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.”
‘Karma’s a Bitch’: Boy George on Why Culture Club Recreated Their Biggest Hit With AI
More than 40 years after its original release, Boy George and Culture Club have rerecorded their chart-topping hit, “Karma Chameleon,” using AI to recreate the vocal characteristics of the original 1983 recording. Alongside digital formats, the release will be available on vinyl in red, gold and green, the colors referenced in the song, featuring reimagined cover art. The rerecord marks the launch of Artist Included, a music technology company co-founded by Boy George’s manager, Paul Kemsley, and entertainment attorney and film producer Jeremy Rosen. Boy George serves as creative director.
Asked why he decided to recreate the song, Boy George has a simple answer: “Control!,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Having some say over where it goes. ‘Karma Chameleon’ is a secret weapon. It’s a song you starve the audience for because they want to hear it, and live, it’s always been a real pleasure to sing it. But in terms of what it does commercially, it’s like having something really powerful with your name on it, and you have no say about where it goes.”
The idea for the rerecord was prompted by a commercial sync license for “Karma Chameleon” involving Richard Branson for Virgin Voyages. Culture Club signed to Branson’s Virgin Records in 1982, and Boy George has maintained a close relationship with the entrepreneur ever since. According to Kemsley, Branson paid approximately $4 million for the deal ($2 million of which went to the master recording rights holders), while Boy George received only an appearance fee because he has never owned the masters for his biggest song.
“Karma’s a bitch,” Boy George states. “When we wrote that song, we weren’t looking 40 years ahead. We weren’t thinking of longevity. That song, because of the context of when it was recorded, the social feeling has stayed with people. It’s become part of people’s lives. Having control over it again, to a certain extent, is very exciting.”
The rerecord has a warmer vocal tone and sits slightly lower in the mix than the original, but is faithful enough to it that it plays like a remaster. The rerecording was produced by JJ Blair and Culture Club’s guitarist Roy Hay with additional production by song’s original producer, Steve Levine. Prior to the session, the AI was trained using archival demos licensed from Levine who had preserved them for decades. The instrumentation was newly recorded by Hay, Culture Club bassist Mikey Craig and session musicians. Only the vocal performance is AI-assisted.
“When I went into the studio to record it, I was like a pub singer imitating myself,” says Boy George. “You listen to where you pace things [sings the first line of ‘Karma Chameleon’]. You listen to where you put the voice: in your nose or your throat or chest. What you do instinctively as a 22-year-old, you don’t do as a 40-year-old or a 65-year-old. There’s a clipped way of singing it, which you forget through playing it live so many times. It was very European-sounding and youthful. I’ve taken it somewhere much more blues-y over the years, dragging out the notes. It’s about the nuance. When you sing something live over 40 years, it changes shape. It’s interesting to take it back to the original recording and recapture that feeling.”
Getting close to the original vocal is a hurdle for most musicians whose voices change over time. It took 18 months for Artist Included’s AI to work out the kinks. In the first iteration, Boy George sounded like “Pinky and Perky, two pigs on helium in a cartoon,” says Kemsley, referring to a children’s television series where the titular characters sing in high-pitched, fast-paced voices. The technology is now refined, and the plan is to rerecord Culture Club’s and Boy George’s entire back catalogs. Kemsley claims this will take two weeks, or as long as it takes Boy George to sing every song.
“I was a naysayer,” admits Boy George. “I was like, ‘This will never work.’ But I actually prefer this version [of ‘Karma Chameleon’]. For me, as the person that sang it originally, and re-sang it, what I love about this version, it has the sound of that time, but the warmth and experience and integrity of everything I’ve learned in my life.”
Kemsley, who has managed Boy George since 2014, frames the project as an attempt to rebalance longstanding industry economics. “This record has been making millions of dollars for [almost] 45 years, and George hasn’t,” says Kemsley. “The whole thing seems terribly unjust. You sign your life away at the age of 22, then have to wait 35 years to get the reversions, but you still don’t get any master recording income. Over the years, bands try to get their masters back and they never get them, with the major labels claiming they are work-for-hire.”
To put this in context, a record company often owns or controls master recording rights, a term stipulated when it signs an artist. That covers the music; the lyrics and composition are an entirely separate right known as publishing, which, by contrast, follows the composition, and therefore the song through every new recording. As a result, rerecords create a new master recording, and can benefit publishing by re-engaging the artist and generating renewed interest in the underlying work.
When it comes to rerecords, many artists are restricted to a certain length of time during which they are forbidden from releasing a new, faithful version to the original. Longstanding artists sometimes use Section 203 of the U.S. Copyright Act to reclaim rights to their masters after 35 years. They are rarely successful, as record companies often argue the masters were created as work made for hire.
The way Artist Included is structured, the artist receives the lion’s share of revenue. “The industry I was in no longer exists,” Boy George points out. “Artists like me are expected to carry on following that model. I haven’t done that for years. I used to say I’m the only person who realizes the ‘80s are over. You want to keep the spirit of that moment to some extent, but you move on. AI is not going anywhere, so having that conversation is exciting. And being ahead of the game in terms of how people use it, is also quite exciting for me.”
Considering Culture Club’s acrimonious split with their former drummer, Jon Moss, which resulted in a hefty settlement, rerecords of their songs also have the benefit of bypassing the need for his approval to use the original master recordings, which have four-way songwriting credit between its members.
“He still gets something from it,” clarifies Boy George. “Jon is a part of what we did [originally as a band].” But Kemsley is quick to point out that Moss is not a part of what they’re doing now with the rerecords, and is not entitled to any percentage of it. The band will see an increase in publishing, and as a credited songwriter, Moss will continue to receive publishing income, while the new master revenues do not involve him.
The next song queued up for rerecord is another signature Culture Club hit, “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” and Artist Included’s AI is primed, having retained Boy George’s voice for training purposes. The company has also been in conversations with publishing companies and other artists, mainly from the Eighties and Nineties, though no names are being disclosed yet. Kemsley says the conversations have not been a hard sell.
“People will react to what they see and hear,” says Boy George. “It’s much more powerful when people see it released and see what can happen.”
Kemsley notes Boy George turns 65 the day before the release of the new “Karma Chameleon,” which is the retirement age in the UK. “We’re not retiring,” Kemsley clarifies. “Far from it. We’re going back to the beginning, and we’re going to do it all again. We’re going to change the way revenue flows through to the artist. And we’re going to have some real fun with it.”