Dior Drops Sharon Stone after Quake Comments
From The Independent:
The founder of one major Chinese cinema chain has pledged to boycott showing Sharon Stone’s films. The American actress caused quite a stir and lost her beauty-ad contract with Dior after making some insensitive remarks about the May 12th Earthquake.
Sharon Stone used to be a great ad for fewer wrinkles, but the 50-year-old’s outburst linking the Sichuan earthquake to bad karma because of China’s policy on Tibet means Christian Dior posters are coming down all over the Chinese capital.
The French fashion house has issued an apology for Stone’s comments and pulled her from its Chinese ad campaign for anti-ageing products. And in good time, it appears, given that the Xinhua news agency has described Stone as “the public enemy of all mankind”.
Stone’s actual words:
“Well you know it was very interesting because at first, you know, I am not happy about the ways the Chinese were treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And so I have been very concerned about how to think and what to do about that because I don’t like that. And I had been this, you know, concerned about, oh how should we deal with the Olympics because they are not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a good friend of mine.
And all these earthquake and stuff happened and I thought: Is that karma, when you are not nice that bad things happen to you? And then I got a letter, from the Tibetan Foundation that they want to go and be helpful. And that made me cry. And they ask me if I would write a quote about that and I said,“I would.”And it was a big lesson to me, that some times you have to learn to put your head down and be of service even to people who are not nice to you. And that’s a big lesson for me…”
Her comments sparked hot words in the Chinese blogosphere. A partial CDT translation of one of the posts on an anti-Sharon Stone website:
1. The earthquake took place in the main Tibetan and Qiang (a Chinese minority) areas, and also affected kind and simple-hearted mountain people. Why does pig-brained Stone want to curse them?
2. What about 911? What’s the reason for this American natural [sic] disaster?
Read also: China: Multinationals Hear It Online by Dexter Roberts of BusinessWeek.
Origin: Clifford Coonan, The Independent
