Adidas terminated its cooperation with West over anti-Semitic remarks
Sports goods company Adidas is facing a lawsuit from investors who claim it knew about the problematic behavior of rapper and designer Kanye West before their years of partnership ended.
Investors claim that Adidas failed to limit financial losses and take precautionary measures to reduce the risk of further losses.
The sportswear giant ended its collaboration with designer and rapper West, known as Ye, last year after he made anti-Semitic remarks.
For its part, Adidas said: “We categorically reject these unfounded allegations.”
“We will take all necessary measures to vigorously defend ourselves against these allegations,” she added.
West is not a party to this lawsuit. The rapper designed a line of highly successful training clothes under the Yeezy brand for Adidas.
Since then, Adidas has admitted that it could suffer losses of up to 700 million euros due to its failure to sell products bearing the Yeezy brand, which is worth hundreds of billions.
“Adidas does not tolerate anti-Semitism or any other kind of hate speech,” the company said when it ended its collaboration with the designer last October.
“Ye’s recent statements and actions were unacceptable, hateful and threatening, and violated the company’s values of diversity, inclusion, mutual respect and integrity,” it added.
However, investors who filed the lawsuit in the US against the company last Friday alleged that Adidas knew of other questionable practices by West, claiming that former CEO Casper Rorsted discussed it as well as other departments of the issue.
The Wall Street Journal published details of an alleged meeting in 2018 where Adidas discussed matters related to the American singer.
The report claimed that senior executives talked about how to mitigate the effects of employee interaction with his statements, as well as the possibility of the company cutting ties with him.
Since Adidas split from West last October, the company has opened an investigation after reports of creating a “toxic environment” at the company.
And Rolling Stone magazine published excerpts from an open letter by Adidas employees who claimed the bosses were aware of West’s “problematic behaviour” but had “turned off their moral compass”.
In response, Adidas said it was not clear whether the accusations in this anonymous letter were true.
“However, we take these allegations very seriously and have taken the decision to immediately launch an independent investigation into the matter to counter these allegations,” she added.
West held a fashion show at Paris Fashion Week last October, where models wore clothes bearing the slogan “White Lives Matter” or “White Lives Matter”.
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “a white supremacist phrase that emerged in early 2015 as a racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement” or “Black Lives Matter”.
Later that month, West’s Instagram and Twitter accounts were suspended after he made anti-Semitic remarks.
2023-04-30 18:44:39
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