Kendall Jenner finally addresses Pepsi controversy in now-deleted clip
Kendall Jenner waited five months to finally address her role in Pepsi’s widely mocked and wildly tone-deaf ad. But by speaking out in a promo for the next season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, her woe-is-me soundbite comes off as self-serving.
“It feels like my life is over,” the model and reality star confessed to half-sister Kim Kardashian, referring the enormous backlash she faced after starring in Pepsi’s infamous commercial, accused of trivializing political movements and protests occurring around the country. In the clip, Kim tells her sister she simply made a mistake.
But now that video is gone, which seems convenient.
In the infamous Pepsi ad, she starred as a model lured out of a glamorous photo shoot and into a protest without any identifiable cause. When the marchers were stopped in their tracks by a line of law enforcement officers, the model bravely offers one of them a refreshing cola, and with one sip, the crowd erupts into cheers.
To many, it seemed like a tasteless cash-grab and dumbfounding parody of significant, serious protests like those of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Political divides are not healed one can of soda at a time, and both of Pepsi and Jenner should have known that better. One is a billion-dollar corporation—who apologized. The other is the second-youngest child in a deeply media-savvy family that managed to turn sex tape scandal into a full-fledged business empire. If anyone knows how to spin a story, it’s the Kardashians.
Jenner has long sought to distance herself from her family and establish herself as a serious model, but when it came to own up to her mistake, the Vogue cover girl remained silent and let her family come to her defense.
In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, Kim said she urged her to speak up, but the notoriously private model refused:
"“We’re not perfect, but you see these things in the media, like Kendall and [her Pepsi ad that was accused of trivializing Black Lives Matter], where I see her at home crying, but in the media she looks another way because she’s not addressing it. I’m just like, ‘This is wrong. You need to speak up.’ She was like, ‘I don’t ever want to show that footage of me crying.’ She was trying to not make excuses or be dramatic, but that was what she was going through at the time.”"
Jenner’s life wasn’t over as she feared and she spent the summer going from one controversy to another.
Only a few weeks later, she was accused of scamming her fans by blindly promoting a luxury music festival that upon arrival, ended up being more Lord of the Flies than beach side Coachella. That May, Vogue India made the controversial decision to put the white, American model on the cover of their 10th-anniversary issue. A month later, both she and sister Kylie tried to cash in on the vintage rock tee trend by debuting a line of T-shirts that superimposed their faces on the albums of iconic rap and rock artists. After another internet backlash and even a cease-and-desist letters from Notorious B.I.G’s mother, they pulled the line.
Jenner has appeared genuinely surprised and upset by every controversy. But she is no ordinary celebrity or inexperienced model taking whatever gig comes her way to pay rent and boost her profile. When you’re surrounded by a small army of media personalities and seasoned industry insiders, you start to run out of excuses. One PR blunder may have been a rookie mistake. A whole summer’s worth is more suspicious and makes deleting the evidence of Jenner’s lone comment for the worst fiasco seems even less like an accident.
Addressing the Pepsi fiasco on the next season of their reality show certainly keeps their name in the press, while giving the family control of the narrative. Jenner gets painted in more sympathetic light, at the cost of the sincerity of her apology.
Next: Caturday blogging: Keeping up with the Kattarshians
The sneak peek raised more questions than answers, especially now that it has been deleted— which just might be exactly what the Kardashian-Jenners wanted.