Reports emerging from New York today indicate that techno pioneer Richie Hawtin has been arrested in connection with an assault on a KUVO employee at last weekend’s Time Warp festival.
Hawtin, pictured above looking menacing, is believed to have been arrested this morning in New York’s Hilton Midtown hotel after a report was made to the New York Police Department by KUVO representatives.
A video showing Hawtin knocking a woman, who appeared to be filming the DJ’s set on a mobile phone, off the stage by pushing a speaker into her has also circulated on social media sites Twitter and Facebook.
“If you look closely at the footage you can clearly see that the woman in the video is KUVO employee Angela Pearsons,” explained Mike Langer, a lawyer for KUVO, the app developed to give clubbers real time information on tracks being played by DJs on nights out. “And the device in her hand isn’t actually a mobile phone. It’s the black box installed to send information from the DJ booth to clubbers via the KUVO app.”
According to sources, Hawtin, in a “drug fueled fury”, ripped the black box out of the DJ booth while shouting “fuck this shit! I’m playing some trap” before launching the hand size electronic device into the crowd.
Paul Freeman, an audience member, also commented on the incident, “It was kinda hard to tell exactly what happened from where I was but you could see him (Hawtin) throw something into the crowd, then he made the worst transition of all time into some really crappy trap track.”
“It went down like a fart in an elevator,” claimed Freeman. “The crowd started to boo and whistle so he quickly went back to badly mixing techno.”
According to Langer, Ms. Pearsons was “simply returning the black box to the DJ booth” when Hawtin reverted to “school yard bully tactics” in an attempt to “save himself the embarrassment” caused by having the entire world know he played a trap track at a well known and respected music festival.
“Richie Hawtin thinks it’s OK for guys like him to go around assaulting women,” continued Langer. “But he needs to realise that it’s never OK for a man to assault a woman, no matter how soft spoken, well mannered or effeminate he is. Now he’s going to feel the full wrath of the law as my employers have told me to pull out all the stops to bring this beast to justice.”
Neither Hawtin, who up until now has been one of KUVO’s most publicised supporters, nor his legal representatives have commented on the incident.
Meanwhile event promoters Time Warp have said, “Richie Hawtin owes us a new speaker, we’ll be around to his house to pick it up on Friday. He better have it or else we’ll beat him with an extension cable.”
