Does Kim Kardasian Really Need Child Support from Kanye West?

Background

Kim Kardasian and Kanye West, who legally changed his name to “Ye” last year, were married in 2014 in a lavish and high profile wedding. The parties have 4 children from their marriage. Kim filed for divorce in February, 2021 citing irreconcilable differences. The court granted her divorce in March of 2022.

Net Worth

According to various new sources, the word on the street is that Kim Kardasian is worth somewhere between 1.8 and 2 billion dollars. Ironically Kanye West was worth about 2 billion dollars before recent losses of business.  Kanye has recently made a series of antisemitic and anti-Black statements that have caused a major ripple of sponsors and business deals to part ways with Ye.  Their prenuptial grants Kim 1 million dollars for each year of marriage, landing her another 7 million dollars from Ye in the last year.  Prior to Kanye’s business losses, it would seem that based on their net worth, no one should need anything from the other parent.

Divorce Agreement

Despite losses of multiple business partnerships and deals following a string of antisemitic comments, the parties reached a divorce settlement whereby the parties share joint custody of their children and Kardashian receives $200,000 a month in child support from Ye. If you do the math, that is 2.4 million dollars a year tax free, meaning a net of 2.4 million.  That is a lot of food, clothing and activities even for 4 children.  Is it a lot? Well, there must be a lot of Hollywood expenses for the children—think private school, chauffers, body guards, extravagant housing, designer clothing, horseback riding lessons, exotic vacations and sushi.  The child support concept is that children are to maintain a certain lifestyle that they are accustomed to, but 2.4 million a year from one parent still is a bit of a shock to the conscious.

Modification in the Future  

According to Forbes and other sources, Ye is now worth 4 million dollars after losing deals with Adidas which alone was worth 1.5 billion to Ye. BuzzFeed reports that in a mere 3 weeks, Ye has lost his empire.  Ye posted on Instragram that he lost 2 billion dollars in one day.  The number of businesses that have condemned Ye’s hate speech continues to grow including Gap, The RealReal, and others have jumped from the Yeazy brand ship. In a stark move from Twitters recently purchased and more liberal view on free speech, Elon Musk’s Twitter has banned Kanye. Vogue has parted ways, the fashion designer, Balenciaga has abandoned Ye and even Kim has posted against hate speech on Twitter and Instagram without specifying Ye directly.  Is there more going on with Ye then a string of white supremacy tweets—remember he said slavery was a choice. Ye agreed to a large child support number based on his net worth even while his worth was plummeting based on his chosen behavior. The rumors have swirled for years that Ye has mental healthy issues that go back to his family.  The best saving grace for Ye is that child support is modifiable.

The courts in Maryland can modify child support based on a change in circumstances.  In this case, the court could also take into consideration that Ye lost his job and income based on his own careless and reckless behavior and could even argue that he voluntarily impoverished himself by choosing to publicly state hateful speech against different groups.  There was a few instances where West challenged Adidas to drop him stating “I can literally say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop me.  Now what?”

If the court believed that Ye caused his loss of income on purpose, the court could uphold the child support amount.  The only difficulty might be in actually collecting the monthly support.  Also, if contempt were filed, it would be very difficult to find Ye in contempt if he did not have the resources to pay the arrearages owed to Kim Kardasian.

At the end of the day, it appears that even Kanye is beginning to drop Ye.  Realizing how far he has fallen, Kanye posted a fake news article that stated “Ye cuts ties with Kanye West.”  It makes one wonder if Ye as an artist is intimating real life?