Kanye West showed pornographic material to staffers at Adidas who were working on his Yeezy apparel line — including his own sex tapes and explicit images of his estranged wife, Kim Kardashian, according to a bombshell report.
Some two dozen former Adidas and Yeezy staffers allege that West showed them the smutty photos and videos during work meetings, according to Rolling Stone West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, is also alleged to have showed an explicit image of Kardashian to a prospective employee during a job interview.
According to former Yeezy staffers, an Adidas executive warned them to be on alert for Ye’s penchant to bring up pornography during meetings.
“Hey, just so you know, there’s gonna be this whole porn-reference thing,” an Adidas vice president is reported to have told Yeezy staffers.
One former staffer told Rolling Stone that he personally witnessed Ye play pornographic videos during meetings on at least five different occasions. Employees reported that they were frequently uncomfortable with Ye’s references to sex.
“We create products of passion,” Ye is alleged to have told a high-ranking employee. “I literally want to f–k my shoes. That’s how good they are.”
In 2018, Ye interviewed a female candidate for a job. According to Rolling Stone, Ye told the prospective employee: “If you ever get stuck creatively, just watch porn for 10 minutes.”
During one meeting with staffers, Ye is alleged to have started playing a pornographic video on his personal computer for all the employees to see.
“He would be in a meeting and he’d be talking to you, and he’d rattle off in his laptop” to play a porn video, one ex-employee told Rolling Stone.
“And he’s like, ‘I know it’s uncomfortable, but I kind of need this in the background to keep me focused.’ And you’d be like, ‘Uhhhhh, oh-kay.’”
Despite these alleged incidents, Adidas management did not take action, the ex-staffers allege.
Yeezy ex-staffers signed an open letter accusing Adidas management of being aware of Ye’s “problematic behavior” but instead chose to have “turned their moral compass off.”
Adidas released a statement late on Thursday saying that it would investigate the allegations.
“It is currently not clear whether the accusations made in an anonymous letter are true,” the company said. “However, we take these allegations very seriously and have taken the decision to launch an independent investigation of the matter immediately to address the allegations.”
Adidas told Rolling Stone that it would not address specific allegations made against Ye.
Ye, who has cut ties with his publicist and attorneys, could not immediately be reached for comment.
The apparel giant “continued to tolerate his difficult behavior” for years.
“Adidas does not tolerate hate speech and offensive behavior and therefore has terminated the adidas Yeezy partnership,” the company told Rolling Stone in a statement.
“We have been and continue to be actively engaged in conversations with our employees about the events that lead [sic] to our decision to end the partnership. They have our full support and as we’re working through the details of the termination, we have been clear that we want to keep our employees’ talent and skills within the organization.”
Ye and Kardashian are in the middle of a contentious divorce. The couple has four young children.
Adidas cut ties with Ye last month after the rapper unleashed a bizarre anti-Semitic tirade on social media. Gap, another corporate partner which sold Ye’s apparel line, also dropped him in the wake of his incendiary remarks.
Ye and Adidas partnered up to sell his Yeezy shoe line back in 2013.
The company faced criticism for not divorcing the former billionaire sooner, which many chalked up to the fact that Ye-branded shoes raked in almost $2 billion in sales last year for Adidas, according to Morgan Stanley.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
