Adidas Starts Major Investigation Into Kanye West Porn Allegations, Contract Fights

Adidas Starts Major Investigation Into Kanye West Porn Allegations, Contract Fights AOC Fashion

Note: This overview is about one-third of the actual article in AOC Fashion.

Sunday’s Wall Street Journal business section has updated the investigation into Kanye West’s behavior promised by Adidas after publication of last week’s Rolling Stone expose on Kanye. Among the damning assertions was reference to a group letter sent years ago — or even more than one —informing Adidas executive management of West’s absolutely unacceptable behavior in the rapper’s business and management practices.

Unlike Nike’s Michael Jordan standalone partnership, where the two groups are separate but both flying under the Nike banner, the Adidas - Kanye West relationship was run under the Adidas organization. Separate teams were created for the Yeezy business, but the staff was Adidas for the most part.

According to Rolling Stone, the Adidas employees claimed that senior managers were aware of West’s “problematic behaviour” but “turned their moral compass off” and failed to protect its employees against “years of verbal abuse, vulgar tirades, and bullying attacks.”

The German brand initially refused to address these reports last Wednesday, November 23.

Investor Demand for Investigation

The demand for a complete and detailed Adidas investigation into the history of the firm’s relationship with West came from Germany’s third largest asset manager, Union Investment.

The firm has a 1 per cent stake in Adidas and is a top-20 shareholder, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. “Adidas needs to disclose when the management and the supervisory board was first informed about the internal allegations,” Janne Werning, head of ESG Capital Markets & Stewardship at Union Investment, told the Financial Times, in making public its insistance that Adidas detail the history of the Kanye West relationship.

Rolling Stone Allegations

The damning Rolling Stone article on Kanye asserted a history of complaints and even a leave of absence at a senior level triggered by the rapper’s behavior and the women’s refusal to put up with him.

West appears to have been a rude, crude, demanding, demeaning, controlling, sleezy, misogynist provocateur in his role as a critical Adidas partner.

It’s estimated that Yeezy products have made up about 7-8 percent of Adidas revenue, indicating that West had major interaction and impact of a significant portion of the Adidas staff.

Staff Claims Against West Not Disputed

WSJ writes that the 2018 presentation “detailed mitigation strategies for the relationship with the Yeezy creator, including cutting ties with the rapper-turned-designer.”

It’s important to understand that West was demanding to become creative director of all of Adidas in October, 2018, based on documents reviewed by WSJ.

No Evidence [Yet] that Adidas Confronted West

For reasons that are understandable from an exclusively revenue loss analysis, Adidas sought to keep the relationship with Kanye West intact — most certainly without agreeing to make him the creative director of all of Adidas.

Rotating Staff Maybe?

WSJ has reviewed documents suggesting that perhaps Adidas could minimize keep staff having direct exposure to Mr. West with some kind of rotation system.

Such a move wouldn’t end the problem, but make it Kanye’s problem and not an Adidas one.

There is a line in WSJ that is telling, though. Kanye West was getting $100 million a year to market and fund Yeezy in philanthropic ventures. “Adidas executives decided that any spending beyond Adidas-related activities could help sell more sneakers as long as Mr. West kept himself in the headlines, the people said.”

Fast Forward to 2022 and New Adidas-Ye Negotiations

Kanye has the view that “Everything is mine. It’s all mine. All good ideas come from me. I am the only one who can fix it.” Sound familiar?

How Ye thinks “it’s all mine” — even the Adidas R&D development — defies logic. But there is no logic in dealing with Kanye West.

The Blowup Approaches

It seems that August became a point of reckoning for Adidas that the Kanye West relationship was about to blow sky high.

And yet, the executives continued to negotiate with West — after he shoved a porn video in their faces. WSJ suggests that the voice on the porn video sounded like one of the top Adidas executives, a numbing experience for that executive who may have been subject to the new technology where the sound of our own voices is attached to videos that have nothing to do with an actual event.

Like his pal Trump, Kanye is above the law in his own mind.

In September 2022 Adidas Was Making Concessions to Kanye

WSJ writes that new contract negotations continued in the fall, after Gap announced that it was severing ties with Ye on Sept. 15:

Adidas made an offer conceding to many of Mr. West’s demands, including ownership of new designs, paying royalties for copycats and offering to increase the royalty payment to 20% on existing Yeezy designs after 2026. But the company wanted him to give up the annual marketing payment.

West refused the deal. With the $100 million marketing money returning to Adidas, it’s clear they wanted to get marketing decisions — and public presentation of Adidas as a partner of Yeezy products — back into Adidas hands.

Mr. West wasn’t satisfied. He wanted Adidas to give him ownership of existing designs, and wanted the company to sell the designs without Yeezy branding—and pay him a 20% royalty for them, according to the people. He also wanted $1 billion worth of Adidas stock once sales of existing products hit $5 billion, and an additional $2 billion in stock if higher sales targets were reached, the people said.

White Lives Matter Day in Paris

And then all hell broke loose, with the White Lives Matter shirt.

The bomb had just gone off for good. Ye had just wiped himself off the Forbes Billionaire List in one giant, grandiose act of self-destruction.

This is probably the most hideous situation I’ve seen in business — and the financial stakes could not be higher — not only for Adidas stockholders but also their employees.

Adidas had to cut off the cancer of Kanye. You cannot have a racist, antisemite, misogynist, bomb-thrower egomaniac who thinks he’s God running lose, terrorizing your entire company.

There’s a strong argument to be made that different options should have been exercised in 2018, when Adidas was considering not renewing Kanye’s contract — given what they knew.

Presently, Kanye is focused on sowing discord far and wide across America. He is aligning himself with the most right-wing and bigoted, misogynist forces in America. It is all so, so, so sad but it is also very dangerous.

Kanye West, legally known as Ye, is a very dangerous person as we move into the 2024 presidential election cycle . ~ Anne

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Note from Anne: I have tried to keep so much politics out of these fashion pages, being very active in the Kanye news elsewhere in the AOC website. My plan is to continue that practice but at least do weekly summaries in the fashion channel of what is happening.

Our organization of the Fashion, Branding, News pages is working very well with their own links.

AOC will not be shoving politics in our faces going forward. But I will bring big overview articles like this one to this Fashion channel, giving friends of AOC the option of reading it or not.

At this point I am so concerned about Ye and his destructive path for America and race relations generally, that he will have his own page complete with all other right-wing news events. ~ Anne