Back in April it was reported that Kendall Jenner was laying low following the release of the (now infamous) Pepsi ad in which she starred. But fans of Keeping Up With The Kardashians got to see Jenner really open up about her reaction to the backlash during the show's Season 14 premiere on Sunday.
The ad (which was axed only 24 hours after its release) featured Jenner abandoning a fashion shoot to join a somewhat ambiguous protest. Throwing off her couture, she strides purposefully into the crowd to determine how best to diffuse the tension (though it isn't clear that there is any tension), before dipping into a tempting basket of chilled sodas, retrieving one and handing it to a similarly chilled looking police officer.
The scene evokes Black Lives Matter protests, and in particular a well-circulated photo of young mum Iesha Evans standing before heavily armed cops in Louisiana last year. The ad's treatment of such a fraught subjest caused considerable offence at the time of release - but it also spawned a huge number of witty tweets and memes. It's not clear if Jenner was embarrassed about being the butt of people's jokes or distraught by the idea that she had upset her fans. Or perhaps both.
The new KUWTK episode sees her lamenting about the Pepsi ad: "When I first got this offer, I mean, it’s a huge company … the people I was following were so iconic and amazing….to get something like that, it was so exciting. And I trusted everyone, I trusted the teams. But after I saw the reaction and I read what people had to say about it, I most definitely saw what went wrong. I was so stuck and I really didn’t know what to do that I completely shut down."
She goes on to state effusively that she "would never purposely hurt someone, ever…if I knew that this was gonna be the outcome, I would have never done something like this. But you don’t know when you’re in the moment…I just felt so fucking stupid. The fact that I would offend other people or hurt other people was definitely not the intent. And that’s what got me the most. Is that I would have ever made anyone else upset."
And then again..."I just feel really, really bad. I feel really bad that anyone was ever offended. I feel really bad that this was taken such a wrong way. I genuinely feel like shit. I have no idea how I’m going to bounce back from it. I don’t even know what to do."
After Pepsi pulled the ad they were quick to apologise for subjecting Jenner to the backlash, a move that inadvertently resulted in another backlash. After all, didn't she know what she was signing up for (and getting well paid for)?
You can see Kendall Jenner's thoughts on the whole saga (as well as those of Kim and Kourtney) on the new episode of KUWTK.
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