PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooya Bashes Donald Trump-Misleading!
Summary of eRumor:
PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooya’s comments about Donald Trump, racism and sexism after the 2016 election have led to calls for a boycott of Pepsi products.
The Truth:
PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooya’s comments about Donald Trump and the 2016 presidential election have been taken out of context.
A day after the 2016 presidential election, Nooya appeared at the New York Times Dealbook Conference in Manhattan, and her appearance can be viewed in its entirety here.
Bits and pieces of Nooya’s comments have been taken out of context and reframed to make it appear that she was speaking out against Donald Trump’s election, but that’s not necessarily the case.
At the start of her appearance, Nooya, a vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 campaign, was asked how she felt about the results of the election. She replied:
Do you have a box of tissues?
First of all, I want to congratulate President-elect Donald Trump. Because the election is over, I think we should mourn, for those of us who supported the other side. But we have to come together. Life has to go on.
What did I do yesterday? First of all, I had to answer a lot of questions from my daughters, from my employees. They were all in mourning. The question that they’re asking, especially those who are not white, is “are we safe?” Women are asking are we safe? LGBT are asking are we safe? I never thought I would have to answer those questions. So, the first thing we have to do, is to assure everybody in the United States is that they’re safe. Nothing has changed because of this election. What we heard is election talk. We will all come together and unify the country. The process of democracy happened, but we have to go on.
Later, the moderator said Trump has used some “coarse language” about women, and he noted that Pepsi is a sponsor of the NFL, which has struggled to address domestic violence issues among its players. Nayoo was asked how those developments might have changed the Pepsi brand or her perspective on public views. She replied:
Forget about the Pepsi brand. How dare you talk about women that way? … Why do we talk that way about a whole group of citizens that way? I don’t think there’s a place for that kind of language in part of society. Not in locker rooms, not in football player’s homes. Not in any place. If we don’t nip it in the bud, this is going to be a lethal force that’s going to t5ake over society. I think that’s wrong. I hope that in every forum we talk about locker room conversations about women being intolerable …. It’s got to stop.
Right-wing and conservative news sites largely took Nooya’s comments out of context and made it appear that she was saying that Trump or his views had to be “nipped in the bud,” when that wasn’t the case. She indirectly condemned comments he made about forcefully grabbing women in a 2010 video, but she never directly condemned Trump.
Given all that, we’re calling claims about Pepsi’s CEO speaking out against Trump “misleading.”