Nike Split With Neymar Amid Sexual-Assault

and soccer superstar Neymar split ways last year after the company started investigating an allegation by a Nike employee that the Brazilian athlete had sexually assaulted her, according to people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

In August 2020, Nike didn’t publicly give a reason for the early end to its endorsement deal with

 Nike’s marketing contract with Neymar had another eight years remaining, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The Nike employee had told friends as well as Nike colleagues in 2016 that Neymar tried to force her to perform oral sex in his hotel room while in New York City where she was helping to coordinate events and logistics for Neymar and his entourage, according to…

The Nike employee had told friends as well as Nike colleagues in 2016 that Neymar tried to force her to perform oral sex in his hotel room while in New York City where she was helping to coordinate events and logistics for Neymar and his entourage, according to the people, including former and current Nike employees, and the documents.

Neymar denies the allegation, his spokeswoman said. “Neymar Jr. will vigorously defend himself against these baseless attacks in case any claim is presented, which did not happen so far,” she said in a statement. She said Nike and Neymar split for commercial reasons.

The Nike employee filed a complaint to Nike in 2018 and described the incident to the company’s head of human resources and general counsel, according to the people and documents. Nike hired lawyers at Cooley LLP to conduct an investigation starting in 2019 and decided to stop featuring Neymar in marketing amid the probe, according to the people and documents.

President Jimmy Carter signs emergency natural gas legislation in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 2, 1977. An oil crisis contributed to a period of double-digit inflation in the 1970s.

President Jimmy Carter signs emergency natural gas legislation in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 2, 1977. An oil crisis contributed to a period of double-digit inflation in the 1970s.

The 1970s are starting to trend – for all the wrong reasons.

Today, prices for everything from gasoline to groceries are surging as the economy roars back from the pandemic recession. And that's raising concerns in some quarters about whether the United States is headed back to the awful economic days of the 1970s, when the country was gripped by double-digit inflation that required painful action by the Federal Reserve.

The Biden administration insists those concerns are far off the mark, and that the days when Americans sported campaign-style "Whip Inflation Now" buttons on their wide lapels are long gone.

"I came of age and studied economics in the 1970s and I remember what that terrible period was like," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told a House subcommittee Thursday. "No one wants to see that happen again."

Yellen and others in the administration argue that the current run-up in prices is a temporary phenomenon, sparked by 

not the beginning of a persistent, upward spiral like the one that spawned "stagflation" in the '70s and haunted presidents from Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter.

To understand the differences between the two eras, it helps to take a step back in time.

The 1970s were bookended by oil shocks that brought soaring prices for gasoline. Meat prices also spiked. On the popular sitcom All In The Family, Archie Bunker was reduced to eating meatless spaghetti.

Prices actually started creeping up in the mid-1960s, when the federal government was spending heavily on both the Vietnam War and the Great Society. Nixon temporarily froze prices in the early 1970s, but that just postponed the pain. When his controls were lifted, prices bounced even higher.

Gerald Ford declared inflation "Public Enemy Number One." Carter called it the nation's most pressing domestic problem.

Despite the tough talk from the White House, prices kept climbing.

Princeton economist Alan Blinder says psychology was partly to blame. In the 1970s, Americans came to believe that high inflation was here to stay. And that expectation became a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy.

"If you're a business and you expect the inflation rate to be 5%, you're likely when it comes time to set the prices for the next year [to] go up 5%," said Blinder, who was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1990s.

"On the other hand, if you think inflation is going to be 1%, you're more likely to go up 1%," he added.

Ultimately, it took a crackdown by cigar-chomping Fed chairman Paul Volcker to break the cycle of rising prices and wages. Volcker slammed the brakes on the economy by raising interest rates to 20% — tough medicine to prove he was serious about getting inflation under control.