14 DAY TRIAL // Kanye West has changed his tune. The rapper is accused of assaulting a paparazzo at LAX last year and smashing his camera in the process because he had tried to take his photo and asked him several annoying questions. Whereas in previous depositions Kanye has argued that paparazzi are devil’s minions walking the earth, he is now admitting on record that even his father was one.
Plus, they’re not all bad, if he thinks about it.
The LAX incident occurred at a time when Kanye had grown tired of the attention he was getting because of his relationship with reality star and paparazzi-magnet Kim Kardashian, but especially of the way these harassed him in public whenever they had the chance.
To speak the truth, they were taunting him constantly and desperately tried to get a rise out of him, which is exactly what this paparazzo, Daniel Ramos, got. He’s now suing Kanye for assault, inflicting emotional damage and destruction of private property.
“My father was a paparazzo himself. My father was a medical illustrator, a Black Panther, a Christian marriage counselor,” Kanye said in his most recent deposition, as Cover Media reports. “My mother was the first black chair of the English department in Chicago State. They didn't raise me to be out here wrestling with random paparazzi in front of LAX.”
Kanye added that, as a rule, the paparazzi are nice to him because their interest is to get their shots, so they even help him out when he’s in a bit of a pickle.
“Sometimes I get in the car with the paparazzi. Paparazzi help me to park. The paparazzi watch my car and makes sure that cops don't give me tickets. There are some nice guys out here trying to just feed their family,” he said.
Ramos is not one of these people. Kanye called him an “[expletive]hole,” the exception to the rule that paparazzi are usually nice. “And this guy is asking me about dumb [stuff]… So, you know, I'm sorry that I tried to grab his camera. But I obviously didn't try to hurt him. I'm not here to hurt people. I tried to stop his camera and stuff, he fell down, faked it and everyone was saying ‘Why did you hit this guy?’ I didn't hit him,” Kanye concluded.
That’s an entirely different story than the one he told in his previous deposition, when he compared the way paparazzi hounded celebrities to the way white men treated the blacks back in the ’60s.
Also then, he claimed that he lived in fear that his daughter North West might die by electrocution, if one of the drones the paparazzi used malfunctioned just as he was out with her at the pool, teaching her how to swim.
Basically, Kanye claimed that paparazzi were pure evil and not of the necessary type either. Perhaps his attorney made him understand that he’d have better chances of settling this to his advantage if he didn’t come across as if he hated the paps so much that he wanted all of them dead.