Foot Locker Cuts Ties With Kanye West Following His Antisemitic Comments

Foot Locker will no longer be stocking Yeezy products on its shelves. The shoe retailer announced Tuesday (Oct. 25) that it would be joining companies such as GAP, Adidas and Balenciaga in cutting ties with Kanye West in light of the rapper’s recent antisemitic comments.

A spokesperson for the footwear company told CNN that while Foot Locker will continue its partnership with Adidas — the brand that has produced Ye’s blockbuster Yeezy shoes since 2015 — it will immediately halt all sales of any products the “Donda” artist has been involved in making.

“We will not be supporting any future Yeezy product drops, and we have instructed our retail operators to pull any existing product from our shelves and digital sites,” said the spokesperson, who also noted that Foot Locker would remain “a partner with Adidas and carry a wide assortment of their collections.”

Adidas had announced earlier in the day it would be cutting ties with Ye — a move that resulted in the rapper losing his billionaire status. “Adidas does not tolerate antisemitism and any other sort of hate speech,” the company said statement. “Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness.”

GAP, which had already ended its relationship with the rapper in September, also announced Tuesday it was immediately removing all Yeezy products, and took down YeezyGap.com, one day after he was dropped as a client form Creative Artists Agency. And on Oct. 21, he was turned away by Balenciaga, as announced via a statement given to Women’s Wear Daily by the fashion house’s parent company, Kering.

The collective demise of Ye’s partnerships follows two controversies sparked by the Grammy winner earlier this month. The first came when he premiered shirts featuring the phrase “White Lives Matter” — which the Southern Poverty Law Center explains is a racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement — at his Oct. 3 Paris Fashion Week runway show.

The second came days later, when he first started on a rampage of antisemitic rhetoric by posting on social media that he would be going “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” something that led to his Instagram and Twitter accounts being restricted. That didn’t stop him from doubling and tripling down on his hate speech, however. He would go on to appear on Chris Cuomo’s self-titled NewsNation show to heatedly debate his antisemitic views on the music industry, and later compared the Holocaust to abortion in an interview with MIT research scientist Lex Fridman.