To say the least, Sarah Silverman has an “intimate” past with disgraced comedian Louis C.K.
At the height of #MeToo, Louis C.K. admitted to some shocking misconduct, which included having two women watch him masturbate.
“These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my d*** without asking first, which is also true,” he said last year. “But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your d*** 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.”
The admission all but destroyed C.K.’s career; he has since been working smaller gigs at several comedy clubs in New York.
In an interview with Howard Stern on his SiriusXM radio show on Monday, C.K.’s longtime friend admitted she willfully consented to watching the comedian … self-stimulate.
“I know I’m going to regret saying this,” Silverman said. “I’ve known Louis forever, I’m not making excuses for him, so please don’t take this that way. We are peers. We are equals. When we were kids, and he asked if he could masturbate in front of me, sometimes I’d go, ‘F*** yeah I want to see that!’… It’s not analogous to the other women that are talking about what he did to them. He could offer me nothing. We were only just friends. Sometimes, yeah, I wanted to see it, it was amazing. Sometimes I would say, ‘F***ing no, gross,’ and we got pizza.”
Silverman says this was at a time when the two were letting their “freak flags fly” at a younger age. The comedienne says that C.K. failed to realize he could no longer ask younger female comics to watch him masturbate once he became famous due to the power dynamic.
“Once he became powerful, even within just his [comedy] community, he felt like he was the same person, but the dynamic was different and it was not OK,” Silverman said.
Silverman says that C.K. learned his lesson before The New York Times story, which did note that he reached out to some of the women to say sorry.
“Even in that article they talk about how he went on and tried to connect with some of these women to say he f***ed up and wronged them,” Silverman said.”I’m not saying everyone should embrace Louis again. I believe he has remorse. I just want him to talk about it on stage. He’s going to have to find his way or not find his way.”