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The artist now known as Ye has filed a new motion in Los Angeles seeking to dismiss the wrongful termination and harassment lawsuit brought by a staffer involved in Ye’s now-defunct and highly controversial K-12 private Christian school, Donda Academy. A trial is scheduled for January.

The staffer, Murphy Aficionado, sued Ye in November 2024, alleging that his job as a Yeezy project manager became a living “nightmare” after Ye purportedly hired him in late 2022 at $125 an hour. Aficionado claims he routinely worked 70-hour weeks and sometimes slept at the office to meet Ye’s demands, including work on a plan to move Donda Academy to a new “decrepit property” without the necessary permits. His lawsuit includes a text in which Ye allegedly wrote, “I need to pay you for your time.”

Aficionado alleges in his lawsuit that Ye subjected him to a daily barrage of bigoted and antisemitic remarks, yelled at him, and made disparaging comments about his Filipino tattoos. According to the complaint, Ye told him on one occasion, “The Jews are out to get me. They froze my bank account. The Jews got Kim and my kids,” referring to his now ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.

In his new motion for summary judgment, Ye is asking the court to resolve the case in his favor without a trial. He argues that Aficionado never worked for Yeezy and instead taught only a temporary, part-time engineering class at Donda Academy that ended when the school shut down. Ye says Aficionado was paid $52 an hour for the teaching job and that the school’s principal never heard him complain about his working conditions.

“There was never any employment relationship between Yeezy and plaintiff. Plaintiff did not submit an employment application, receive an offer letter, there is no record of his onboarding, he has no personnel file, he was never provided an employee email account, he had no work schedule, or supervisory assignment,” the new motion obtained by Rolling Stone argues.

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According to the new filing, Aficionado’s claims should fail because, although his discovery responses identify Ye as his alleged harasser, they “describe no particular incident, identify no particular comment connecting the alleged conduct to a protected characteristic.”

“Plaintiff’s sensational allegations in the complaint read more like material for tabloid headlines than a case supported by evidence,” the new filing states. “When required under oath to identify the facts supporting his claims, plaintiff supplied rote conclusions and vague assertions. His responses identify no particular discriminatory comment or harassment incident, no dated sequence connecting a complaint to an adverse decision, and no compensation rate or formation date for the alleged contract.”

Attempts to reach Aficionado’s lawyers for comment were not immediately successful Thursday. Ye’s lawyers did not respond to a request for further comment. A hearing on the motion is set for Dec. 17.

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In his lawsuit, Aficionado described meetings at the Beverly Hills Waldorf Astoria that he said left him deeply disturbed. At one alleged meeting, in November 2022, Aficionado encountered Ye’s wife, Bianca Censori, topless in the suite and tried to leave, but Ye ordered him to stay, the lawsuit claims. Ye then referred to a lawyer who had just departed as “a Jewish spy,” and later left Aficionado waiting while he had loud sex with Censori in a nearby bedroom, the complaint alleges. Aficionado said Ye returned wearing a T-shirt bearing a swastika and asked, “Don’t you like my shirt?”

The lawsuit is not the first filed by a purported Yeezy project manager alleging mistreatment. At a trial last March, Tony Saxon was awarded $140,000 for injuries he suffered while working at Ye’s $57 million Malibu beach house. %!s()

“We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement to the WSJ. “Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work.”

The report did not name the researchers, the organization, or the information involved. OpenAI did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

Posts circulating on X named individuals some users believe were among those dismissed, who had also publicly expressed concerns about AI risk while at OpenAI. TechCrunch has not confirmed their identities.

In a statement to WSJ, an OpenAI spokesperson said an internal investigation confirmed the researchers had “mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures.”

The departures come two days after The New York Times reported that OpenAI executives had brushed aside employees’ warnings about its safety practices, with employees describing a broader pattern of the company deprioritizing security. An OpenAI spokesperson told the Times the company takes security concerns seriously and has internal channels for reporting safety issues, while saying it recognized “a need to move faster.”

It’s unclear whether the three researchers raised concerns through internal channels before allegedly sharing information outside the organization.

The departures also come as OpenAI responds to a series of security incidents in which its AI agents escaped containment, posted user images, and hacked government websites. Earlier this week, OpenAI said it was scrapping the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra, an AI model, over safety concerns.

This isn’t the first time OpenAI has dismissed researchers over alleged information sharing. In 2024, the company fired researchers Leopold Aschenbrenner and Pavel Izmailov over alleged leaks, The Information reported.

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Aditya Mehta is a reporter at TechCrunch covering AI. He’s supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism and attended UC Berkeley. You can contact from Aditya by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at adymehta.74 on Signal.

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Throughout this week, Russia has accused Nato of preparing to blockade its territory, which borders Lithuania and Poland, warning that it would even be prepared to use nuclear weapons if the West tried to cut off Kaliningrad from the rest of Russia.

Nato has sought to calm the situation, stressing it is a defensive alliance and urging Moscow to stop its "nuclear threats".

Western allies have faced a surge in so-called hybrid warfare incidents blamed on Russia, particularly in Poland and the Baltics in recent months.

Last week alone Poland said a Russian helicopter had strayed into its territory adjacent to Kaliningrad and Lithuania said its population felt "constantly threatened" by Russia, in part because of drones entering the nation's airspace.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Thursday that his country was preparing for further hybrid attacks, "including serious ones", after a drone armed with explosives was found in August on the tarmac at Leipzig airport close to Ukrainian cargo planes.

In a wide-ranging speech, the Russian leader told his audience he believed that international conflicts were highly likely to continue, but would get better as "Western hegemony" weakened.

Although Putin himself began the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, he again blamed the West for provoking the invasion, arguing that it had simply been forced to defend itself and take up arms.

He also insisted that Russia's attacks on Ukrainian economic targets were a direct response to Ukraine's strikes on Russia's oil refineries, and on its ships in the Black Sea.

"Now from every direction we're receiving calls 'let's stop'. But they started it," he said.

Putin admitted Kyiv had "got some results" from its refinery attacks and Russia had lost about 1% of its GDP. Ukraine maintains it began attacking Russian oil infrastructure because it helped the Kremlin finance the war.

Russia has targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure, ramping up attacks every winter since the war on Ukraine started in 2022. Other civilian infrastructure is also regularly hit, and a key bridge in Kyiv was attacked by drones on Thursday.

Putin also accused the West of instigating other conflicts.

"If it comes to a direct attack on the Russian Federation, in this case we are talking about Kaliningrad but possibly some other territories, of course the issue of use by the Russian Federation of all arms at the disposal of our country will inevitably and immediately be on the agenda," he said.

He accused Nato of holding naval manoeuvres in the Baltic Sea which he argued represented serious threats to Kaliningrad. If the territory came under Western blockade, he said Russia would be prepared to use all means and forces, including nuclear.

"We are not threatening anyone. We do not intend to attack anyone in 2029, in 2030, in 2050. But if we come across an aggression we will have to respond. Citizens of European countries should be fully aware of that."

He added that while he was aware of the nuclear capabilities of countries such as the UK and France, the weapons at its disposal were unparalleled.

Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte made clear on Wednesday that none of the alliance's "exercises or activities" posed any threat to Moscow and the Kremlin's messaging was "absolutely not called for and not helpful".

Putin spent some time talking about leading countries in the world having armaments at their disposal that could "swipe away all life or at least push the Earth to catastrophic consequences", and said unfortunately no-one could be sure they would never be used.

He drew the analogy of a gun sitting on a theatre stage - if it was hanging there at the start of the show, it would certainly fire at the end.

He appeared to call for the rules of warfare to be rewritten, and warned of the increasing risk of artificial intelligence.

"The automation and digitalisation of warfare leads to its gamification. This leads to degradation and sliding back of humanity to barbarity," he said. %!s()

The prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, called a crisis cabinet meeting on Thursday and told ministers to cancel travel plans to deal with the demonstrations, which erupted in the Paris region last week but have snowballed across the country.

Lecornu’s office said: “This upsurge in violence makes it virtually impossible to maintain the continuity of public education and is exposing staff and students to danger.” The education minister, Édouard Geffray, is to meet pupil representatives on Friday.

About 900 demonstrations, blockades and related incidents were under way outside high schools around the country, police said, with more than 160 shut down as a result. Access was also blocked to about 30 university campuses on Thursday, including in Paris and Marseille.

Nearly 3,000 lycée students – aged between 15 and 18 – have been detained since the start of the protests, including 1,949 on Thursday alone, the interior ministry said. More than 300 police and dozens of firefighters, teachers and pupils have been injured.

The pupils’ grievances range from overloaded timetables and overcrowded classes to insufficient teachers and unbearable temperatures during heatwaves earlier this year. Riot police have been deployed to confront the increasingly violent protests.

Injuries have mainly been from hurled objects but also from police-fired riot-control projectiles, with the interior ministry announcing an internal police investigation after accusations of excessive force and brutality by officers against three pupils.

Rubbish bins have been set on fire outside many schools and more serious arson attempts have been reported inside some buildings. Fire damage in one school in Nantes in the north-west was so extensive that it will stay closed for a month, authorities said.

In the northern city of Caen, 16-year-old Maelle said she wished those setting bins on fire would protest “with words”. Students were protesting “against this government that doesn’t invest in heating, air conditioning, or teachers’ salaries”, she told AFP.

In Strasbourg in the north-east, tram services were temporarily suspended to “restrict the movements of rioters and demonstrators”, the regional prefect said, after protesting students obstructed the tracks with crowd control barriers.

“There are 35 of us per classroom,” one 17-year-old Strasbourg student said. “There aren’t enough toilets, and there are water leaks in some rooms. The building is falling apart, the cafeteria is too small. There’s zero budget, zero resources.”

Several bin fires were also reported in the southern city of Toulouse; while in Lille, young people wearing black hoodies destroyed a bus stop. In Marseille, there were attempts to light fires inside two schools. In one, a teacher was splashed with petrol.

While many teachers and several headteachers have reported being physically threatened and sometimes attacked, some support their pupils. Juliette Estiville, a high-school Spanish teacher in Paris, said that the police response had disgusted her.

“I’m actually here just to provide protection, to form a barrier between the police and the students,” she said. “Today went well, it’s going well, but I think that the teachers who come to the blockades are really there to protect our young people.”

The government has accused the radical left La France Insoumise (LFI) party of encouraging the protests, with several LFI MPs and mayors, including Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, cheered at demonstrations.

The party’s candidate for the 2027 presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, insisted on Thursday that LFI backed “non-violent methods of struggle” and added that his “greatest worry is an unbearable level of police violence against these young people”. %!s()

Using the stage name Cronos, with an eerie pallor and dressed in showboating leather ensembles as he made theatrical declarations about witches, Satan and the underworld, Lant brought great showmanship to the group, for whom he also played bass.

While they never reached the commercial heights of forebears such as Black Sabbath or the thrash bands that followed – they reached the UK Top 75 only once – Venom had a big impact, and their album Black Metal ended up giving a name to one of metal’s most important subgenres.

Lant was born in Chelsea, London but moved with his family to Newcastle aged seven. His brothers were also musicians, one a drummer who joined Prefab Sprout (“they were shite,” Lant would later opine), and another who drummed for Venom in the band’s 21st-century period.

Venom began as Guillotine, which Lant joined aged 16, initially on guitar, then bass and graduating to vocalist after a previous frontman left. Renamed Venom, the lineup solidified around Lant, guitarist Jeff Dunn (AKA Mantas) and drummer Tony Bray (AKA Abaddon), and they released their debut album Welcome to Hell in 1981. It featured the controversy-baiting single In League with Satan, which featured reversed speech about the devil and helped bring satanic imagery into metal.

Inspired by punk, Venom intensified the heaviness of early British heavy metal bands by playing at a furious pace. The Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne “was singing about the devil”, Lant said. “I wanted to be the devil.”

He told the Guardian in 2019: “I had that snot and piss and shit element, which I wanted to put back into metal. I saw more and more bands shoving socks down their pants and putting lipstick on, and I just was disgusted by that, to tell you the truth. Fucking hell, if heavy metal was anything it had to be raw and dangerous and in your face.”

That impulse came to bear on five more albums during the 1980s, including Black Metal, whose demonic cover art and raw, hellish sound “carved in stone some of the essential features” of the black metal genre, according to scene historians Michael J Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind in their book Lords of Chaos. Lant, who co-produced the album, said the making of it was “pure mayhem from start to finish”, with instrumentation including steel plates being cut into with a chainsaw, and a makeshift coffin having earth dumped on to it.

Venom went on hiatus in 1988 and Lant – after pondering a career change in forestry – went solo as Cronos, putting out two early 1990s albums. Venom then reformed for another seven LPs, the most recent being 2018’s Storm the Gates. There was another, shorter hiatus in the early 2000s while Lant recovered from a climbing injury.

He trained as a fitness instructor in the 1990s (“I did loads of classes, I played rave,” he later said) and also began parallel careers in computer engineering and graphic design, though Venom continued to tour, including at festivals in summer 2026.

Venom’s pace, ferocity and darkness all proved seductive to a new generation of metalheads in the 1980s, particularly thrash bands such as Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax. “It was so, so evil. This was a new kind of insanity,” Scott Ian of Anthrax said admiringly of Welcome to Hell.

Lant collaborated with another admirer, Dave Grohl, for Grohl’s metal supergroup Probot in 2004.

Lant’s son Nathan thanked Venom’s fans after his father’s death. “I know he really appreciated you all. He has laid down his soul, and his music will live on. The legend of Cronos will never die.” %!s()