Kanye West is seeking to overturn the $140,000 jury verdict awarded to handyman Tony Saxon after a recent two-week trial in Los Angeles.
Saxon testified he was severely injured while living and working at the $57 million Malibu mansion designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando that West, now known as Ye, purchased for $57 million in 2021. Saxon said Ye planned to transform the luxury contemporary beach house into an off-the-grid bunker and ordered it stripped of all plumbing, toilets, fixtures, cabinets, electricity, and a built-in concrete fireplace. When Ye sold the property three years later, it fetched $21 million, marking a steep loss.
In a new filing obtained by Rolling Stone, Ye’s lawyers Andrew and Catherine Cherkasky argued the $140,000 jury award was not supported by the evidence and should be set aside.
“This case went to the jury without a single admissible medical bill, without any medical records establishing injury, and without expert testimony grounded in any reliable causation or valuation methodology,” the lawyers wrote. They argued that the jury’s award of $50,000 for past economic loss and $50,000 for future economic loss “cannot stand.” They said no billing records were admitted and that a doctor testified only that Saxon’s treatment cost “about $50,000.”
The total award doesn’t make sense, they argued. “The jury’s own findings confirm the speculative nature of the claimed future damages. While it awarded $50,000 for future economic loss, it simultaneously awarded zero dollars for future pain and suffering, even though the physician’s recommendations for future procedures were premised entirely on the possibility that plaintiff would experience intermittent pain requiring treatment,” the lawyers wrote.
The trial record contains “no competent evidence supporting” the award, they concluded. “At a minimum, the court should order a new trial limited to damages.”
Saxon’s lawyer, Ronald Zambrano, said he expects the motion to fail. “We’ve reviewed the [filing] and it is defendants’ attempt to relitigate an issue that was already denied by the court prior to trial,” he said in a statement to Rolling Stone. “We have strong confidence the Judge will make the same decision, disagree with defendants’ reading of the law, and leave the jury’s verdict as is.”
At trial, Saxon had asked for $1.7 million in damages. Jurors found that Saxon was Ye’s employee, not an independent contractor, but they declined to impose punitive damages. They found that Saxon had not been wrongfully terminated and that Ye did not engage in “malice, oppression, or fraud.”
“It took a lot of discussion to get to $140,000. Some people wanted to go higher,” a juror who spoke with Rolling Stone on condition of anonymity said last week. “We thought [Saxon] was injured, but there were too many other nebulous things to consider.”
The juror said the panel meticulously dissected bank statements and canceled checks to determine how much of the $240,000 that Ye wired to Saxon in late 2021 had been used to pay workers and invoices, and how much should count toward the wages Saxon claimed he was still owed. “We figured he pretty much broke even,” the juror said.
Asked about Ye’s wild turn on the witness stand, when he appeared to fall asleep amid questioning, she and a fellow juror didn’t pull any punches. “He looked at us contemptuously. It was just a waste of our time. Either he was just bored, or he was falling asleep on the stand. Both are bad options. I was not impressed,” the female juror said.
“Oh, he fell asleep. I saw it,” the second juror, a man, told Rolling Stone. “I was kind of surprised. I could tell he’s not what some of my friends who still like him believe.”
Saxon’s lawyers called the mixed verdict “a vindication” for their client. “Obviously, it’s not as much as we asked for, but under the labor code, they have to pay attorney fees and costs. It’s going to be a lot more than $140,000 when it’s all said and done. The final judgment should be over $1 million,” Saxon’s lawyer Neama Rahmani, president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told Rolling Stone.
Rahmani and Zambrano said that before the trial, Ye demanded that Saxon pay the rapper-producer’s fees and issue a public apology. Saxon refused, they said. “In true David-vs.-Goliath fashion, Mr. Saxon stood firm against one of the biggest celebrities in the world, with the truth on his side,” Zambrano said in a statement last week.
“Although the jury found that Saxon qualified as an employee for certain purposes, they awarded no damages for lost wages, overtime, waiting-time penalties, retaliation, punitive damages, or any other statutory penalties,” Ye’s spokesman, Milo Yiannopoulos, said in a statement highlighting Ye’s victories. He also pointed to a portion of the verdict form where jurors found that Saxon performed “in the capacity of a contractor” while working for Ye. Based on that finding, he said, “we believe the damages award is legally barred.”
In his closing argument, Andrew Cherkasky portrayed Saxon as an unreliable witness who fabricated claims about injuries and unpaid wages after being let go from the project. “The lies are so deep and so wicked, not a thing can be believed that came out of his mouth,” Cherkasky said, calling Saxon a “professional victim.”
Cherkasky also praised Ye for taking the witness stand. “He answered the questions. He wasn’t sleeping, he was bored. This is beneath him,” Cherkasky argued. In rebuttal, Zambrano said Ye hardly deserved a “participation prize” for his brief appearance. “Who’s been here the rest of the time? You guys,” he told the jury of seven women and five men.
Zambrano argued Ye was gutting the Ando house without permits and had hired Saxon not as a licensed contractor but to keep the work discreet. He pointed jurors to a text message from Ye’s wife, Bianca Censori, who was working as an architectural consultant on the project in late 2021. “No permitting increases caution,” she wrote, apparently suggesting that the team find “quicker” solutions to problems to create “less red flags.”
Censori, a trained architect from Australia, testified before her husband, telling jurors that Ye had an aversion to stairs and windows, preferring “ramps and slides” and using “mesh as the barrier between indoor and out.” She said Saxon had told her he was a licensed contractor, a claim Saxon denied.
Text messages shown to jurors appeared to document Saxon complaining about a back injury suffered on the job. “I hurt my back and have been taking it easy,” he wrote to Ye in one text. In another message to Censori, he wrote, “My back is so fucked.”
© Melissa Auf der Maur