A new court order says these details might be relevant to German artist Alice Merton’s legal case over an allegedly uncleared sample.
A German artist suing Ye (formerly Kanye West) for copyright infringement will be allowed to cite the rapper’s history of antisemitism and her own family’s ties to the Holocaust as the case moves forward.
A Thursday (Oct. 8) court order, obtained and first reported by Billboard, denied Ye’s motion to strike these references from the lawsuit filed in 2025 by German singer-songwriter Alice Merton. The case, currently set to go to trial early next year, claims Ye’s 2024 track “Gun to My Head” sampled Merton’s earlier song “Blindside” without permission.
Merton alleges Ye included this sample on a digital deluxe version of Vultures 2 even though she had expressly denied his clearance request months earlier. Merton says she refused to grant the license for a key reason: as a direct descendant of Holocaust survivors, she did not want to be associated with Ye’s past antisemitic remarks.
Ye’s lawyers sought to remove the references to the Holocaust and antisemitism from the lawsuit, calling them “immaterial, impertinent and scandalous.” But Judge Fernando L. Aenlle-Rocha denied that motion on Thursday, finding that these details could indeed be relevant.
“The court finds that the allegations concerning Merton’s background or Ye’s alleged remarks are not unduly prejudicial and may have some bearing on the litigation, including potentially at trial to explain Plaintiffs’ rationale for denying Defendants’ use of Plaintiffs’ song,” wrote the judge.
Judge Aenlle-Rocha similarly refused Ye’s request to trim away the complaint’s references to his many prior copyright infringement lawsuits. The fully intact lawsuit will now move forward through the remaining evidence discovery process. A jury trial is set to begin in March unless a settlement is reached first.
Reps for Merton and Ye did not immediately return requests for comments on the court order Thursday.
Ye has been sued more than a dozen times over the years for allegedly using unlicensed samples and interpolations in his music. While the rapper has historically settled many of these claims, he took one to trial for the first time earlier this year. In May, a jury found Ye liable for infringing an instrumental track on an early version of his chart-topping 2021 album Donda.
Meanwhile, Ye’s career has been mired in controversy around his antisemitism since 2022. He issued a lengthy apology in the Wall Street Journal this past January for years of public hate speech, which included praise of Hitler and selling swastika T-shirts. Ye wrote in this apology, which preceded the release of his album Bully, that these controversial comments had stemmed from a 2002 car crash that caused severe brain damage and bipolar disorder.
“I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment and meaningful change,” Ye wrote. “It does not excuse what I did, though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.”
Ye has since worked to mount a comeback, playing to huge crowds at an ongoing run of stadium shows this year. But the rapper’s past is still haunting him, and shows in the U.K. and Poland have been canceled due to government concerns about his previous antisemitic statements. Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.) also ran a public, though unsuccessful, campaign to stop Ye from performing at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium in June.
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