Kanye was once a high-school underdog, now he is a bully who shows porn to Adidas and Yeezy employees

In the early 2000s when Kanye West started getting more mainstream love, he broke out with his Higher Education trilogy that included the albums The College Dropout, Late Registration, and Graduation. The albums were represented by a recurring mascot: the Dropout Bear, a metaphor for Kanye's struggles in high school and his eventual disillusionment of the American education system.

Sadly, the Dropout Bear has now turned into a full-fledged high-school bully.

In a year of career lows, rapper/entrepreneur/fashion designer/“anti-Semite” Kanye West has hit a new low as new revelations have come out of Yeezy’s partnership with Adidas.

What's new now: Employees have not only alleged the Grammy winner to have “controlled” them at work through pornography (including revealing photos of his then-wife Kim Kardashian) but now they are also willing to take action against Adidas execs for allowing such “bullying behaviour”. 

What are the Adidas and Yeezy employees saying? According to a Rolling Stone report, employees involved in the Adidas x Yeezy collaboration had to endure a lot of mental pressure from their controversial boss. Kanye’s bullying tactics for Yeezy employees involved randomly playing pornographic videos in staff meetings and making a heavily sexualised atmosphere that was generally uncomfortable for especially women staffers. 

Willing to stay anonymous, the employees have also alleged Kanye to have shown them an intimate photograph of Kim Kardashian as well as his own “sex tapes”. It is worth asking if Yeezy even had an HR department!

While Pete Fox, ex-Prez of Yeezy, says that Kanye didn’t show him any explicit content, he does agree that Kanye had a strong bias towards some employees and played mind games with the others, even belittling them at the workplace. 

What are the employees doing now? The employees want both Kanye and Adidas to take accountability for fostering such a threatening work atmosphere. For the same reason, they have collectively written an open letter to Adidas for supporting Kanye’s “bullying tactics”. 

To quote the letter titled The Truth About Yeezy: A Call to Action for Adidas Leadership, 

The letter adds that Adidas failed to provide their employees “throughout what we experienced as years of verbal abuse, vulgar tirades, and bullying attacks”.

Kanye's own documentary foreshadowed this: In case people missed out on it, Kanye even dropped a 30-minute-long documentary called Last Week on his YouTube channel in October. The video clip finds Kanye documenting glimpses of his controversies, general interaction, and work ethic. Somewhere near the 10.28 timestamp, he can also be seen showing a porn clip to four men (with blurred faced), all of whom verbally express their discomfort by telling him to stop.  

What was Kanye's reasoning behind this response? As he tells in the documentary, his intention is to make the four men uncomfortable and even points at two of them saying they are "the worst nightmare" for Adidas. One of these men adds that Kanye is angry because of Adidas launching Yeezy-inspired derivatives and "stealing this man's ideas is like stealing his children". 

Another exec is quoted as saying, "We can certainly do a lot better in the way that we work with you." 

The situation plays out even more awkwardly as you can watch for yourself. Even though the four men here seem to be top shots within the company, the recent allegations by other staffers prove that showing porn might be a common tactic for Kanye.

No response from Kanye or Adidas so far: As of now, Kanye and Kim Kardashian’s representatives have issued no statement and even the Adidas board has stayed mum. 

A controversial year for Kanye: An enigma of pop culture since his heyday, Kanye’s fall from grace has never been this rampant; with 2022 probably being the worst year when it comes to his public perception. Fans are finding it hard to defend his actions when he makes anti-Semitic statements or floats conspiracy theories around George Floyd’s “death by drugs”.

The fashion world is similarly distancing itself given how Adidas, GAP and others have terminated deals with Yeezy. And with Kim Kardashian already having faced Kanye’s bullying since she dated Pete Davidson last year, this new revelation might only add more to the bad blood between the former partners.