LIV Golf makes shock woke hire with exec who tanked Bud Light with controversial trans campaign

The former Bud Light executive behind the company’s ill-fated promotion with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney is now working for LIV Golf in a stunning turn of events.

Alissa Heinerscheid, formerly a vice president at Bud Light parent company Anheuser-Busch, departed the company in the fall of 2023 after Bud Light’s decision to partner with Mulvaney for a social media campaign resulted in mass boycotts of the brand.

The controversy is said to have cost the company $1.4billion in sales, and Bud Light lost its spot as the highest-selling beer in the United States.

However, the exec has now resurfaced with Saudi-backed LIV Golf, as her LinkedIn page says she’s been working there since September.

Heinerscheid’s profile describes herself as working in ‘Team Business Operations’ for the breakaway league, which has hosted several events at President Donald Trump’s golf clubs, and boasts several golfers – such as Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson – who have offered public support of the Commander-in-Chief.

In a March 2023 interview with podcast Make Yourself At Home, Heinerscheid spoke of a mandate to ‘evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand’, and having a campaign that was ‘truly inclusive’ and felt ‘lighter and brighter.’

She also added that Bud Light had ‘a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor.’

Anson Frericks, a former colleague of Heinerscheid’s, wrote in his new book ‘Last Call for Bud Light that she was ‘one of DEI’s chief proponents’ at the company.

‘My guess is that LIV was probably able to get somebody relatively inexpensively to come join them and take some of her experience working at the biggest beer company, Frericks told the New York Post.

‘LIV is already inherently controversial, and that probably makes it difficult in some cases to recruit top talent,’ Frericks continued. ‘So she gets an opportunity to redeem herself, and LIV gets the opportunity to have somebody who has experience managing billion-dollar brands.’

Heinerscheid was initially placed on on leave by Anheuser-Busch in April 2023 before ultimately leaving the company the following November, as her LinkedIn shows.

She did not to respond to a request for comment from The Post, while LIV also declined comment. 

While a poll from Sportico and Harris in December 2023 actually showed that LIV’s fans leaned left, the league has been aligned with Trump due its use of his golf courses in Bedminster and Doral, as well as his work to try and broker a merger between LIV and the PGA.

‘I made a deal with them,’ Trump said of LIV brass in 2022. ‘They’re very good people. They’re very fine people. [Former CEO] Greg Norman’s been a total gentleman, you know, and he’s wanted to do this for years and now he has the right backers because, you know, [the Saudi money] is unlimited. 

‘They can do the job right. I think when you put up first-place prize money for $6 or $7 million, I think a lot of people are gonna be showing up, to be honest with you.’

The Bud Light controversy began in April 2023 when Mulvaney posted on Instagram a photo of a custom can of Bud Light sent to her by the beer to celebrate ‘365 Days of Girlhood’ during her transition to a woman.

She also posted photos of her opening a can of Bud Light during March Madness in an apparent attempt to broaden the appeal of the beer to LGBTQ customers.

Last year, during a SXSW panel, she scolded Bud Light and said it needed to stand up to ‘bullying’ during the backlash over its decision to hire her to promote the brand.

She added that the abuse she experienced as a result of the Bud Light campaign was ‘disheartening’.