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Female Kanye West Pleads Guilty to Times Square Vandalism

By Andrew Chow, Esq. on May 31, 2012 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

Kanye West pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal mischief this week and caused quite a stir in a Manhattan courtroom.

"Kanye! For real?" defendants excitedly said as they checked the docket and recognized the famous name, the New York Post reports.

Turns out, it wasn't hip-hop star Kanye West, but a female street performer from Chicago who legally changed her name to Kanye West last year.

When one of those street performances went south, the female Kanye West admits she went bezerk.

Ms. Kanye West's legal trouble began when a battery for an amplifier she'd recently bought stopped working during a street performance in Times Square.

Enraged, Kanye West hurled the amplifier through the storefront window of a nearby Office Depot. The store, she admits, had nothing to do with her non-working amplifier battery.

"I had a crowd full of people, got goals in the back of my head, I wanna rock this crowd, I feel like singing," West explained in a video interview with the Post. When the amplifier stopped working, "I was furious, and so... the window just happened to be in my way."

You can see more of Ms. West's interview here:

Police arrested West on the spot, and prosecutors initially charged her with a felony. But in a plea deal, they reduced her charge to a misdemeanor; in exchange, West will perform 100 hours of community service, the New York Daily News reports.

As for Ms. Kanye West's name, she says she legally changed it from her birth name, Linda Resa, to get the real Kanye West's attention. A person is generally allowed to change her name to whatever she likes, unless it's to hide from creditors or to mislead people, among other reasons. In many states, you don't even need a court order to change your name.

Along with her Times Square vandalism, Ms. Kanye West has attempted other stunts to attract attention, such as getting the name "Kanye" tattooed on her buttocks. "I've been singing eight years," the 28-year-old singer told the Daily News. "Nobody comes to see me until I break a window or get a tattoo on my butt."

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