…the only person confused is you. Who else has been injecting a legal perspective into this thread? Who has been asking for a prosecution?
The behaviour is repetitive. Louis CK wanked in front of many women. That did happen.
Then you need to listen more. You need to cast aside your own experiences and listen to the voices of people who have been put into these situations and don’t act the way you seem to think that “they should react”. These people have been speaking up recently. Have you been listening?
I was surprised that his longtime collaborator Pamela Aldon seemed to be caught off guard by his behavior. From the closeness of their relationship and her raw, frank personality, I would have expected him to have done it in front of her. When I was watching Louie, I thought the way they portrayed their relationship was very raw and honest–so much so that I assumed they had a relationship in real life. So maybe it really was the shock value with strangers that LCK was after. Maybe rather than seeking out someone who would have been accepting, he sought out women who would be shocked and offended. Maybe that made it even more exciting for him.
One thing I can think of is that Pamela is so brash, she likely shut him down if he asked. I could picture her saying something like “Ugh! Louie, you’re so disgusting. The last thing I want to do is watch you do that.” So maybe rather than being surprised that he was doing that in the first place, maybe she was devastated that he was doing it to unwilling women.
There is possibly a legal aspect to the harassment here, because he was in a position to influence or ruin their careers. In some states, even if the harasser is not the employer (for example, California), this type of relationship would qualify. Indeed, there are reports that women were pressured not to come forward.
This also means that they may have felt unable to leave for multiple reasons: they froze, he was in front of the door, he was someone more important in the industry who could ruin their careers if she didn’t go along, he was a man (bigger, stronger) and she was a woman, etc. It’s also harassment if they feel unable to leave, not just if they are physically prevented from doing so.
I am saddened that so many people who come forward with their stories are still greeted with “why didn’t you leave”, or “it wasn’t that bad.”
Based on when the reports took place and the verbiage of the apology, I think it’s very possible that Louis stopped this behavior years ago, possibly before he started working closely with Adlon. Not that this is an excuse in any way, especially considering his years of denials and apparent pressure on the various harrass-ees to not talk about it.
I’m not surprised considering how many decoy reveals CK has woven into his material. “Hey guys, I’m the world’s biggest masturbator, I think about masturbation all the time, to a slightly creepy degree.” He flogged the subject so hard that it was difficult to think it was just the tip of the wank-berg.
Looking back at it now… it’s like, ick. Was he pre-spinning the story this entire time to deflect attention or muddy the waters? I was a big Louie fan, and this is all just too depressing to assimilate.
My comment was based on the quoted excerpts from the article I linked. Many of the statements from those accused were weasely worded, a typical example being the weasel phrase “perception that my behavior was disrespectful” – no, sexual harassment is not a “perception” and it’s a lot more than “disrespectful”. Others went the route of outright denial; Brett Ratner denied everything despite being accused by seven different women (or at least six, depending on which account you read) and then filed a lawsuit against one of them for defamation. Louis CK was one of the few who owned up to it, beginning his statement with “these stories are true”. That’s all I’m saying. Not sure why you’re all outraged about that interpretation, because when someone says “these stories are true”, that is a factually unconditional acknowledgment.
As for the full statement, I had not read it before but I read it now. It’s here. I have no idea if Louis wrote it himself or had someone wordsmith it for him, but I don’t see why he would have – there’s no legalese in it and it doesn’t really try to excuse anything except to explain his thought process and why it was wrong. I don’t see any “spin”. None of which in my view excuses what he did, but at least give the guy credit for issuing a plain acknowledgement of the truth of the accusations. The low-lifes who not only did these things but are now denying it are worse, especially because they may keep right on doing it.
Here’s Dan Savage’s reply to a letter that could have been written by one of Louis’ defenders in this thread. He has a lot to say, but this sums it up nicely:
Also very important for any man who doesn’t understand why women would put up with this kind of thing is the harrowing Twitter thread at the end of the column by a woman who was the victim of a man jerking off on the El in Chicago.
(If someone linked to this column earlier in this thread, I apologize. I looked and didn’t find it.)
Then it’s important to counterbalance the fact with another one, that as recently as September of this year rather than admit guilt he said that the allegations were not real, that they were just rumors, and that people discussing what he now admits to were participating in rumors. He also specifically says that he has no idea why Tog Notaro made the claims about him (could it be because they happened? lol), and says specifically she should not discuss his misdeeds. It’s not virtue that has him admitting to what he did, it’s the fact that the cat is out of the bag and some kind of admission is the only option of damage control that he has left. When he felt that he could shut people up, he was spinning the line that this was all lies and shouldn’t be disclosed to the press.
So all the fact of his admission REALLY shows is that circumstances have motivated him to believe that making that style of admission is his best option for self-preservation. It doesn’t mitigate anything, or even show real remorse, it just shows that he’s aware that public denial and private threats aren’t going to work any more.
I give him credit for taking the best option to minimize consequences to himself at the moment. He’s just as bad as the low-lives who did these things and are denying them now, and was vehemetly denying them and accusing people of ‘rumor-mongering’ as little as two months ago. The fact that he’s using a slightly different tactic to try to get away with as much as possible doesn’t make him a better person.
I’ve encountered a few of the ‘aggressive predator’ guys in my past; one of them was someone I had thrown a birthday party at my house for before I found out all of the shenanigans he was up to. He’d do things like keep fondling a former GF’s breasts and treating her 'no’s as a joke, follow women into the bathroom, corner women and aggressively push them to engage with him, and the like. Once the former GF got some people involved to make him back off and started warning other people about him, more and more stories of stuff he did came out, going back two decades to when he was in college and campus PD would refuse to take reports against him because it’s ‘he said she said’, and since they didn’t have reports would treat them as isolated incidents.
He had some friend of his try to spin a story that he is somewhat autistic and it was all just decades of misunderstanding. But it was clear that he did understand, because one consistent factor in all of the incidents is that he would do them away from witnesses and would pick victims who were quiet. He didn’t go and feel up the kind of woman who would slap him in the face and shout “what the fuck?”, he’d get the quiet type who would feel guilty and suffer in silence. He didn’t try this stuff on straight guys at all even though he’s bisexual. He didn’t do the aggressive stuff in front of people like me, he’d do it with no witnesses or only people who weren’t likely to say anything as witnesses.
So when I hear about a dude sexually attacking women who were too scared to say anything or leave the room, I think of that guy, and how he carefully picked his victims. I really doubt the ‘respected her too much’ idea, or the idea that he only liked it if the victim found it shocking, I think it’s much more likely to be ‘her brash personality means she wouldn’t make a good, compliant victim’. IMO both of those give him too much credit.
OK, fair enough. The point I was making is that compared to some of the other low-lifes, who not only won’t admit their misdeeds but in at least one case is actually attacking his victim, Louis at least seemed honest about it. But it seems he’s a lying scumbag just like the others and is perhaps just more pragmatic about it. I was certainly not trying to defend him, I was just trying to be fair and factual. Frankly I don’t even like him all that much as a comedian. I’ve seen some of his shows on TV and some of it is OK, but George Carlin he’s not.
I think that’s why he’s doing the ‘honesty’ track now - it’s very easy for someone like you to see him making a quiet confession, and think that he’s being more genuine than all of these scumbags who deny it. He can come off looking like someone who did something bad, repents, and should now be forgiven. The fact that he was dismissing the accusations as a bunch of worthless rumors and saying that the women involved should just keep it hushed up as recently as two months ago blows that out of the water, but isn’t in the current stories.
I get a ‘you are supposed to like this guy because we say he’s great even though he’s not that good’ vibe from a lot of what people say about him. None of his material seems awful, but none of it has really captured me. Definitely not remotely on Carlin’s level.
…I would suggest you look at some of the mealy-mouthed apologies that people in Silicon Valley have been making over the last couple of years for examples of people who “seemed honest about it” but are actually being pretty disingenuous. Louis CK’s type of apology is by no means unusual.