Patti LaBelle’s nephew says she cut him off permanently because he supports Donald Trump, and he laid the whole thing out in a long post on X Friday.
His name is William “Byl” Holte, he is 65, and he runs a right wing commentary account with around 169,000 followers. In the post he said that at Christmas 2019, LaBelle had just told him he had to move out of the home they had shared for 12 years. When he heard the family discussing why Trump was a threat, he asked why he should be scared of Trump when she was the one who had made him homeless. He says the family attacked him and threw him out on the spot. He says that when he later started talking publicly about his life with her, the punishment was lifetime banishment, that she still is not speaking to him, and that because she is not, nobody in her circle is either. He closed by saying nobody disrespects free speech more than Democrats.
Here is the piece his thread leaves out, and it changes the shape of the whole story.
Byl Holte is the son of Jacqueline “Jackie” Holte-Padgett, LaBelle’s youngest sister. Jackie died of brain cancer in July 1989 at 43 years old. After she died, LaBelle adopted Byl and his sister Stayce. So this is not an aunt who let a nephew crash for a while. This is the woman who took him in as a child when his mother died and raised him.
He also filled in some detail himself after the post went up, clarifying that during those 12 years he was living on a family estate and working as LaBelle’s personal assistant, gardener and pet caretaker. That is a different arrangement from what “the home I had happily shared with her” suggests.
Then came the replies, which is where this stopped being a story about politics.
When a commenter talked about going to buy more Patti pies, Holte responded that it would make it easier for her to give him money, because she promised her dying sister that she would.
That dying sister is his mother. He is invoking her deathbed to argue that the woman who raised him owes him a check.
He also told people, plainly, that the pile on was helping his numbers ahead of next week’s payout. For anyone who does not follow how this works, X pays eligible accounts based on engagement from other paying users. A fight that trends is not just attention. It is a direct deposit. He said the quiet part out loud, and the people dunking on him were the ones funding it.
This is also not the first time Holte has been at the center of something like this. In 2020, Dean Browning, a white Republican from Pennsylvania, went viral for a post written from the perspective of a gay Black man saying everything was better under Trump. Browning said he had been quoting a message from a follower. That follower turned out to be Holte, who then posted a video defending him.
LaBelle has not responded to any of this. She did address the family’s political split back in 2020, telling Oprah Magazine that she did not choose her family but she chooses her friends, that she loves Billy, that he has a Republican mind and she does not, and that she was not going to hate him for it. She said she “can’t beat him up for the rest of his life.” She also drew one line, saying that when her name gets pulled into the mistake, that is a problem.
Six years later her name is in it again, this time attached to a request for money and an admission that the outrage is monetized.
