Louis Vuitton, Porsche drop Kris Wu over date-rape allegation, days after Chinese consumer brands did the same
- A teenage beauty influencer’s allegation that Wu, 30, date-raped her and seven other women when they were underage has rocked China’s entertainment industry
- Du Meizhu said she and others were tricked into going to bars where they were plied with alcohol. Wu denies her allegation and is taking legal action
Global luxury brands Louis Vuitton and Porsche have joined several Chinese consumer brands in freezing or severing their ties with rapper and model Kris Wu Yifan following an allegation, which he denies, that he date-raped underage girls.
French luxury fashion powerhouse Louis Vuitton, for whom Wu has been an ambassador since 2018, announced on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, late on Monday that it had suspended its collaboration with Wu until the results of a judicial investigation are released.
“We put much attention on the accusations against Wu,” the company said.
German luxury car manufacturer Porsche, which appointed Wu as its China car racing spokesman in April 2021, said on Weibo it had terminated its collaboration with Wu with immediate effect.
Kans (cosmetics), Liby (washing powder), Seeyoung (hair care products) and Vatti (electrical appliances) are among the Chinese brands which in the past week have dropped Wu, 30, a former member of the South Korean boy band Exo.
The allegation against Wu also throws into doubt the launch of Tencent Video’s period drama series Golden Hairpin, in which Wu co-stars with Andy Zang Yi.
In China it is customary for brands and media production companies to include terms in contracts which allow them to unilaterally terminate collaborations with disgraced stars whose actions cause them reputational damage. Such terms make disgraced stars liable for breach of contract and financial losses the brands incur as a result of their actions.
Chinese media have long reported on Wu’s womanising lifestyle. An influencer named Little G, for instance, revealed a series of intimate photos with Wu on the entertainment portal Yulefm.com in 2019.
But an interview an 18-year-old beauty influencer, Du Meizhu, gave to Yi Xian, an entertainment portal of Chinese internet giant Tencent, on July 10 sent shock waves through the Chinese entertainment industry.
In the interview, she claimed that a proxy for Wu would solicit girls on the pretext of selecting them to appear in the star’s music videos. When the girls turned up for what they thought would be an interview in an office setting, they were instead taken to bars and no mention was made of video work, Du said.
“The girls were forced to get drunk. Sexual intercourse followed. This constituted deception,” she said in the interview. Du said she was one of the girls deceived into having sex with Wu after getting drunk.
Du said she had lodged a complaint with the police, but gave no details.
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She followed that up, Agence France-Presse reports, with an interview with Chinese news portal NetEase on July 18, in which Du said she was a victim of date rape by Wu when she was 17. She also claimed to NetEase that Wu had had sex with at least seven other girls who were minors as she was at the time, and that he had plied them with alcohol and seduced them with promises they would be famous, the news agency reports.
On Monday Wu broke his silence about the allegation, calling it defamatory. “My silence only made the rumour-mongerer more brazen. I can’t stand it any more,” he said on Weibo. His agency said it had begun legal action against Du.
The Post has sought comment from Du and from Wu’s agency.
Beijing-based entertainment commentator Zhu Qirui, who has 6 million fans on his C-pop channel on China’s equivalent of TikTok, Douyin, says advertising brands and production companies will chase Wu for financial compensation.
“They are held accountable by their stock investors. They have to show their stance by chasing him for damages,” he says.
With Wu doing promotions for over 80 brands, Zhu estimates the star could be liable for hundreds of millions yuan in damages.
According to Zhu, a former show business reporter for the Hong Kong newspaper Oriental Daily, singer Edison Chen, who was felled by a widely publicised sex scandal in 2008 over racy pictures of him with various female stars that were unlawfully distributed over the internet, had to pay over HK$20 million in financial damages to his business collaborators.
“After the scandal broke, all the earnings Chen received from showbiz work had to go towards payment of the financial damages,” Zhu said.
