Kanye West’s father Ray West is battling prostate cancer, according to TMZ.
Sources told the site that Ray was not diagnosed with stomach cancer, contrary to a Radar Online report published Saturday.
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Ray is now in a Los Angeles hospital and is “responding well” to treatment and it “looks like he’s going to be okay,” TMZ‘s sources said.
After hearing his father’s diagnosis, West rushed to be by Ray’s side. Although Ray and his mother, the late Donda West, divorced when West was a child, the two have remained amicable. In fact, in March, paparazzi spotted the father and son at Nobu Malibu.
In a New York Times profile, West said his father visited him in Wyoming earlier this year and tried to convince him not to support President Donald Trump.
“He expressed that he felt that some of the policies were hurtful and that I’m a person that does not intend to hurt people, never hurts people with intention,” West said. “I expressed the example that I have a cousin that’s locked up for doing something bad, and I still love him, so I don’t base my love for a person on if they doing something good or bad.”
West also said his father is a former Black Panther who recently lived in a homeless shelter to help former drug addicts.
“My father was a Black Panther, my father was a photo journalist,” West said in a 2013 BBC interview. “We had a dark room in our house. Seven years ago, he lived in a homeless shelter, not because he was homeless, because he wanted to help the ex-drug addicts, he wanted to get that close. He started a foundation called Good Water and moved to the Dominican Republic, to help with the prostitution, to help with the extortion. He stays in the DR right now.”
West added, “My mom was the first black female chair of the English Department. There is no awards show, there is no amount of Billboards, there is nothing that can define me or make me pass what my parents made me. And that’s exactly who I am.”
Ray received his cancer diagnosis 10 years after West’s mother Donda died. She died at 58 from a heart attack, the day after she underwent cosmetic surgery. The Los Angeles County Coroner ruled her death was caused by “coronary artery disease and multiple post-operative factors due to or as a consequence of liposuction and mammoplasty.”
West and his mother had a very close relationship.
Photo Credit: Prince Williams / Getty Images
