Kanye West has appeared to have escaped some assault charges, as the complainants in the case have reportedly stopped cooperating with investigators.
TMZ is reporting that the two complainants, Mark and Jonnie Houston, have not been responding to repeated requests from the LAPD to provide them with information.
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West, too, isn’t cooperating with the authorities.
This means that for now, at least, the assault investigation is on hold — and may be dismissed altogether, depending on the statute of limitations.
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Last month, Ye sat down with Justin Laboy for an episode of The Download podcast, where he explained that he confronted a man who allegedly made contact with his wife inappropriately on April 16.
“My wife is walking to the bathroom at the Chateau, and then this guy … just grabbed my wife,” he began. “I didn’t see it directly, and [Bianca] started just explaining to me what happened, so then I walked over and found him.
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“I’m talking to different security, not just the security that be with me, but other security, like, ‘Okay, let’s get this guy just escorted out or something.’ And then I talked to the guy and I say, ‘Yo, I need you to just— you need to leave right now,’ and he’s like ‘Oh, it’s okay, it’s okay.’
He continued: “It’s like, no, it’s not okay; it wasn’t okay. Then he saw it wasn’t okay — had to go to bed early, tucked this n-gga in. He had to go to bed early.”
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While the Chicago native seemed to be proud of himself for knocking out the alleged perpetrator, TMZ spoke to some eyewitnesses who were present at the famed hotel during the incident, and their claims about what went down are vastly different from Ye’s.
One eyewitness claimed that a man accidentally ran into West’s wife, which prompted the rapper and producer to confront him outside the building. He then allegedly punched the person he thought was responsible, though he apparently ended up striking the man’s identical twin instead.
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The two people at the center of this controversy, brothers Mark and Jonnie Houston, own a series of restaurants in the greater Los Angeles area. As of now, it’s unclear which of the two allegedly ran into Censori and who got hit by West in turn.
Kanye’s people had a completely different recollection of the ordeal, as they told TMZ that the alleged assailant didn’t simply run into Censori.
“‘Grabbed’ is grossly inadequate as a description of what happened. Bianca was physically assaulted,” a rep for West said in a statement at the time.
“The assailant didn’t merely collide into her. He put his hands under her dress, directly on her body, he grabbed her waist, he spun her around, and then he blew her kisses. She was battered and sexually assaulted.”
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As of this writing, Censori has not filed criminal charges against either of the twins.
