A model who claimed Kanye West suddenly choked and pornographically gagged her with his fingers on a La Roux music video set has submitted new affidavits to corroborate her claims. They include alleged Instagram exchanges from La Roux, who remembered the choking incident vividly, writing, “I could never forget that, it was horrific,” according to court documents obtained by Rolling Stone.
Jennifer An, who was a finalist on America’s Next Top Model in 2009, sued West for sexual assault under New York City’s Gender Motivated Violence Protection Act in November 2024. What was supposed to be an exciting role as a background actress for a remix of La Roux’s song “In for the Kill” in September 2010, turned into a “humiliating and degrading” experience when West allegedly singled out An during the shoot. “Give me the Asian girl,” West reportedly ordered.
Going off-script with the camera rolling, West allegedly choked An with both his hands, smeared her makeup, and then “rammed several fingers down her throat, continuously moving them in and out,” effectively “emulat[ing] forced oral sex.” “This is art,” West yelled, according to the lawsuit. “This is fucking art. I am like Picasso.”
In January, West’s team filed a motion to dismiss An’s lawsuit on a variety of grounds, including the argument that because West’s conduct “occurred in the course of producing expressive” art, his actions should be shielded by free-speech protections.
An’s lawyers pushed back on that notion in a new filing on Tuesday and attached five exhibits that they say bolster An’s claims. “We disagree with [West’s] contention that the alleged sexual assault of Ms. An was protected artistic expression,” attorney Jesse S. Weinstein, who is a partner at Phillips & Associates and counsel at Arcé Law Group, tells Rolling Stone. “Our filing sets out substantial corroborating evidence supporting the allegations, including contemporaneous communications and witness testimony. We believe the record makes clear that the claims have a substantial basis in law and fact and should proceed so that the evidence can be fully examined in court.”
Rolling Stone has reached out to attorneys for West for comment.
The documents include screenshots of a lengthy exchange between An and La Roux’s verified Instagram account. (In the messages, La Roux — a.k.a. Elly Jackson — provides an email address associated with her full name.)
In the 2024 messages, An reaches out to the “Bulletproof” singer through the official La Roux account to ask whether the singer remembered the incident. Jackson confirms that she does, according to the court documents, writing: “I have never seen the footage (thankfully) and obviously I asked for it to never be used or for it to be seen as you were understandably very concerned about anyone or your family seeing it.”
“I’m so sorry it happened,” Jackson added, according to the lawsuit.
The court documents show additional messages where Jackson acknowledges that she previously publicly referred to the incident, but told An she felt that “it wasn’t my story to tell” and that West “already threatened me in some way.” Jackson added, per the documents, “He wanted to remind me of his power and status and threatened me with my career essentially. I’ve obviously continued to say how I feel about him regardless but I haven’t told your story out of respect for you.”
In 2020, Jackson said West caught wind of her commentary and demanded she write him an apology email, which she said she did ironically, with a “massive grin on my face.”
Reps for Jackson did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.Also included in the exhibits is a signed statement from Liz Martins, a makeup artist who was on set that day, which offers further corroboration. Martins wrote that she saw West “forcefully put his fingers down [An’s] mouth and told her to, ‘Suck on them.’”
“This sexual assault was not a part of the script,” Martins added. “Everyone on set was shocked and nervous to step in because of Kanye’s influence. Afterwards, [An] was crying and I heard her repeatedly say, ‘My mom is going to see this. I don’t want my mom to see this.’”
Michelle An — who is unrelated to the plaintiff, model Jennifer An — also submitted an affirmation. She said that from her vantage point on set, she did not directly see West place his fingers inside An’s mouth or around her neck. However, she recalled that West stood over the model and appeared to “move his thumb back and forth across the outside of [the] plaintiff’s mouth.”
Regarding the rest of An’s claims about West’s actions, Michelle An wrote that she was “not saying that it did not happen, only that, from where I was located on the set, I did not — and could not — see it happen.”
The rest of the exhibits contain reports from a third party private investigation firm who tracked down other crew members on the shoot, who both recalled West sticking his fingers down An’s mouth. West is currently in the middle of a trial for a separate civil lawsuit from a former worker at his $57 million Malibu mansion in Los Angeles. He also faces a second sexual assault lawsuit from his former assistant Lauren Pisciotta, who sued him in 2024. He denies her claims.
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
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In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
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He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.