Nike breaks with Neymar after failing to cooperate with a company investigation that claimed Neymar sexually assaulted a female employee.
Nike breaks with Neymar for alleged sexual abuse against a female employee
The multinational Nike confirmed Friday that it broke with Brazilian soccer player Neymar because he did not collaborate in the investigation of the complaint of the company’s employee who claimed to have suffered a sexual assault by the player.
Nike confirmed to EFE the information published Friday by the U.S. newspaper of the Wall Street Journal, which reported that the rupture of the sponsorship contract with the sports equipment manufacturer in August last year was due to this reason.
When the company announced its pause with the Paris Saint-Germain attacker, it did not know the reasons for this decision.
According to the opinion of the complaint, the events occurred in 2016 when the footballer was in New York and the staff came to his hotel room to coordinate events and logistics.
Neymar tried to force her to perform oral sex on him, the newspaper reports.
The employee filed a complaint in 2018 within a forum created by Nike for the company’s workers to “share experiences and concerns,” Nike added in its statement.
Nike hired the services of a law firm in 2019 to investigate the complaint and decided to stop featuring Neymar at commercial events while that process was ongoing.
But Neymar refused to cooperate with investigators.
A spokeswoman for Neymar rejected these allegations by the newspaper and certainly that the infractions with Nike were attributable to commercial reasons.
The two parties had a long-standing contract, which began when the Brazilian was 13 years old, and already a promising youngster on Santos’ youth fringes.
The 29-year-old footballer was already accused in 2019 of rape by a Brazilian model, who claimed to have been sexually assaulted in a Paris hotel.
