Kay One appears in an outfit not typical of a rapper. He is wearing beige linen trousers, a checked shirt and brown leather shoes. Maybe that has something to do with the fact that he lives in posh Grünwald in the district of Munich. He does not want to give his exact address, allegedly because of the large number of press people who came to the wood-panelled room 500 of the Berlin district court on Wednesday. But maybe the reason is that Kay One didn’t have a good deal with Arafat Abou-Chaker, who is sitting in the dock here. He and his brothers are accused of threatening the rapper Bushido and inflicting violence on him when he wanted to get out of the joint business.
Kay One, bourgeois Kenneth Brodowski, 37, is an important witness for the prosecution: Because he may have had the same experiences with Arafat Abou-Chaker as his fellow musician Bushido. It all started in 2007, when Kay One from Ravensburg came to Berlin and found a job with Bushido’s Ersguterjunge label. “The vibes” there were “cool”, he says, “I was best friends with Arafat”. But in 2012 he got out. Why – he later made it public. He compared the actions of Bushido and the Abou-Chakers with mafia methods, saying he was a slave to the Abou-Chakers. After his performances, masked men threatened him with knives, and once a car drove past him and someone pointed what appeared to be a gun at him.
In court, on the other hand, Kay One behaves like many witnesses who are supposed to testify about clan crime. He doesn’t like to talk about what he claims to have experienced. When asked about any disputes, he evasively replies that everything was not so bad, that Abou-Chaker was like a big brother. The prosecutor confronts him with a statement he made to the police in 2013. Kay One said that Abou-Chaker was about to strike when he didn’t want to sign a contract. And when he approached singers who were also under contract with the label, he was confronted by Abou-Chaker. First with the words “You don’t sleep with the company,” then with a baseball bat. Abou-Chaker hit him for a quarter of an hour, according to Kay One’s statement at the time. He also reported the following sentence to the police: “I was afraid that I wouldn’t get out of there alive.” Today, Kay One doesn’t want to remember that anymore. “Phew, ten years later it’s not in my head anymore.”
It remains to be seen how helpful this appearance is for the proceedings, Abou-Chaker’s defense attorneys call Kay One’s earlier statement a lie, yes, “bullshit”. And there was another notable court date on Wednesday. In Potsdam, the villa ensemble including the property came under the hammer, where the rapper Bushido and Arafat Abou-Chaker once wanted to move in together. At the request of the musician, it was foreclosed on. After a short session, the only bidder went for 7.4 million: the 21-year-old son of Arafat Abou-Chaker.