A Los Angeles court will hear a discrimination case against Kanye West starting Oct. 12, 2026, and the former security guard suing him is asking for roughly $23 million. Benjamin Deshon Provo says he was fired in 2022 for refusing to cut the dreadlocks he wears as part of his Muslim faith.
Provo filed the suit in April 2024 in Los Angeles Superior Court, where Judge Brock T. Hammond is presiding, according to MyNewsLA. Provo, who is Black, worked security for both Donda Academy and Yeezy. The $23 million damages figure surfaced in pretrial filings and was first reported by TMZ, per TheGrio on Sept. 16.
What the Complaint Alleges
The case is pleaded as both racial and religious discrimination, because Provo’s dreadlocks are tied to his faith. The complaint says “Kanye and members of his management team required Provo to choose between these critical aspects of his self-identity and financial stability.”
The filing describes a specific directive that preceded the firing. HR Grapevine reported the complaint quotes the instruction as, “Tell the one with the dreads to shave his head or he is fired.”
The same filing makes broader claims about the workplace. Provo alleges West “frequently screamed at and berated black employees” and that books by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were banned from Donda Academy, HR Grapevine reported. The complaint also alleges West and his management “subjected Provo and other black employees to less favorable treatment than their white counterparts,” per Complex, which credits TMZ and The Root. All of it remains untested allegation until the court rules.
Testimony already taken in the case includes a deposition from Milo Yiannopoulos, West’s former chief of staff. Yiannopoulos said employees with “really thin skin about racially charged remarks” were not suited to the company and that staff “must accept the provocative way Ye talked about religion,” according to TMZ reporting cited by Reality Tea.
The Staffing Company Defense, Explained
West’s side argues in court filings that Provo was employed by a third-party staffing company rather than by West or Donda Academy directly. That argument goes to whether West and the academy can be held liable at all, and it is worth understanding how the mechanism works.
Companies across many industries hire workers through staffing agencies for exactly this reason. The agency becomes the employer of record. It signs the worker’s paperwork, issues the paychecks and carries the formal employment relationship, even though the worker shows up at the client company’s site and takes direction from the client’s managers. The arrangement creates legal distance. When a worker later brings a discrimination claim, the client can argue the claim belongs against the agency, because the agency is the employer named on the documents.
If the court accepts that Provo was the staffing company’s employee, the substance of his discrimination allegations could become legally beside the point as to West and Donda Academy. The claims would have to be brought against the staffing company instead. A trial about hair, faith and race would then turn on an employment-classification question that has nothing to do with what anyone said about dreadlocks.
Plaintiffs in these cases typically respond by arguing joint employment, pointing to who actually controlled the work, set the schedule and issued the orders. The alleged directive to shave or be fired is the kind of detail that speaks to control.
Pretrial Fights Over Evidence
The run-up to trial has produced its own disputes about what the court will be allowed to hear.
Provo’s attorneys argued in an August filing that West’s mental health is “per se irrelevant” to the liability of West, Yeezy LLC or Donda Academy. They also argued that West’s charitable donations are “wholly irrelevant to (Provo’s) claim that he was subjected to unlawful discrimination, harassment, retaliation and wrongful termination, according to MyNewsLA. The filing says that at a meeting between the parties, “defense counsel stated he was ‘certainly not agreeing’ to exclude evidence of Ye’s ‘documented mental health issues.’” Both sides are fighting over whether that category of evidence comes in, and Hammond will decide.
West’s posting history has been a recurring subject in the case, includingComplex’s Aug. 27 report on the discrimination claims.
Discovery has also been contentious. A discovery referee, retired Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig D. Karlan, wrote that “the referee finds that Yeezy’s effort to meet and confer was suboptimal, according to MyNewsLA. Karlan added that “sending a lengthy email two days before the motion filing deadline, with ambiguous references to plaintiffs in other cases, does not help to informally resolve the discovery disputes at issue.”
How This Fits the Earlier Donda Academy Cases
Provo’s suit is not the first employment case brought against the school. In 2023, former teachers Cecilia Hailey, Chekarey Byers and Timanii Meeks sued. Byers said of the school, “It’s like a mental hospital being run by the patients, according to NBC News. Their attorney, Ron Zambrano, said West “is clearly as bad at running a school as he is at managing his own personal and professional life.” Zambrano represented the teachers and is not connected to Provo’s case.
Those suits produced a partial win for West before they resolved. In May 2024, Judge Robert Broadbelt sustained a demurrer that removed West from two of the eight causes of action, Courthouse News Service reported. West’s attorney at the time, London Meservy, said, “I would like to be able to put this matter behind my client,” and called the claims “a haphazard and barebones guilt-by-association theory.”
Four of the 2023 lawsuits settled in March 2025, a month before a trial set for April 2025, according to NME. That history matters to the current timeline. West’s side has resolved Donda Academy employment claims close to a trial date before, and Provo’s case now sits under four weeks from trial with a damages number on the table.
