Kanye West's Cousin Confirms the Rapper Paid $250,000 USD to Stop His Sex Tape from Leaking in New Interview

If you’re a big fan of Kanye West‘s lyrics, perhaps this next piece of news won’t come as a huge surprise. In West’s song “Real Friends,” the rapper states, “I had a cousin that stole my laptop that I was f*ckin’ bitches on. Paid that n**** 250 thousand just to get it from him. Real friends … Huh?” West also mentions a cousin on “No More Parties in L.A.” with the line, “And as far as real friends, tell all my cousins I love ‘em, even the one that stole the laptop, you dirty motherfucker.”

Reportedly, that really did happen. According to West’s cousin Lawrence Franklin, Kanye paid off another one of their relatives who had gotten access to video footage of the hip-hop icon having sex with an unknown woman. Lawrence states the clip was found on a laptop West had given away as a gift in 2012, the same year he started officially dating Kim. In a new interview with Daily Mail, Franklin states it was this incident that led to ‘Ye’s mistrust towards the people around him:

“The sex tape episode started his decline – he stopped trusting people. At the end of the day if a member of your family had taken you for a quarter of a million dollars – so they can complete their own ambitions – who can you trust within your circle? This was also around the time when his mother has just died and he takes a lot of responsibility for that. When you go from being a regular person to being a huge star – and having all of these mounting issues and being completely void of the normalcy that you once had – it’s tough. Where do you go? Who do you trust at the end of the day?”