The Incomplete Comeback of Louis C.K.

Of all the men accused of sexual misconduct during the febrile late 2010s, Louis C.K. came closest to modeling a pathway for redemption. At the most basic level, he admitted that the allegations against him—that he’d exposed himself to and masturbated in front of younger women in the comedy scene—were true. He seemed able to comprehend the loaded dynamics of propositioning women in what was essentially an amorphous workplace of clubs and after-parties, writing in a 2017 statement 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.” He expressed remorse, saying, “There is nothing about this that I forgive myself for.” And he seemed intent on acknowledging the people who’d suffered as a result of his compulsions, and earnest about trying to change his behavior.

In his comedic work, C.K. had mastered the art of confessional transgression, and so it was fair to hope that he might one day turn his comeback into a restorative process rather than a retributive one. He said he was going to “step back and take a long time to listen.” But when he returned, something seemed to have calcified in him. He was bitter. In his self-released 2020 stand-up special, titled Sincerely Louis C.K., C.K. insinuated that he’d asked for consent when he’d masturbated in front of a woman, and that the women had given it (which several deny). Instead of wrestling with the part of his psyche that had taken sexual pleasure in making women feel humiliated and distressed, or with the fact that he’d deliberately targeted women lacking power or status, who might have been easier to coerce, he reframed himself as the victim. “You all have your thing,” he said. “I don’t know what your thing is. You’re so fucking lucky that I don’t know what your thing is. Do you understand how lucky you are? That people don’t know your fucking thing?” I can remember hearing this joke at the time and being stunned by the willful reinterpretation of events, the elision of the vital context that he had literally exposed himself.

[Read: Louis C.K. and the missed point of redemption]

You could intuit, then, that C.K. isn’t thrilled about Sorry/Not Sorry, a new documentary produced by The New York Times that revives its 2017 reporting on him and—somewhat briefly—examines what happened after. And if so, it’s hard not to sympathize with him, because I don’t believe most people actually want men who haven’t committed serial criminal offenses to be shunned and castigated forever. It must be wretched to be publicly shamed for something you feel secretly shameful about already, even if you can’t acknowledge it. I can understand that fame and success cocoon a person in adulation while actively inhibiting self-awareness, and that being forced to reckon with your misbehavior while being simultaneously cast into the wilderness must be hugely destabilizing.

But it’s even harder to forgive people who have done nothing real to try to make amends. And it’s infuriating to see someone come so close to acknowledging their own part in systemic abuses of power in entertainment, only to whiplash all the way to aggrieved myopia, and even spite. (At the end of 2021, C.K. released a stand-up special trollishly titled Sorry, in which he seemed anything but.) This discrepancy is what Sorry/Not Sorry tries to probe, while expanding on the Times’ original reporting to lay out the details of behavior that was, for many people in the industry, an open secret.

What ends up feeling more vital, if less examined, is the way in which #MeToo divided people into two camps: the ones who wanted things to change, and the ones who were adamant that nothing should. “It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator,” the psychiatrist Judith Herman writes in her 1992 book, Trauma and Recovery. “All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain.” The comeback that C.K. has pulled off in recent years—he won a Grammy for Sincerely Louis C.K. in 2022 and performed at Madison Square Garden last year—has validated the impulse to do nothing. But it’s also added to the burden of the women who came forward, who have been harassed and abused by C.K.’s fans online and have seen no meaningful changes to comedy’s power structures.

Sorry/Not Sorry skates over much of this recent history without really analyzing it. The directors, Caroline Suh and Cara Mones, could have focused on the particular risk-taking that comedy rewards—and the paradox of trying to impose boundaries within an industry that thrives on provocation and excess. Or they could have considered the tragedy of a brilliant comedian (the vulnerable “philosopher king” of comedy, as, ahem, Charlie Rose once billed him) who’s been left pandering, as The New Yorker’s Hilton Als put it, to a wholly new kind of audience, “a male-dominated crowd that [shows] no sign of finding fault with his dick or what he did with it.”

[Read: The leaked Louis C.K. set is tragedy masked as comedy]

Or Sorry/Not Sorry could have focused on the women. A few months ago, Christine Blasey Ford released a memoir, One Way Back, that revealed the exact cost of alleging that Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her as a teenager during the Senate confirmation hearings that ultimately elevated him to the Supreme Court: fractured relationships with her parents and siblings, and a wave of hate so virulent, she had to leave her home and move her family into a hotel; even her children were threatened (“Glad you have two kids because we have two opportunities,” one menacing message read). She still has to spend thousands of dollars on private security for some public events. (Kavanaugh forcefully denied that the incidents she described ever took place; he has never publicly decried the threats against her.)

Fully documenting what happened to more of the women who came forward during #MeToo would be a fascinating project, but such an effort is complicated by the fact that many are understandably reluctant to put themselves through such a public ordeal again. Four out of the five women interviewed for the original New York Times story about C.K. declined to participate in the documentary. Just one, Abby Schachner, who said C.K. audibly masturbated during a phone conversation with her in 2003, appears on camera; other subjects—including the comedians Jen Kirkman and Megan Koester—are left to explain how C.K.’s profile and clout enabled his behavior. Kirkman explains how C.K. once tried to ask if he could masturbate in front of her while the pair were at a bar (a friend of hers came over before the exchange went any further); she also describes how she ended up turning down subsequent opportunities to work with him—opportunities that would have been great for her career—because she feared what might happen. Koester describes being essentially blacklisted for trying to reveal C.K.’s misbehavior; she now makes her living selling things on eBay. (“Meg has so much integrity, she hasn’t worked in a year,” her partner jokes.)

Implicit in these women’s stories is the question of who commands power and who doesn’t. C.K. had it, and these women didn’t, which was part of his compulsion—there’s a reason he never pulled out his penis in front of, say, Tina Fey. “The power I had over these women is that they admired me,” he wrote in his 2017 statement. “And I wielded that power irresponsibly.” As a writer and producer, he had a say over who was cast in his shows, and who got to join him on tour. And, as someone who self-funds and self-releases new work (FX, Netflix, and HBO cut ties with him following the Times story), he has the power of a fan base that doesn’t seem to care what he did or have any consideration for the women who implicated him. (Schachner dryly describes being turned into a punch line by the comedian Dave Chappelle, who mocked her “brittle-ass spirit” for not hanging up the phone on C.K.) His accusers have their integrity, and the knowledge that they did everything they could to try to bring light to abuses that had long been tacitly accepted. But C.K. has the Grammy, and the sold-out show at Madison Square Garden.

What’s so frustrating is that you can easily imagine how things could be different. C.K. could have pushed his art of introspection deeper, and—looking outward—might have considered what a process of atonement and restorative justice could look like. Everything he’s ever done in his work affirms that he would have had the moral sophistication and the clarity of insight to try again. The art he made in the process would have been better. Instead, he opted for the much easier and less interesting role of victim, his second act underscoring all the ways in which nothing in comedy, or within him, has actually changed for the better.

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