Kanye West

Kanye West’s recent legal troubles continue this week as NBC News reports the producer has been sued by his former property manager after being fired for refusing to work in allegedly unsafe conditions. According to the report, the property manager, Tony Saxon, refused a request from Kanye to remove all the windows and electricity from his Malibu home.

After Saxon refused, Kanye said he would be “considered an enemy if he did not comply,” and told him to “get the hell out.” The 32-year-old Saxon had worked for Kanye for around two months on a promised salary of $20,000 per week — although Saxon says Kanye only paid him twice, and one of those payments was alleged to have been allotted for the requested renovations. Saxon said Kanye’s goal for the house was to turn it into “a bomb shelter from the 1910s.”

To that end, some of the changes he requested included disconnecting the home from city plumbing and electric and replacing the stairs with slides. At first, Saxon said he thought it was meant to be an art project, but that “As we progress, it’s becoming clear that, no, he wants to live in here… He only wanted plants. He only wanted candles. He only wanted battery lights. And he just wanted to have everything open and dark… He wants to be on a privatized Wi-Fi network. He wants to have an alternate source of energy. He wants to have no doors, no windows, no fixtures, just concrete.” As he put it, “We were going to be gutting all of that out and sort of building him a Bat Cave” where he could “hide from the Clintons in and the Kardashians in.”

Of course, there were drawbacks. As Saxon noted, “You can’t keep food in that house, because you had no refrigerator left. You had no windows. I had sea gulls flying in.” According to Saxon’s attorney Ron Zambrano (who is also representing Lizzo’s former dancers in their own workplace dispute), “Ye has shown a reckless disregard toward his employees and has flouted the law in unbelievably dangerous ways throughout this entire project at the Malibu house.He continues his pattern of not paying his bills while treating workers terribly. No employee should have to suffer through the sort of working conditions Mr. Saxon was forced to endure, yet Ye showed no concern and merely wanted the work done, despite the hazardous and unsafe, not to mention illegal, actions he was trying to force the plaintiff to undertake.”

Last week, Kanye was asked to leave Venice and investigated by police after exposing his backside in public during a boat ride on the city’s famous canals. Meanwhile, former teachers from his now-defunct Donda Academy are also suing for workplace conditions and wrongful termination.