malibu mansion designed by Tadao Ando came to a close today. A jury deemed the musician and entrepreneur liable in a lawsuit for $140,000. The plaintiff cited damages resulting from his work as a handyman.
The plaintiff, Tony Saxon, initially filed the suit in September 2023 for $1.7 million. Saxon pursued the lawsuit seeking compensation regarding “serious injuries” he had incurred during his work, both as a supervisor and the site’s de facto security guard, before a wrongful termination. The suit maintained that during employment, he lived at the gutted construction site and was instructed to sleep on a mattress atop the mansion’s concrete floor. Saxon asserted he experienced pain in his neck and back as a result.
The jury ultimately determined Saxon was not wrongfully terminated and that Ye did not engage in “malice, oppression, or fraud.” The resulting $140,000 covers lost wages and medical expenses, with the jurors declining to award damages for future pain and suffering but deferring the imposition of punitive damages. Ye will still be responsible for Saxon’s attorney fees.
Ye purchased the concrete mansion by the Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese architect in 2021 for $57.3 million, promptly after his divorce from Kim Kardashian. Ye’s vision for the house was an off-grid, modernist, bomb shelter. Saxon was originally hired to only remove the home’s cabinets, a plan that evolved into removing the jacuzzi, the fireplace, the plumbing and electricity, and even its toilets.
In the March 10 testimony of Bianca Censori, Ye’s Australian architect wife, she revealed that her husband had an aversion to both stairs and windows, seeking to construct slides and ramps to connect the floors. Ye sold the house in 2023 with the bomb shelter plans unrealized and the slides yet to be installed. The price was $21 million—a loss of $36 million.
After the house was sold, the buyer, Steven Belmont of Belwood Investments, planned to restore the house to its original state, eventually tapping in architecture firm Marmol Redziner to oversee restoration efforts. This was until Belmont relisted the home for $39 million, still unfinished, and once more sold at a loss to an investor group led by a luxury home investor.
During Ye’s testimony on March 6, he appeared to struggle to stay awake while being questioned. NBC News reported that he would close his eyes for long periods of time and didn’t know if he was the CEO of one of his companies, Yeezy Construction. This suit is among a series of legal battles the rapper is facing, including sexual harassment charges by a former Yeezy employee, and roughly a dozen lawsuits filed by former employees of his short-lived private school, Donda Academy.
Ye’s mistreatment alongside his mercurial courtroom behavior was only further stressed in court. Ye’s team claimed that during Saxon’s employment, Ye had treated Saxon to Nobu and reserved him a hotel room, going as far as to draw a bath for him on one occasion. A member of the jury told Rolling Stone, “It took a lot of discussion to get to $140,000. Some people wanted to go higher, We thought [Saxon] was injured, but there were too many other nebulous things to consider.”
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