Papa John’s just wants Papa John to go away.
The pizza chain has spent the past week distancing itself from John Schnatter, its founder and pitchman, after it was reported that he used a racial slur in a comment about black people.
Mr. Schnatter apologized and resigned as chairman of the company last Wednesday. On Friday, the company said Mr. Schnatter’s image, a fixture on its marketing materials, would be removed as the “first of several key steps to rebuild trust from the inside-out.”
Then on Sunday, Papa John’s booted him from subleased office space at the corporate headquarters in Louisville, Ky., and asked him to stop speaking to the media.
But Mr. Schnatter, who opened the first Papa John’s restaurant in 1985, isn’t going to make things easy. Both he and his lawyer sent letters to the board over the weekend suggesting that he was pressured to resign without any investigation into the circumstances, which he said included an extortion attempt. Relinquishing the position, he wrote, “was a mistake.”
