Kanye West’s Yeezy brand has been ordered to pay $300,000 to a frustrated creative director who claimed she was never paid for a photo shoot that featured the Chicago icon.
The allegations were made by Katelyn Mooney, a Brooklyn-based creative director, who filed against Ye’s Yeezy Inc. for allegedly failing to pay her for a last-minute photo shoot he booked back in September.
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The lawsuit, which was filed in Manhattan Supreme Court in December, claimed that Kanye West’s team contacted Mooney and asked to shoot his SHDZ designer sunglasses to use for marketing at New York Fashion Week.
The shoot reportedly went down on September 13, 2022, and Mooney delivered the final digital files the following day. From there, Mooney claimed that she and the controversial rapper discussed payment terms over text, and “confirmed that Ms. Mooney would be retained for a fee of One Hundred Ten Thousand Dollars” for her service.
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“Ms. Mooney was to be fully responsible for every aspect of the photo shoot, including but not limited to hiring models, reserving studio space, procuring lighting, catering, pre-production, and post-production,” the suit reads. “Yeezy had no issues with Ms. Mooney’s work or the final delivered product,”
The suit added that Ye only paid Mooney $15,000 resulting in financial hardship for the mother of three “due to Yeezy’s failure to timely pay her.”
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Mooney originally sought $110,250 in statutory damages, but on Tuesday (May 2) Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Gerald Lebovits ruled that Ye must instead fork over $300,000 after he failed to even respond to her suit.
According to The New York Post, The final amount includes around $95,000 in actual damages plus some $205,000 in statutory damages, according to the judgment.
Mooney isn’t the only one taking Ye to court over missing payments. In March, TMZreported that the controversial rapper and producer had been hit with a $275,000 breach of contract claim by a former Yeezy staffer.
Dora Szilagyi claimed in a lawsuit that she was hired to be the Director of Product Innovation for the Yeezy brand in June 2021, and alleges West wanted her to quit her job at adidas and work for him full-time. She added that she was promised a severance payment of $275,000 if she was fired without cause after September 2021, but never received said payment after her termination.
“Dora says she doesn’t believe Kanye or his company ever intended to follow through on the severance package and only dangled it to lure her from Adidas,” TMZ noted.
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Also in December 2022, it was revealed that Yeezy’s Los Angeles offices were under threat of eviction after missing two months of rent payments totaling more than $60,000.
CT Calabasas, the company that owns the office building, issued a demand to West to pay the rent within 72 hours or face eviction.
