TMZ Removed Kanye’s Antisemitism from 2018 Interview, Former Reporter Alleges

Photo Credit: Kanye West by Axel Antas-Bergkvist

A former TMZ staffer claims that founder Harvey Levin once edited a Kanye interview to omit the rapper’s antisemitic comments, years before the revelation of the rapper’s extreme views.

TMZ founder Harvey Levin once chose to omit Kanye West’s praise of Hitler from a 2018 interview, years before the rapper’s extreme views became public. According to former staffer Evan Rosenblum, Levin had Kanye’s antisemitic comments scrapped from the infamous interview in which the rapper said he believed that slavery was a choice for Black Americans.

“Earlier in that interview, Kanye went off about Hitler and the Nazis and started talking about his love for Hitler and how Hitler was misunderstood,” said Rosenblum, who worked at TMZ for 15 years. “This was years before his other antisemitic controversies, but after the show finished taping, Harvey came up and told me he’d had all that stuff cut out. It was crazy. I mean, ‘Kanye West goes to bat for Hitler’ does not hit the cutting-room floor at any serious newsroom.”

Indeed, TMZ’s unusual approach to handling sensitive material has at times enabled it to report on powerful individuals while preserving access to them. To that end, GQ suggests that Levin’s decision to cut Kanye’s remarks about Hitler was fueled by the desire to maintain access to the star.

For example, Levin reportedly paid $80,000 in 2011 to acquire a video of a young Justin Bieber using a racial slur. But instead of immediately publishing it, Levin shelved it and only brought it out after Bieber had given an interview to TMZ Live on his 18th birthday.

In 2023, TMZ acquired footage of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) CEO Dana White getting into a physical altercation with his wife—but that video only arrived alongside a sit-down interview between White and Levin. Meanwhile, TMZ continues to get UFC exclusives.

AOL and a subsidiary of Warner Bros. founded TMZ in 2005, and 76-year-old lawyer Harvey Levin has led the site since then. The outlet has established itself by breaking some of the biggest Hollywood scandals of the modern era, including Mel Gibson’s 2006 DUI arrest (and antisemitic rant), Chris Brown’s 2009 domestic abuse of Rihanna, and the drug-related deaths of Michael Jackson, Prince, and One Direction’s Liam Payne.

Regarding Kanye, had TMZ released the full interview with the rapper in 2018, it would certainly have accelerated the timetable for the revelation of the hitmaker’s extreme antisemitism. Neither TMZ nor Levin has responded to inquiries from the press on the matter.