“Because people who look up to me didn’t want to hear it”
Unlike the others, Louie CK has copped to it – which means that unlike the others he has at a stroke undermined any claims that the women are lying or exaggerating.
Louis C.K. broke his silence Friday after five women came forward to accuse the comedian of sexual misconduct, admitting in a lengthy statement: “These stories are true.”
The Times posted the whole statement:
I want to address the stories told to The New York Times by five women named Abby, Rebecca, Dana, Julia who felt able to name themselves and one who did not.
These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was O.K. because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly. I have been remorseful of my actions. And I’ve tried to learn from them. And run from them. Now I’m aware of the extent of the impact of my actions. I learned yesterday the extent to which I left these women who admired me feeling badly about themselves and cautious around other men who would never have put them in that position. I also took advantage of the fact that I was widely admired in my and their community, which disabled them from sharing their story and brought hardship to them when they tried because people who look up to me didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t think that I was doing any of that because my position allowed me not to think about it. There is nothing about this that I forgive myself for. And I have to reconcile it with who I am. Which is nothing compared to the task I left them with. I wish I had reacted to their admiration of me by being a good example to them as a man and given them some guidance as a comedian, including because I admired their work.
That is how these things should be done. It doesn’t make it ok that he did the creepy shit, but it is definitely the right way to do it: take a long hard look and then say what you did to the women, from their point of view. This is what all the others have refused to do.
He says more, about the harm he did to the people who helped him, but that analysis of what he did to the women is the core.
There is still some reason to be skeptical about his ‘true’ motives (I’ve seen some women say that he’s banking on a ‘redemption arc’ and hoping this kind of thing will keep other women from coming forward for fear of being accused of ‘piling on’), but on its face this kind of statement is better than I was hoping for.
But still, opening with an unambiguous ‘These women are telling the truth’ and then showing a fairly comprehensive understanding of why what he did was wrong is a much higher bar than anyone else has cleared. That doesn’t absolve him from what he did and shouldn’t leave him in a position to do it again (and doesn’t forgive him having done anything worse that we haven’t learnt about yet), but it’s not nothing.
Strong move. Not entirely convinced how sincere it was or if it came out of a box of advice, but well played. Opens up a new line of defense on the chess board, which is clever. And opens up a venue for further discussion.
Hey, maybe he even means it?
But even if it came out of a box of advice, it includes some probing analysis. I guess I’ve been wanting to see that in these things for so long I can’t help being impressed. This sentence especially – “I also took advantage of the fact that I was widely admired in my and their community, which disabled them from sharing their story and brought hardship to them when they tried because people who look up to me didn’t want to hear it.” Someone could have dictated it to him, of course, but then that would mean he was listening to whichever of his friends understood it that well.
Yes. Hope he means it too.
This reminds me of the brilliant, lovely illusionist and entertainer Carl Einar Häckner. He was performing some card trick before his home audience at the open-air stage Liseberg in Göteborg and tried to get the public to take part by uttering the magic formula “Hocku-pocku-pocku” but, disappointed in the tepid response, interrupted the trick instructing us:
“No no, say it like you REALLY MEAN IT!”
I was thinking about this yesterday and this was exactly what I thought someone in his position should do… frankly I’m surprised.
How hard is this? Own it, apologize, and stop doing it.
Yeah, I’m pleasantly surprised at how he’s handled this.
The only thing that gives me pause is that he’s a little generous to his manager, who he describes as only trying to “mediate” a problem Louis caused. If I recall the previous stories correctly, the manager did a little more than that — he tried to bully women into shutting up — and for that he needs to make his own apology. But I get why Louis would want to try to deflect blame away from the manager.
I may be biased by the fact that I’ve always loved his work, but I do think he’s being sincere. He’s been insightful on some of these issues in the past, and not just in a performative “look at me, I’m a feminist” way, but in a way that managed to explain some basic feminist concepts while being funny.
I think he’s sincere, too (though that doesn’t mean people can’t be skeptical)…and I think the deflecting-blame-from-his-manager thing could be generously assumed to keep the focus (and blame) on himself, rather than being seen to throw an enabler under the bus, as so many powerful men do. (The Pussy-Grabber-In-Chief is a prime example of this.)
All the same, some of the accounts from the women’s stories go into detail about his own shame and anger at being rejected, and it is obvious that at some point before he stopped, he knew what he was doing was wrong and did it anyway. Whether that sort of compulsive self-destructive behaviour was ‘his fault’, it’s pretty obvious that he knew he had a problem (and knew he’d done wrong) well before the NYT finally outed him.
I’d have been more unambiguously impressed if he’d made this statement after the Gawker article (which alluded to but did not name him), or even before. But that was millions of dollars ago, right about when he was being coronated as the latest king of comedy. Those incentives (financial and emotional) were more than enough to keep anyone from coming forward, it’s true.
We can acknowledge the sincerity and propriety of this response without forgiving, or forgetting. If he really is as decent and introspective as his work (and this statement) implies, he’ll have anticipated that, and made the statement anyway. Time will tell.
Yeah. I’m impressed by the statement. Not impressed by its lateness, its having been prompted by the exposure, etc.
His statement undermines the denials by other men who have recently hit the news pages.
You know, even if he totally didn’t mean it, the analysis in his statement should be required reading for everyone. People in positions of power need to think hard about not abusing those positions, and people suffering abuse should know that it’s not their fault. That being said, I do think that Lous CK was being sincere when he wrote that (and I don’t even like the guy).
In a recent post Ophelia quoted Janice Turner in the Times on the subject of knowing and not knowing. Turner’s article in turn leans heavily on the book Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril by Margaret Heffernan. At the time I commented that I was definitely going to check it out. Well, I did, and as you can imagine it’s highly relevant to the current topic as well as an amazing book in general. For whatever it’s worth, I recommend it.
It’s worth a lot. I’ll seek it at the library tomorrow.
Correction: I’ll place a hold on it now, which I just did.
In the year or so before the Weinstein watershed, I found myself preoccupied with the big gap in Western social/cultural narratives when it comes to how admired, ‘good guy’ harassers justify their behavior to themselves (particularly when they take credit for their target’s work, also, as per my own experience).
Particularly striking, I thought, since most Western writing and other media is dominated by male perspectives. I admit that my grasp of Western literature isn’t comprehensive, so that might be why I perceive a gap. Still, ‘how I square my abuse of women with my widely-believed ‘good bloke’ persona’ doesn’t seem a particularly prominent genre for male writers. (Would be interested if anyone has any recommendations).
‘Boys will be boys’ is the justification often used by society to explain harassers’ choices. Even that only begins to get at motivation, and doesn’t approach how these guys think and feel about what they do to women. There’s the more recently emerged obliviousness defence ‘Oh, I hate to hurt anyone and I didn’t realise that’s what I was doing’ which LCK wields, implying that he only recently attained understanding of the consequences for his targets. ‘And I have to reconcile it with who I am’ as if this process hasn’t been bubbling away in his consciousness for years now.
Perhaps further exploration by society at large could result in linking masculinity with two-facedness, a tendency to manipulation, and self-interested introspection, commonly considered feminine traits. Reduction in male privilege is one possible consequence, but worse, what can be good in the world if masculinity is a fraud?
I’d say that statement from Louis CK has the ring of authenticity. He is a person who has made a career out of speaking his mind, so I’d say that statement is of a piece with that.
Ophelia, I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts when you’ve finished reading it. It doesn’t deal with sexual harassment and assault per se (well, there are parts about child abuse, and also bullying, which are obviously related, but still not quite the same), but the dynamics of open secrets and willful blindness is directly applicable. The one jarring note, at least to this reader (and in my experience every book has at least one), was Heffernan’s defense of WikiLeaks (at a time when Assange’s sleaziness was pretty much an open secret in itself). It could have been a force for good, and it should have been, but it’s not. Anyway it’s not a major point in the book, and the parts about the psychological and sociocultural mechanisms of willful blindness are all spot on i.m.o.
fldteslalivia #15
It’s the emptiest non-explanation since “just so”. Also, why do people say things like “That’s just the way he is” as if it was anything other than restating the problem? Well, duh! It’s precisely “the way he is” that’s the issue here.
Even if LCK’s apology was dictated or coached, he’s shown vastly better choice of advisers/coaches than the others. I don’t expect this to start a trend. The sacrifice of principle and integrity to power is far too deeply normalized.
At some point ‘boys well be boys’ merges with ‘the ebil white cis-men will be ebil white cis-men.’ Both stances normalize and justify what’s really decadent behavior as if it were Human Nature. Which feeds right back into the MRA/PUA narratives about alpha males etc.
I’ve gone back and forth, but I’m currently pretty skeptical about this statement.
Notice that LCK makes a point of saying he “asked first.” Fine, but reportedly he didn’t always wait until he had a “yes,” however coerced or uncomfortable that yes might have been.
And he knew what he was doing. This wasn’t a mere “well a few times I asked but I didn’t consider that my celebrity gave me power over the women.” The man has a long history of pervy behavior, and he’s been thinking about it, mining it for his comedy, the whole time.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/louis-ck-has-been-baiting-us-i-love-you-daddy_us_5a04ed7fe4b05673aa585d1e?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000621
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/within-his-jokes-louis-ck-hid-a-disturbing-secret_us_5a04d789e4b05673aa584ac2