Kanye West, the musician known as Ye, has been ordered to pay another $181,433 in his Malibu mansion debacle, seven months after a jury found him liable for $140,000 in damages to Tony Saxon at trial.
In a new ruling obtained by Rolling Stone, Los Angeles
County Superior Court Judge Brock Hammond ordered West to pay $147,000 in attorneys’ fees and $34,433.93 in costs to Saxon’s legal team at West Coast Trial Lawyers. The firm had sought substantially more, but Hammond initially proposed an even smaller award. After Saxon’s lawyer, Ron Zambrano, challenged the tentative amount as too low, the judge reconsidered and increased it.
“I respect Judge Hammond’s openness to consider my argument why his initial assessment was perhaps missing a critical point. Though I believe the value of what we brought to get Mr. Saxon his verdict is above where Judge Hammond ultimately landed,” Zambrano tells Rolling Stone.
A spokesman for West gloated and called the ruling “humiliating” for the other side, but Ye’s lawyers had argued that Saxon should receive no attorneys’ fees at all.
Saxon sued West in 2003 and told jurors last March that he suffered serious injuries while living and working at the Malibu mansion that West purchased for $57 million in 2021. Saxon testified that West planned to turn the luxury beachfront home, designed by prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando, into an off-the-grid bunker. He said West ordered workers to remove the home’s plumbing, toilets, fixtures, cabinets, electrical systems and a built-in concrete fireplace. West sold the gutted property three years later for $21 million, $36 million less than he paid for it.
Saxon said he was misclassified as an independent contractor and severely injured his back and neck on the project. He claimed West failed to secure workers’ compensation coverage and that he was still owed substantial compensation. He asked for $1.7 million in compensatory damages. In a mixed verdict, the jury awarded $100,000 for past and future medical expenses and another $40,000 for past pain and suffering. Jurors declined to award any damages for future pain and suffering and did not impose punitive damages. They found Saxon had not been wrongfully terminated and that West 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 explained. “We thought [Saxon] was injured, but there were too many other nebulous things to consider.”
The juror says the panel meticulously dissected bank statements and canceled checks to determine how much of the $240,000 that West 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 owed. “We figured he pretty much broke even,” the juror said.
Asked about West’s wild turn on the witness stand, when he appeared to fall asleep amid his examination, she and a fellow juror said they weren’t impressed. “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,” the female juror said.
“Oh, he fell asleep. I saw it,” the second juror, a man, told Rolling Stone.
West’s wife, Bianca Censori, an architect from Australia who worked on the Ando house, testified that West had an aversion to stairs and windows, preferring “ramps and slides” and “trying mesh as the barrier between indoor and out.” She said Saxon told her that he was a licensed contractor, a claim Saxon denied.
West is appealing the $140,000 judgment.
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