The holiday season is upon us and many of us will spend it showing love and gratitude to the members of our families. Kayne West will not be following that formula, at least not for a few slimeball family members.
Lawrence Franklin, one of Kanye’s cousins, recently revealed to the Daily Mail that Kanye Kanye was blackmailed into coughing up $250,000 after a family member discovered a video of West having sex with an unknown woman on a laptop, which Kanye had gifted the family member.
Says Franklin,
‘I was at my aunt’s house when the family member who had the laptop called me, a friend of his, and my uncle to the kitchen where he opened the laptop to show a video of Kanye in clear view having sex with a fair-skinned black woman.
‘The family member knew what he had was gold, and later called an old friend of his that was an attorney.
‘He put together a small team him and his attorney went after Kanye, and to show that they meant business they leaked a little information publicly to let it be know they indeed had the footage.
‘The family member tried to keep a low profile but it was not long before Kanye’s team learned who it was that had the sex tape.’
This incident, Franklin claims, is what caused West to stop trusting people, even those who have been around the hip hop artist before he became a household name.
The song Real Friends, released earlier this year, is about the 2012 incident, according to Franklin. The lyrics are evidence of that:
‘I had a cousin that stole my laptop that I was f*ckin’ bitches on. Paid that n***a 250 thousand just to get it from him. Real friends…Huh?’
Franklin, an entrepreneur and producer, speculated on how this incident helped bring on Kayne’s public breakdown just weeks back.
‘The sex tape episode started his decline – he stopped trusting people,’ Franklin explained.
‘At the end of the day if a member of your family had taken you for a quarter of a million dollars – so they can complete their own ambitions – who can you trust within your circle?
‘This was also around the time when his mother has just died and he takes a lot of responsibility for that.
‘When you go from being a regular person to being a huge star – and having all of these mounting issues and being completely void of the normalcy that you once had – it’s tough.
‘Where do you go? Who do you trust at the end of the day?’
Family stealing from family is punishable by death in some cultures and I think America’s behind the curve on this one. How big of a fucking dirtbag do you have to be to exploit your own flesh and blood?
[h/t Daily Mail]