Last year Kanye West canceled the final 21 dates of his Saint Pablo tour following a string of incidents in which the rapper burst into spontaneous tirades on stage. West spent more than a week at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital Center following an especially strange show in Sacramento, in which he expressed admiration for then president-elect Donald Trump.
When an artist books a tour, they can purchase non-appearance and cancellation insurance, which effectively protects their income in the event that they cannot perform a scheduled event due to an emergency, or due to an illness. According to a lawsuit obtained by the Hollywood Reporter, after Kanye halted the tour, his insurance company, a subsidiary of Lloyd's of London, made aggressive moves to avoid having to pay out his claim.
THR reported that West's complaint asserts that, “Almost immediately after the claim was submitted, defendants selected legal counsel to oversee the adjustment of the claim, instead of the more normal approach of retaining a non-lawyer insurance adjuster.”
The lawsuit also claims that, despite an independent doctor picked by the insurance company agreeing that Kanye was medically unable to continue touring, the company worked to prolong the process of paying the claim, producing what West's lawyers called “irrelevant facts,” namely speculation in the media, to discredit the claim.
Howard King, West's lawyer, said in the lawsuit filings that “Lloyd's companies enjoy collecting bounteous premiums; they don't enjoy paying claims, no matter how legitimate.”
Correction:This article has been updated to correctly attribute news sources.
