Kanye West has been accused of sexual assault in a new lawsuit that also names Universal Music as a defendant based on the fact that the alleged incident in 2010 occurred on the set of a shoot for La Roux’s ‘In For The Kill’ music video, released via Universal imprint Polydor. West was also signed to Universal’s Def Jam at the time.
The major label, the lawsuit claims, should have had a code of conduct in place that prevented West from assaulting the alleged victim while he was filming the video, not least because it knew about the rapper’s “publicly documented history of misogynistic behaviour”.
The lawsuit has been filed by a model called Jenifer ‘Jenn’ An with a court in New York under the city’s Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law. That law, introduced in 2018 to provide a civil remedy for victims of gender-motivated violence, was then amended in 2022 to remove the statute of limitations for people to bring lawsuits against alleged perpetrators, providing litigation is launched before 1 Mar 2025.
In that respect, it is similar to New York State’s Adult Survivor’s Act, which similarly removed the statute of limitations for a time, and which prompted some of the initial legal claims against Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs.
With the deadline for filing lawsuits under the ASA passing a year ago, some of the more recent lawsuits against Combs have also relied upon the Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, where alleged incidents happened in New York City.
Jesse S Weinstein, the attorney representing An, told reporters, “We are honoured and privileged to represent Ms An, who has displayed great courage to speak out against some of the most powerful men and entities within the entertainment industry. Everyone’s voice is important, and West cannot escape liability because of his success and notoriety”.
In the lawsuit, An alleges that she was assaulted while working on a music video for the La Roux track, which included West as a guest artist in the US digital single release. The shoot took place at New York City’s Chelsea Hotel.
She claims that, a few hours into the shoot, West arrived and ordered “female background actors/models to line up in the hallway”. He then “evaluated their appearances” before pointing to two of the women - one of whom was An - and “commanding that they follow him”.
An says that she was uncomfortable about the command, not least because she was wearing “revealing lingerie”, but nevertheless accompanied West and members of the video production team into a specific suite in the hotel.
There, she claims, West told the crew to focus the camera on her face as he choked her, “smothered [her] face with both of his hands”, “rammed several fingers down her throat, continuously moved them in and out, and gagged her to emulate forced oral sex”.
The lawsuit says that An struggled to breathe during this incident and “felt as if she had temporarily blacked out”. Meanwhile West screamed, “This is art, this is fucking art, I am like Picasso”.
It’s not the first time Universal has been pulled into a lawsuit making allegations of assault against one of its artists, it having been named as a defendant on a particularly bombastic lawsuit filed by a young producer against Combs earlier this year. It managed to get itself removed from that lawsuit and will likely seek to do the same here.
Whether it can do that will depend on what the court makes of the argument that the major should have implemented and enforced a code of conduct to protect performers appearing in videos made by its artists.
Universal, says An’s lawsuit, “knew or should have known that [West] was capable of sexually assaulting [her], given his publicly documented history of misogynistic behaviour”, and yet it “unreasonably failed to stop his conduct”.