MINNEAPOLIS – Roxie Washington, the mother of George Floyd’s daughter, announced on Tuesday that the family has filed a $250 million lawsuit against rapper Kanye West after he recently made remarks on Floyd’s death.
The announcement was shared in a press release from the legal team representing Floyd’s family, Witherspoon Law Group, and Dixon & Dixon Attorneys at law.
Floyd’s family has not only filed the suit against West, but also issued him a cease-and-desist letter for his comments about Floyd’s murder at the hands of police.
West made his controversial statement while appearing on the Drink Champs podcast, saying Floyd died from fentanyl use and not from the Minneapolis police mishandling his arrest. The episode is no longer on YouTube.
During testimony in the case of the man charged with Floyd’s death, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Hennepin County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker said that while Floyd’s heart disease and fentanyl use were contributing factors in his death, they were not the main cause.
Floyd was determined to have died due to Chauvin pressing his knee down on Floyd’s neck for 9-and-a-half minutes while he told officers he couldn’t breathe, according to Dr. Vik Bebarta, an emergency physician, toxicologist, and professor at the University of Colorado in Denver.
This isn’t West’s first comment that has gotten him in trouble. The rapper was set to appear on an episode of Lebron James’ “The Shop,” but after filming for the episode was wrapped, HBO decided not to air the episode due to “hate speech” used by West, according to CBS News.
Many have questioned the rapper’s motives as he has also been on the hot seat for anti-semitic tweets he released hours after getting his Twitter back and for wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt.
In the release, Washington said that West made “false statements about George Floyd’s death to promote his brands, and increase marketing value and revenue for himself, his business partners, and associates.”
Nuru Witherspoon, a member of the legal team representing Floyd’s family, shared that the priority is protecting Floyd’s daughter from the “malicious falsehoods” spread by West in order to profit from his death.
“The interests of the child are priority,” Witherspoon said in the release. “George Floyd’s daughter is being traumatized by Kanye West’s comments and he’s creating an unsafe and unhealthy environment for her.”
