The family of George Floyd is planning to file a $250 million lawsuit against Kanye West over the mogul rapper’s suggestion that fentanyl killed Floyd, not the knee restraint used by former Minneapolis police officer and convicted murderer Derek Chauvin.
Roxie Washington, the mother of Floyd’s daughter who is still a minor, is seeking to sue Mr. West for “misappropriation, defamation and infliction of emotional distress,” according to a joint statement from Witherspoon Law Group and Dixon & Dixon Attorneys at Law.
The law firms said that a cease-and-desist letter was sent to Mr. West, who legally changed his name to Ye.
“The interests of the child are priority. George Floyd’s daughter is being retraumatized by Kanye West’s comments and he’s creating an unsafe and unhealthy environment for her,” Nuru Witherspoon, a partner at the Witherspoon Law Group, said in the statement.
The law firms accuse Mr. West of spreading falsehoods in an attempt to profit from Floyd’s death when the rapper said “They hit him with the fentanyl. If you look, [Chauvin’s] knee wasn’t even on his neck like that,” during a recent appearance on the “Drink Champs” podcast.
The lawsuit comes in the wake of a Connecticut jury ordering conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to pay nearly $1 billion for suggesting that the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was faked.
A First Amendment expert told NPR that the lawsuit has an uphill battle in proving its claim of emotional distress.
“This requires the plaintiff to prove that the statements were intentional or reckless, outside the bounds of accepted decency and morality and causally connected to some viable harm,” Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, told the outlet. “This tort is often a difficult claim to collect on, especially with a media defendant.”
Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker testified during Chauvin’s trial last year that Floyd died from cardiac arrest due to the former cop’s arrest tactics, specifically “neck compression.”
Dr. Baker testified that Floyd’s heart disease and fentanyl use contributed to his death but were not the cause of it.
During his autopsy, however, Dr. Baker said that Floyd had a “fatal level of fentanyl” in his system under normal circumstances, according to court documents. A state jury found Chauvin guilty of murder and manslaughter for the May 2020 killing of Floyd. He was sentenced to 22 years for both state charges and 21 years on separate federal charges.
The incident was captured on video and set off a summer of protests and riots that caused more than $2 billion in property damage, according to Axios.
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