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Beauty giant Dove is facing a Bud Light-style boycott for partnering with controversial Black Lives Matter activist Zyanha Bryant, who was previously accused of getting a white student expelled over “misheard” comments.
Some once-loyal customers even posted pictures of bars of soap in the trash after Bryant, 22, announced she was a “Dove ambassador” helping to promote “fat liberation.”
“After hearing that Dove Beauty chose Zyanha Bryant — who ruined Morgan Bettinger’s life — for their ‘fat acceptance ambassador,’ THIS lifelong large lady and now former Dove customer tossed out the last three bars of Dove products she will EVER buy,” one, Carole Thorpe, tweeted Thursday night along with a shot of the bars in her trash.
Even Elon Musk weighed in as outrage spread across his social media platform X, the new name for Twitter.
“Messed up,” he wrote alongside a clip of the BLM activist’s initial announcement.
It is just the latest backlash against controversial partnerships by big companies, most notably Bud Light, which has suffered a huge financial hit after teaming up with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney.
Bryant, a student activist at the University of Virginia, had accused Bettinger of referring to BLM protesters as “good speed bumps” in the summer of 2020 — only to later admit she likely “misheard” her.
She campaigned to get the white student suspended from campus, and Bettinger’s record shows she faced disciplinary actions for her comments, which she fears may hinder her ability to get into law school.
Greg Price, the communications director for the State Freedom Caucus Network, said the decision to ignore that controversy and pick Bryant as an ambassador “is what actual privilege in America looks like.”
“BLM activist completely ruined the life of an innocent white girl with a false accusation of racism and gets a brand deal with Dove while Morgan Bettinger was kicked out of school and now needs medication in order to sleep.”
Lisa Roatch, a mother of two who lives in Kansas City, was among those who said the partnership “is not OK.
“As a LIFETIME — yes, you heard that right, a lifetime #Dove user, you cannot hire bullies, liars, and those who discriminate to market your product and expect to retain your market base.
“I will stop using your product in a second,” she wrote. “Full stop.”
Another X user said he guesses he’s “bought my last bar of Dove soap,” while a third tweeted: “I’ll have to toss my Dove products and never buy them again!”
“I’ve stopped buying their products,” another person tweeted. “Never again.”
The Post has reached out to Dove’s parent company, Unilever, for comment.
Bryant made the announcement she was partnering with Dove as part of its Fat Liberation campaign late last month, posting a video to Instagram in which she said: “My belief is that we should be centering the voices and the experiences of the most marginalized people and communities at all times.”
“So when I think about what fat liberation looks like to me, I think about centering the voices of those who live in and who maneuver through spaces and institutions in a fat body.”
She captioned her video by saying, “Fat liberation is something we should all be talking about … Tell us what Fat Liberation means to you using the hashtag #SizeFreedom and tagging @dove to share your story.”
The company has yet to publicly comment on the controversy about hiring Bryant, whose alleged vendetta against fellow student Bettinger began in the summer of 2020 amid ongoing police brutality protests.
Bettinger mistakenly drove down a street in Charlottesville, Va., where some Black Lives Matter protesters were demonstrating.
She told Reason magazine she saw a dump truck partially blocking the road, but because the street was not completely blocked off, she continued driving.
When she realized the road was actually being blocked off from traffic, Bettinger said, she decided to park her car and see what was going on.
As she passed by, Bettinger said, the truck driver began talking to her, and the two had a brief conversation.
Bettinger says she remembered telling the truck driver something along the lines of, “It’s a good thing that you are here because otherwise these people would have been speed bumps,” trying to praise his efforts to block traffic.
The driver later corroborated Bettinger’s remark to local cops.
But Bryant overheard part of the conversation and tweeted that Bettinger said the protesters “would make ‘good speedbumps’” along with a video showing Bettinger backing down the street in her car while Bryant and several other protesters follow.
“She then called the police and started crying, saying we were attacking her,” Bryant claimed.
The tweet was quickly shared more than a thousand times, and internet sleuths soon identified the driver as Bettinger.
The fact that she had pro-police social media posts, and her late father had worked as a police officer, only seemed to irritate people more, according to the Daily Mail.
Just one day later, Bryant began demanding that school administrators expel Bettinger.
“EMAIL these UVA deans now to demand that Morgan face consequences for her actions and that UVA stop graduating racists,” she tweeted.
Bryant herself filed a complaint with the University Judiciary Committee, a student-run disciplinary system, alleging Bettinger had threatened students’ health and safety.
It found Bettinger guilty of making a legitimate threat against the protesters, despite being unable to prove Bryant’s claims about her intentions.
The jurors ruled that even saying the words in a harmless manner during a protest merited punishment, according to documents obtained by Reason magazine.
Bryant also filed a complaint with the school’s Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights, in which she claimed Bettinger repeated the statement five times and had discriminated against her due to her race.
The EOCR office found that three of the five accusations could not be corroborated, and a report found Bryant most likely did not hear Bettinger’s comments firsthand after no eyewitnesses were able to corroborate her version of events.
Bettinger eventually graduated from UVA but with a permanent mark on her record, Reason reported, likely hindering her chances of getting into law school as she had dreamed.
“This whole situation has had a huge impact on my life,” she told Reason magazine. “The university has never had to answer for what their actions have done.”
Bettinger is said to be considering bringing a lawsuit against school officials, seeking to get her record cleared.
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