Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo track 'Real Friends', a very personal take on exploitation and betrayal, has a real sting in the tail in the final verse:

‘I had a cousin that stole my laptop that I was fuckin' bitches on / Paid that nigga 250 thousand just to get it from him’

It seems Kanye wasn’t taking poetic license either, as the MailOnline caught up with his cousin Lawrence Franklin to discuss the incident.

Franklin claims that Kanye gave the laptop as a gift to another cousin, who let another family member borrow it - the one that discovered a video of Kanye having sex with a “fair-skinned black woman”.

Family loyalty be damned, the man apparently “put together a small team him and his attorney went after Kanye, and to show that they meant business they leaked a little information publicly to let it be know they indeed had the footage.

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“The family member tried to keep a low profile but it was not long before Kanye’s team learned who it was that had the sex tape.”

Franklin claims Kanye did indeed end up paying $250,000 to stop the tape being leaked, and thinks it may have contributed to his recent mental health struggles.

“The sex tape episode started his decline — he stopped trusting people,” Franklin said. “At the end of the day if a member of your family had taken you for a quarter of a million dollars — so they can complete their own ambitions — who can you trust within your circle?”

He also thinks Kanye’s crisis could have been averted if his mother Donda was still alive.

“If she was here today she would do nothing but love on him and encourage him and uplift him and be by his side.