For Kanye West everything is a pretext for controversy. His latest outing could take him to court. In fact, the rapper claimed in a podcast that what killed George Floyd was fentanyl (an opiate) and not police violence.
George Floyd’s family is considering taking legal action after “Kanye West’s misrepresentation of the cause of his death,” as human rights attorney Lee Merritt tweeted on Sunday.
“Pretending that Floyd died of fentanyl and not brutality, criminally and civilly established, undermines and disparages the struggle of the Floyd family,” he wrote.
confusing tirade
If a libel suit is impossible because George Floyd is dead, Lee Merrit told CNN to explore “other legal avenues” to sue the rapper.
Kanye West said in a confusing tirade on a Twitter podcast that “the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like this” and cited fentanyl as the reason for his death.
The argument that George Floyd used fentanyl and suffered from heart failure, two factors that would have led to his death, is the one defended by Derek Chauvin’s lawyer. The policeman was sentenced to 21 years in prison for choking George Floyd with his knee.
tackled to the ground
The doctor who performed the autopsy on George Floyd’s body said at Derek Chauvin’s trial that he succumbed to “cardiopulmonary arrest” that occurred during law enforcement’s “restraint, restraint, and neck compression.”
On May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, a 44-year-old white police officer, wanted to arrest George Floyd, a black man suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes. With three companions he had pinned him to the ground, before kneeling on his neck.
The policeman kept up his pressure. for about ten minutesindifferent to the groans of George Floyd but also to the pleas of terrified passers-by, even once the pulse of the forties became undetectable.
Supremacist t-shirt and antisemitic tweets
The scene, filmed and posted online by a witness, quickly went viral and sparked huge protests against racism and police brutality in the United States and around the world.
Kanye West’s comments about George Floyd are the latest episode of defiant and confusing behavior and statements. Therefore, he was accused of anti-Semitic comments on social networks, he announced that he intended to buy the Parler social network, particularly popular among conservatives in the United States and supporters of Donald Trump. And he exhibited during Paris Fashion Week a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt -popular among supremacists-, a departure from the famous slogan “Black Lives Matter”, emblematic of the summer 2020 anti-racist demonstrations in the United States.
Source: BFM TV
