Janeane Garofalo: ‘Leave Louis CK alone… I think he has suffered’
I’ve forgotten about what has been proven and what was just rumored, so let me tell you what I believe. I believe Louis CK spent years sexually harassing women in comedy and women in the entertainment industry. I believe he spent years jerking off in front of coworkers and comediennes and then vaguely denying that it ever happened, and effectively blackballing them from the industry. I believe that when he was outed as a pervert and serial harasser, he then leaned into comedy aimed at Deplorables, the kind of “let’s punch down at the marginalized groups and let’s mock survivors of mass shootings” comedy. I believe Louis CK has been deserving of cancellation for years. But what bugs me is that too many of his comedy coworkers and friends are doing the most to cape for this piece of sh-t. And too many of them are women. Janeane Garofalo is the latest:
Though Louis C.K. has fallen under scrutiny for sexual misconduct and more recently, his mockery of survivors of the Parkland High School massacre, fellow comedian Janeane Garofalo is telling the public to back off. In an interview released Friday on “Poptarts,” BUST Magazine’s bi-weekly podcast, Garofalo called for sympathy for the disgraced comic.
“Leave Louis C.K. alone,” she said. “Enough with that. And again, there are so many issues we gotta be motivated on. He’s been my friend ― and I stand by that ― he’s been my friend since 1985, and I think he has suffered… And when he performs at the Comedy Cellar and people get all irate, if nothing else, care about his daughters. If nothing else ― if you can find no compassion for him, which I think you should ― think about how his daughters, who hear all of this stuff, feel. Why don’t you leave him alone for them if you’re so women-empowering?”
Garafalo said the misconduct allegations against C.K. were not the fight of all women, but solely of the women who had accused him. That’s when the podcast’s interviewer voiced her audible discomfort with the remarks, wondering why anyone should feel sympathy for the comedian just because he’s a father.
“Because you don’t understand what it is like to be a public pariah because it’s not happened to you,” Garafalo argued. “He chose to be a public person and then he chose to take advantage of that,” the interviewer shot back. Still, that failed to shake Garafaro’s stance, as she described “the pushback” on her position as “so unjust.” Doubling down on her demands for better treatment of C.K., Garafalo added, “I do think there is a point where somebody stops kicking people when they’re down.”
Here’s the thing: if Louis CK had gone away after he was outed as a predator/harasser and he quit comedy and moved away to the wilderness, I would agree: leave him alone, don’t even waste your breath on yelling about him anymore. The problem is that this sh-t is still ongoing, like it is with so many outed predators (Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer say hi). They all want to “come back” and “rebrand” and “punch down on people who are actually deserving of humanity and sympathy.” Louis CK is a straight, cisgendered white man who did awful things and continues to be an awful person. I honestly couldn’t give a f–k if his daughters read about it, because Louis CK obviously didn’t care about his daughters reading about how he was a serial sexual harasser, or how he uses LGTBQ people as the butt of his jokes, and on and on and on. Again, Janeane Garofalo is not to blame for what Louis CK did or does. But she doesn’t have to cape for him either, and I think less of her for her tortured argument for why we should leave him alone.
Photos courtesy of WENN, Backgrid.
