Doritos Spain cuts ties with trans influencer Samantha Hudson amid calls for boycott
Doritos Spain has ended a recently announced partnership with Samantha Hudson, a transgender singer and influencer, amid calls for a boycott over social media posts the 24-year-old allegedly wrote when she was 15.
Last week, the company announced a social media campaign with Hudson, a recording artist known for toying with “gender, sex, and free-expression paradigms” and who was named Best Spanish Act at last year’s MTV Europe Music Awards.
The partnership included a 50-second promo called “Crunch Talks,” which the influencer had briefly shared on her own social media accounts.
But on Tuesday, the PespiCo subsidiary announced their partnership was over, following growing backlash against resurfaced posts Hudson allegedly shared on social media in the past.
In a since-deleted message from nearly a decade ago, Hudson allegedly wrote about making fun of victims of sexual assault and wanting to do inappropriate things with a 12-year-old girl, according to Rolling Stone.
Hudson had reportedly apologized for the message after she became known in Spain, but over the weekend, screenshots of the alleged messages resurfaced online, prompting a massive call for a boycott of the snack.
Several other people online also joined the #BoycottDoritos campaign taking offense at the company’s hiring of a transgender woman to represent the brand — much like BudLight’s controversial and consequential choice of Dylan Mulvaney for a social media campaign last year.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, the company said that after becoming aware of Hudson’s deleted tweets from around 2015, “we have ended the relationship and stopped all related campaign activity due to the comments. We strongly condemn words or actions that promote violence or sexism of any kind.”
On Tuesday, Hudson addressed the controversy on X, once again admitting the comments were “absolutely out of place, disgusting and offensive,” adding she wrote them as a younger person “in a context in which the general tone on social media was to use black humor in the grossest and most exorbitant way possible, as a way to generate attention.”
She also pointed out that the screenshot of a particularly disturbing tweet attributed to her, which has been circulating online is “totally false,” since it was written in 2014 and she said she only joined the platform the following year.
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