When you’re the star of one of the biggest reality shows on television, little is kept private, no matter how much you want it to be. And when you’re in the midst of a controversy, viewers expect answers—when they don’t get any answers, a lot is left for speculation.
One major example of this is Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi ad, which left many people pissed off. In April the ad was met with backlash and pulled almost immediately after people accused Kendall and Pepsi of appropriating nationwide movements and marches such as Black Lives Matter. While Pepsi did apologize for the distasteful ad, mum was the word for Kendall, who made no official statement or apology. (A source did claim she was “devastated” by the backlash.) Now, months after the controversy erupted, we’re learning more about Kendall’s reaction to the backlash and why she didn’t want it to air on Keeping Up With the Kardashians.
In an oral history of KUWTK from The Hollywood Reporter, Kim Kardashian and Kendall gave a little more backstory on what exactly was going on with Kendall during this time. “I’m the most private one,” Kendall explained. “If there’s a moment I don’t want anyone to hear, I talk to myself or talk to someone in another room.”
“We’re not perfect, but you see these things in the media, like Kendall and [her Pepsi ad that was accused of trivializing Black Lives Matter], where I see her at home crying, but in the media she looks another way because she’s not addressing it,” said Kim. “I’m just like, ‘This is wrong. You need to speak up.’ She was like, ‘I don’t ever want to show that footage of me crying.’ She was trying to not make excuses or be dramatic, but that was what she was going through at the time.”
Being on a reality show throws a lot of difficult situations and personal issues into the spotlight, and some of these moments are difficult to show, Kris Jenner noted. “There are moments when it’s hard to leave something in because it’s vulnerable and it exposes us to a deeper level of emotion, and sometimes that’s hard to share.”
While it certainly isn’t okay to trivialize movements of such magnitude, at the end of the day we’re all human, and humans make mistakes—especially when their entire lives are in the public eye.