After Ye pulled out a full-page newspaper ad to apologise for his previous antisemitic comments, the rapper is doubling down and attempting to assure the public that it’s not a PR stunt.
Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, said in a series of emailed statements to Vanity Fair, published Tuesday, Jan. 27, that his apology letter to the Black and Jewish communities was not a part of a strategy ahead of his new studio album, “Bully.”
Instead, the rapper insisted that “these remorseful feelings were so heavy on my heart and weighing on my spirit” and that he owed “a huge apology once again for everything that I said that hurt the Jewish and Black communities in particular.”
“I look at the wreckage of my episode and realise that this isn’t who I am,” Ye told Vanity Fair.
In the apology letter featured in a Wall Street Journal advertisement Monday, Jan. 26, Ye said his mental health history – including a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and a four-month manic episode that took place in the first half of 2025 – was what allegedly fueled his “reckless” behaviour.
Ye gave context about his state of mind in the Vanity Fair interview, saying he’s “been put on and taken off of many medications” over time. “Toward the end of my four-month-long manic episode, my medication was changed. In that shift, the antipsychotic drug took me into a really deep depressive episode.”
He said his wife, Bianca Censori, “recognised” the issues and helped him find an “effective and stabilising course correction in my regime from a rehab facility in Switzerland.”
“When you’re manic, you really don’t think that you’re sick,” Ye told Vanity Fair. “You think that everyone else is deeply overreacting. You feel like you’re seeing the world so much more clearly on things, when in reality you’re losing your grip entirely.”
Now, experts are weighing in on Ye’s apology and whether his mental state is enough to win him back in the public’s good graces.
