Kanye West Wanted To Give Kids GUNS At Donda Academy, Claim Former Teachers!

A new lawsuit claims Kanye West planned to teach kids at his failed Donda Academy all about how to shoot guns, march with them in tow, and more. Almost like his own child soldiers…

Former Donda Academy teacher Cecilia Hailey is now suing the rapper for wrongful termination alongside some of her ex-colleagues. And on Monday, she spoke to the US Sun about her alleged experiences with the school.

Most notably, Hailey revealed what things were allegedly really like inside the walls of that school, which was first opened in the Simi Valley area of Los Angeles and then moved over to the El Lay suburb of Chatsworth a couple years back before shutting down entirely. (Plus, more on that shutdown and Donda Academy’s new pivot below, too.)

Related: Kim Kardashian ‘Pretty Much A Single Mom’ — Kanye West ‘Not Around’ The Kids Anymore

Hailey went really in depth with her accusations against Bianca Censori‘s husband. Her lawsuit is set to go to trial against Ye in April of next year, should other court rulings or settlements not intervene. Lawyers involved in the case spoke up, too — and one of Ye’s friends even spoke to the outlet, as well. It’s a LOT, y’all!

Read on (below) for all the jaw-dropping highlights on the former teacher’s lawsuit and the apparent goings-on at Donda Academy…

Giving ‘Hitler Vibes’

Most notably, Hailey claimed to the news outlet that Ye wanted the children to “learn marching” and be taught how to carry a gun. She explained:

“He did want the children to learn marching. He wanted all the children to be educated in how to carry a gun, how to shoot a gun. I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m not having my third graders out learning how to shoot rifles, absolutely not.'”

WTF does marching and gun usage have to do with education, tho??

Hailey claimed that was exactly the pushback she delivered upon Ye at the time, but her concerned message supposedly fell on deaf ears. She says “Hitler vibes” took hold instead:

“It came up kinda early when I first got there, kinda wanting to know how I felt about the kids learning to march, and how I felt about the kids taking gun classes and rifle classes, and I’m thinking that is not gonna happen if I’m here, that’s not acceptable, it’s not necessary, and what does that have to do with education? Teaching these kids to march, to be honest with you I kind of got like Hitler vibes around that or real bizarre things.”

Yikes!!

The Nazis did infamously train children to fight for them — and Kanye has said there were things he liked about Hitler. Oof.

Calling Ye “delusional,” the longtime teacher added:

“And I don’t know what he’s thinking. I don’t know where he thinks children fit in this. We’re not talking about adults here, we’re talking about eight-year-olds, twelve-year-olds, 15-year-olds.”

A second unnamed teacher also backed Hailey’s assertion about the proposed gun training. They claimed to the news outlet that someone at Donda Academy (it’s unclear who) was looking into hiring an instructor to teach survival skills and tactical military lessons to the children:

“He was going to teach the kids how to survive in the wilderness, hunting, camping, and how to load and shoot firearms.”

Huh?! What about just, like, reading… and writing… and arithmetic??

Thankfully, the US Sun notes there’s no indication any children at the school actually completed rifle training or marching lessons. So, that’s good. But still…

Big-Time Bullying

Unfortunately, Hailey’s accusations were FAR from finished there. She also reported on how bullying was a major issue at Donda Academy. She recalled instances of kids fighting viciously while other students cowered under tables in fear. And she noted that the kids weren’t even allowed to be disciplined like they needed to be in a bid to restore order!!

She alleged:

“There was a lot of bullying. Kids were getting physical; they would fight, the bigger kids would fight the little kids. So you might have a fourth grader hitting on a kindergarten or a first grader. We had kids hiding under tables because they were afraid. It was mayhem, really. There were armed guards outside, but the kids were not safe inside.”

So scary…

Even More Accusations

Hailey is far from the only person accusing Donda Academy and Ye of nefarious activities. An unnamed military veteran has also filed a lawsuit against the Hurricane artist. In the suit, the combat veteran — who is referred to in court docs only as John Doe — claimed that Ye himself threatened to kill him after he raised concerns over alleged abuse at the school!

In that suit, the anonymous vet claims Ye began firing Donda staffers and executives en masse in May of 2024. Shortly after that, as the rapper’s behavior behind closed doors reportedly became more erratic, Doe supposedly got a call from another school employee who claimed that “abuse of children had occurred at Donda and that supposedly nothing was done to correct or report the problem,” according to his lawsuit.

Hours later, the s**t hit the fan. Doe’s lawsuit claimed:

“Almost immediately thereafter, on the same day, Ye himself called Doe to yell, curse, and threaten Doe with great bodily injury, including death, if Doe repeated what Doe learned from the Donda employee.”

Per the suit, Kim Kardashian‘s ex-husband also allegedly played recordings of strange voices that threatened physical harm would come to the veteran, and then yelled this at him for good measure:

“You’re f**king dead to me.”

And while Ye himself has not responded to that suit (or the others), an insider close to the star did make this claim to the US Sun in reply to their query about it:

“Many of the details in his complaint are simply fantastical and false.”

Sushi Problems

But back to Hailey. She alleges that Ye one day suddenly decided to serve only sushi to the kids at Donda Academy. That is a claim we’ve reported on before from other lawsuits against Kanye, BTW.

Hailey added a new detail, though: that many kids went hungry during the school day because they didn’t want to eat the sushi provided to them and had no other options. She claimed:

“Initially, the kids were being given a decent meal. And then all of a sudden, Kanye gave them sushi every single day. We had kids that were hungry because they didn’t eat sushi. So then that means from eight o’clock in the morning to five or six o’clock at night, maybe they only had fruit in the day.”

She went on to add how it got so bad at times that staffers would “sneak out” and “go get food” for some of the kids who were hungry:

“We’d just kind of sneak out and go get food for the kids because we had to. We absolutely had to because the kids were hungry.”

BTW, when the school made its move a few years back from its ranch campus in Simi Valley to the more recent stop in Chatsworth, walls and rooms were blacked out and open space to play outside was at a premium. Hailey recalled the disturbing adjustment and how poorly the kids reacted to it alongside the sushi-only food policy:

“The sports that they were playing inside, during recess time, they needed to be outside, they needed to have a playground, they could have been seriously injured.”

Ugh!!

The Lawyers Speak…

Big-time lawyers Ron Zambrano and Neama Rahmani are representing Hailey and several other teachers in their lawsuit against Ye. They also sat down with the US Sun to discuss the situation at the school.

Regarding the blacked-out rooms in the Chatsworth building as well as the no glass windows policy allegedly put forth by Ye at that time, Zambrano said:

“Kanye had this idea at that point of no windows. So they were at the campus, and then all of a sudden, these kids were in these rooms where there were no windows at 8 am. Everything had to be black. No color in the classrooms for an elementary school is odd. He didn’t like, at that point, to have things on the second floor. The no windows, I think, is the most egregious thing.”

No kidding! If true, that is SUCH a disturbing move!

Ye’s Pal Claps Back

While Ye hasn’t commented on all this, he’s still got pals in his corner. The news outlet spoke to longtime Kanye pal and former Donda Academy advisor Malik Yusef about the claims made against the rapper. Yusef — who first met Ye decades ago through his late mother Donda West — tried to defend the original purpose of Donda Academy:

“We can’t lock kids in at 3 years old. At 3 years old you wanna be a doctor, at 5 you wanna be an electrician, at 6 you wanna be a superhero. I don’t think we should lock kids in like that, and I think Donda Academy was meant to be free in that way.”

So… it wasn’t locking them into being child soldiers? Learning to march and shoot?

Yusef also lamented how hard it apparently was to bring on skilled employees to the new school:

“Kanye’s not a principal, he’s not a certified teacher in that way, so obviously we got to go hire the best people, to bring them in, to do the job necessary. It’s not easy to get traditionally trained educators to kind of come back to a more holistic brand of teaching, even with all the skills. and their ‘je ne sais quoi’ still have to train them how to deal with these babies.”

And at first, he defended many of Ye’s tactics — including the sushi and the “sensory deprivation” of blacking things out. Yusef grudgingly acknowledged the “window thing,” too, though:

“I think sushi is a great meal, my children eat sushi, I know that we live in a world where everyone should be able to eat fresh foods. The window thing. I was not aware of that. I’ve heard rumors of it, I’ve not spoken to Ye about that. But I do know that we had a sensory deprivation experiment that we did, as adults, when we were working on the Donda album. We were living in a stadium. There were no windows. And I think it helped concentrate us.”

But he went on from that hiccup to keep defending Ye. For one, he slammed the allegations of bullying at Donda Academy as being worse than what goes on at any other school in the world:

“Safety, what is safety, where is there safety in the world? We have school shootings, and we’re talking about kids feeling somewhat uncomfortable. And I’m not in any way minimizing the parent’s concern for their kids. But you’re not gonna be overconcerned at Donda Academy and send your kids to public school where we’ve had 300 mass shootings. Sorry. I’m not going for it.”

And he concluded:

“I think there was some frivolity to those lawsuits, I think people get a chance to pile in and dogpile on Ye because he has money.”

Future As A Charity

For now, the US Sun also reported that Donda Academy is no longer registered with the state of California as a school — a change that appears to have first been made back in June. But wait! There’s more! Ye’s team has since filed paperwork to rebrand so-called Donda Ray Academy as a charity. There, say insiders, kids can take lessons from various coaches in disciplines including basketball, choir, and dance.

The news outlet reports that Ye has little to do with the charity now in terms of its day-to-day operations. He’s not fully removed, though, as an insider was quick to note. That source went on to add:

“We are operating training for the youth. For free. Pouring into our youth and the community, which has always been one of Ye’s visions.”

The insider claimed that children at Donda Ray are now “thriving,” while still taking “certain directives” from the organization’s famous founder. That source did not reveal what those so-called “directives” were. They did say this, though:

“We are fortunate enough to hold the building because Ye invested his own money into the vision.”

Former Donda teacher Hailey is one of the newfound charity’s most vocal critics, though. She slammed the re-brand by saying:

“It needs to be totally disseminated, it does not need to exist. We don’t know what they’re doing. We know kids come after school, so what? We don’t know what’s really going on. I worry about my kids; I wonder where my children are, how they’re doing in the schools, if they’re someplace else, how they’re progressing.”

Yeesh, yeah. He could still be putting guns in the hands of kids if no one is there to see. Scary. And she added:

“Again, the traumas they’ve experienced in the last two years, having so much chaos in their school life. Are they sleeping well, are they eating better, are they stable, because they were so young, and this is the age where they’re impressionable. I hope they’re getting some counseling, and I’m hoping they’re getting the services they need if they need them to get caught up, because going into a school when you’re behind is not good at all. My concern was for those children, knowing that inside those walls was a zoo, and they were not being educated at all, and it was supposedly a private school.”

Honestly… well said!

Critics Offer Advice

For now, several of Ye’s most vocal critics are offering him advice on this whole situation — not that, ya know, he’s likely to actually take said advice. Hailey gave this piece of wise counsel to the rapper when asked by the news outlet:

“Kanye, this was a mess, and you knew it was a mess, and you shouldn’t have gotten yourself involved. If you know that you can’t run something adequately, don’t put the lives of children and other people in the middle of your stuff.”

And her attorney Zambrano added:

“Kanye has many talents, and he’s done many things, but I don’t think running the school is where his strengths are. Despite all his legal problems, we still haven’t seen Kanye West in a courtroom, in a trial. So, we’ll be interested to see if that actually happens.”

How very tactful of him… to say the least.

Lawsuit Limbo

In the end, Ye is truly in lawsuit limbo. He’s facing a litany of lawsuits for Donda Academy-related allegations and plenty of other things, as well. Plus, back in July, Ye’s now-former lawyer Brian Brumfield asked a judge to be removed from Kanye’s case after he claimed in court that the rapper had stopped paying him!!

Hailey isn’t moved at all by Ye’s mounting legal troubles, though. In fact, as she said in her own words, she “couldn’t care less.” The ex-teacher concluded:

“I felt whistleblowing was going to be the only way these things were going to change. I didn’t worry about who it was. I didn’t worry about the repercussions — ‘oh it’s Kanye West and he’s gonna come after you’ — I couldn’t care less.”

Wow.

This whole thing is wild on so many levels. We’re not even sure what to make of it all. Reactions, Perezcious readers?? Thoughts?! Takes?? Share them ALL in the comments (below)…

[Image via Jimmy Kimmel Live/YouTube.]