LOS ANGELES (CN) — A handyman recounted before a jury in downtown Los Angeles how he went to Home Depot with Ye in the hip-hop artist's Lamborghini to shop for power tools late on a Saturday night after he had reluctantly agreed to help overhaul Ye's beachfront house in Malibu.
Tony Saxon took the stand Wednesday as the first witness at the trial in which he seeks to recover a purported $1 million in unpaid wages from the artist and fashion entrepreneur previously known as Kanye West.
The trip to Home Depot, Saxon told the jurors, wasn't a success because Ye got distracted by the flower arrangements at the hardware store, and no power tools were purchased.
Saxon, under questioning by his attorney, Ron Zambrano, said he had initially been hired in September 2021 by Bianca Censori, an Australian architect who is now married to Ye, for a paint job that was part of the remodeling project.
The house in question was designed in 2013 by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Tadao Ando, and Ye had bought it in 2021 for $57.3 million.
Initially, Censori had asked Saxon to paint the cabinets and the marble in the bathroom to look like concrete, he testified. But after spending the whole day painting, Saxon was told that there had been a change of plan and that the owner wanted the cabinets ripped out. Moreover, it had to be done fast.
Saxon said he worked through the night to finish the new assignment with another handyman he had brought in to help with the job.
The next day, he said, Censori called him and said the owner, who turned out to be Ye, wanted to meet him.
When he met with Ye that Friday afternoon, Saxon told the jury, they walked through the house, and Ye told him that he wasn't happy with the work that the architects, under the direction of Censori, had done and that he wanted Saxon to take over the project.
"I told him I was just a guy with a minivan — not a licensed contractor," Saxon testified.
Ye, however, wasn't taking no for an answer.
"Don't tell me you can't," Saxon said Ye told him. "You can."
Ye wanted the entire interior of the house to be stripped, from the light fixtures and the wiring, to the bathrooms and the plumbing, to the wooden floors, the fireplaces and the glass partitions, according to Saxon.
He immediately began to work, Saxon said, and that's when Ye found him that Saturday night stripping a wall, when they decided to go to Home Depot to get more powerful equipment.
Saxon slept at the Malibu house that night and was awakened Sunday morning by Ye, who got stranded on the Pacific Coast Highway because his Lamborghini had run out of gasoline.
When he found Ye at the side of the road to bring gasoline, the artist was displeased because Saxon was wearing a blue sweatshirt while Ye insisted that all his employees wear black and only black, Saxon told the jury.
That night, Ye drove Saxon to the Nobu hotel in Malibu, where he was staying, and ran a bath for him. He also provided the handyman with some black clothing that he had lying around.
"He said, 'You'll never forget this moment,'" Saxon said.
Ye, according to Saxon, wanted him to help realize his vision of an off-the-grid house, disconnected from typical utility services and completely self-sufficient with renewable energy.
Saxon quickly found out that Ye and Censori hadn't taken out any permits for the work they wanted to be done because, he told the jury, that might interrupt the work. Ye told him to keep the project lowkey and not attract attention from the media or the police, who could shut down the project, Saxon said.
"Figure it out and find people," Ye told Saxon, according to the handyman. "This is what I want done."
Ye also had gotten rid of the security guard that kept an eye on the house because, Saxon said, the artist wanted him to be there all the time and essentially provide security and supervise the project, in addition to doing the demolition work.
And so, Saxon said, he ended up camping out on a mattress in the corner of the stripped-down living room. Once, he said, Ye walked up to him at 3 or 4 in the morning and asked why he wasn't working.
"I hoped he was joking, but I didn't think he was," Saxon testified.
Most of the text exchanges between Ye and Saxon that were shown to the jury revealed an amicable relationship — in which they addressed each other as "brother" — before things turned sour after about one and a half months.
Saxon claims he was promised $20,000 a week, and though he did receive around $260,000, much of that went to pay for materials and other workers. He also claims he hurt his back on the job, and at one point, Ye had him work in a downtown LA warehouse to prepare for “Sunday Service,” a sort of quasi-church service run by Ye.
In his opening statement Tuesday, Ye’s attorney, Andrew Cherkasky, told the jury that Saxon was an independent contractor, and an unlicensed one at that, who had told Ye he was licensed. Saxon, said Cherkasky, “was paid $240,000” for six weeks of work, “and he destroyed the Ando house.”
“There is not a single indication that he was an employee,” Cherkasky said. “It was what every remodeler or construction worker does — bring your own tools, your own guys.”
Cherkasky said it was Saxon, on his own, who took it upon himself to sleep at the Ando house, that he “made promises he couldn’t fulfill” and that his “energy for the job had dropped.” Cherkasky added that Saxon himself quit the job, as Saxon would later tell a psychiatrist. There was no unpaid invoice at the time, the lawyer claimed.
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