Right off the bat I’ll admit to being a huge Louis C.K. fan over the years – the guy’s funny, and his TV show Louie is an absolute gem.
That being said there are some seriously disturbing allegations being thrown around here, Roseanne Barr calling Louis out for what she claims is a long history of gross sexual misconduct.
In case you’re not aware of who Roseanne is, she was the lead character in the aptly-named Roseanne TV show from back in the day, and she also took an ill-fated run at the U.S. presidency in 2012.
Speaking to the Daily Beast ahead of the release of her documentary, Roseanne For President!, she called out the mysoginistic culture that pervades the comedy circuit in the U.S.
She also took aim at what was going on behind the scenes, with Louis in the firing line:
Barr theorizes (sic) that as that kind of hostile behavior was increasingly frowned upon, sexism in the comedy clubs was sublimated elsewhere but never really left: “Because they couldn’t do that anymore onstage,” she said, “it got really mutated off.”
And Cosby might not be alone. Another high-profile male comic, she predicted, is “about to get busted.”
“I’ve been speaking up,” she said, pausing briefly before naming names. “It’s Louis C.K., locking the door and masturbating in front of women comics and writers. I can’t tell you—I’ve heard so many stories. Not just him, but a lot of them. And it’s just par for the course. It’s just shit women have to put up with.” (Louis C.K.’s rep did not respond to a request for comment.)
In a follow-up email to The Daily Beast, Barr added, “These allegations [against Louis C.K.] have been leveled and talked about for years. I do not have first hand knowledge, though have heard women make these allegations.”
This isn’t the first time she has spoken out – see this tweet from back in 2015:
There’s actually more, a podcast from 2014 suggesting C.K. was guilty of some awful behaviour and some follow up research conducted:
A few weeks later, [they] posted emails from an anonymous tipster confronting C.K. for a 2014 incident in which he allegedly “[took] his penis out in front of uninterested and frightened girls.” The same article claimed C.K. was the subject of a similar blind item from 2012 about a male comic who allegedly forced two female comedians to watch him masturbate at the Aspen Comedy Festival.
So these accusations have been around a while, surely Louis has had adequate time to respond?
“I don’t care about that. That’s nothing to me. That’s not real,” he said…
Pressed on why he hasn’t responded publicly, C.K. answered, “Well, you can’t touch stuff like that. There’s one more thing I want to say about this, and it’s important: If you need your public profile to be all positive, you’re sick in the head. I do the work I do, and what happens next I can’t look after. So my thing is that I try to speak to the work whenever I can. Just to the work and not to my life.”
[source:dailybeast]
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