Sandy MaloneHouston, TX – The mother of George Floyd’s daughter filed a $250 million lawsuit against superstar Kanye West on Tuesday after he said on a podcast that Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose, not a cop’s knee on his neck (video below).
West donated $2 million during the riots in June of 2020 to support the families of Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, CNN reported.
The rapper also specifically set up a 529 education account to cover the full college tuition for Floyd’s then six-year-old daughter, Gianna Floyd.
Despite all that prior financial support, he offended the family with comments he made during a recent appearance on the Drink Champs podcast, KPRC reported.
“I watched the George Floyd documentary that Candace Owens put up,” West said. “One of the things that his two roommates said was ‘they want a tall guy like me. They want a tall guy like me.’”
“And the day that he died, he said a prayer for, you know, eight minutes,” the rapper continued. “He said a prayer for eight minutes. They hit him with the fentanyl.”
“If you look, the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that,” West continued. “When he said ‘mama,’ mama is his girlfriend. They said he screamed for his mama. ‘Mama’ was his girlfriend.”
A press release filed by the attorneys for Roxie Brown, Gianna’s mother, claimed West made “false statements about George Floyd’s death to promote his brands, and increase marketing value and revenue for himself, his business partners, and associates,” KPRC reported.
The release also alleged that West made up “malicious falsehoods” about Floyd in order to profit from his death and his family’s trauma.
“The interests of the child are priority,” Nuru Witherspoon, an attorney for Brown told reporters. “George Floyd’s daughter is being traumatized by Kanye West’s comments and he’s creating an unsafe and unhealthy environment for her.”
But however upset Floyd’s family may be about West’s comments, it’s unlikely they will gain much traction with their lawsuit in the courts.
The full autopsy report on Floyd’s death indicated he had a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl in his system when he died on May 25, 2020 as he was being arrested by the Minneapolis police.
A May 26, 2020 memo written by the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said Hennepin County Medical Examiner Dr. Andrew Baker had told them he didn’t think Floyd had died of asphyxiation.
“The autopsy revealed no physical evidence suggesting that Mr. Floyd died of asphyxiation,” Baker told prosecutors, according to the memo.
But at the point, he hadn’t gotten the toxicology results back.
A second memo entered into the prosecutor’s file against former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin showed that the medical examiner said he thought it was likely that Floyd had died from an overdose, KMSP reported.
Baker told prosecutors on a week later that Floyd had a “pretty high” and potentially “fatal level” of fentanyl in his system when he died.
“[Dr. Andrew Baker] said that if Mr. Floyd had been found dead in his home (or anywhere else) and there were no other contributing factors he would conclude that it was an overdose death,” the prosecutor’s memo about the conversation with the medical examiner read.
Earl Gray, the attorney for former Minneapolis Police Officer Thomas Lane, said in a motion to dismiss the charges against his client that Floyd swallowed fentanyl tablets while the officers were trying to take him into custody, KMSP reported.
Gray said that the bodycam video of Floyd’s arrest showed a white spot on his tongue that disappeared a moment later.
In the motion to dismiss, former Officer Lane’s attorney argued it looked like Floyd was swallowing “2 milligrams of fentanyl, a lethal dose” in order to avoid being caught holding the drugs, KMSP reported.
“All he had to do is sit in the police car, like every other defendant who is initially arrested. While attempting to avoid his arrest, all by himself, Mr. Floyd overdosed on Fentanyl,” Gray wrote in the court filing. “Given his intoxication level, breathing would have been difficult at best. Mr. Floyd’s intentional failure to obey commands, coupled with his overdosing, contributed to his own death.”
At Chauvin’s trial, David Fowler, a former chief medical examiner for the state of Maryland, testified that there were too many factors to rule Floyd’s death a homicide.
However, the state’s expert, Dr. Martin Tobin, testified at trial that Chavin’s knee on Floyd’s neck caused Floyd’s death. Dr. Tobin said that even a healthy person would have died in that situation.
West also said that Floyd had been calling for his girlfriend rather than his mother when he was dying.
Floyd’s girlfriend, Courtney Ross, testified on the stand at Chauvin’s murder trial that Floyd’s nickname for her was “mama” and confirmed that she also had an opioid addiction and frequently took pills with her boyfriend.
But Ross tried to walk back earlier statements to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) agents that Hall sold Floyd pills and Hill sold him heroin but confirmed in court that she had told investigators that shortly after the incident.
She also confirmed that she had told investigators that she and Floyd had previously taken pills that were supposed to be Percocet but had the opposite effect of making Floyd jumpy and unable to sit still.
Investigators found pill fragments in Floyd’s vehicle that looked like Percocet but actually contained a mixture of methamphetamine and fentanyl, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.
Watch West’s interview with Drink Champs here below:
Kanye West says George Floyd passed away because of fentanyl and that the cop’s knee “wasn’t even on his neck like that” pic.twitter.com/sVKy3VK35O
— Kurrco (@Kurrco) October 16, 2022
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