Why Was YesJulz Fired And ‘Fined’ $7.7 Million By Kanye West’s Yeezy?

Late yesterday afternoon, Kanye West publicly cut ties with party promoter and influencer Julieanna Marie Goddard, better known as YesJulz, saying she owes over $7 million to the Yeezy group for violating a non-disclosure agreement. On his Instagram Story, Kanye reportedly wrote, “We have decided to no longer have YesJulz involved in the roll out of Vultures. All the activity on her page and with our fans in the past few days has been unauthorized.”

Several Yeezy fan accounts also posted screenshots of an email purported to be from Yeezy “chief of staff” Milo Yiannopolous to Goddard. “Dear Ms. Goddard, enclosed please find a letter and statement of account from your time with Yeezy,” it reads. “Fines incurred to date as a result of your NDA violations come to $7.7m. While you were a contractor, I suspended enforcement of this debt. It now falls due. Hassan from the compliance team will reach out with information about payment. Please not that any further violations will accrue more fine. Because you are being terminated for cause but also because you forgot to sign your contract your termination is effective immediately.”

Uproxx generally doesn’t engage in schadenfreude as a rule, and we won’t do so now. But this is so messy. None of this is how a professional organization should behave and even writing this give me, as the kids would say, “the ick.” One of my very first pieces for this site was a critique of Julz for her weird cultural voyeurism and not only was she never held to account for it, the grasping, clout chasing, social climbing she did paid off in a job working for one of the biggest artists in hip-hop, who should have known better, but has been printing t-shirts that read “White Lives Matter” and putting white supremacists in charge of his hiring.

Oh, did I forget to mention Yiannopolous is a virulent, right-wing troll who has been ripped by multiple outlets for pushing hate speech? Yeah. Kanye hired him last year to replace another racist outrage peddler, Nick Fuentes, as his “campaign manager” — after previously firing him in 2022. You gotta give the sourpuss credit, though; usually, when white folks do the “my best friend is Black” thing, their Black best friend isn’t the guy who made “Jesus Walks.”

There is no real “win” here for anyone. It’s sad that Kanye has become this, it’s sad that people are still dealing with Kanye after everything he’s done to destroy his reputation, it’s sad people in hip-hop are still working with YesJulz in 2024, it’s sad that nobody at Yeezy has any concept of professionalism (and that they think this supposed “NDA” is remotely enforceable), and it’s sad that we haven’t agreed as a society to completely ostracize creeps like Yiannopoulos and Fuentes because they only pick on people who’ve historically been oppressed all along. I’m hitting “publish” and taking a very long, very hot shower. Yuck.