Dear Gossips,

The Hollywood Predator Advent Calendar opened up a new door yesterday and spat out Louis CK. Exactly five weeks ago yesterday, The New York Times broke open the story about Harvey Weinstein. It was a Thursday. Yesterday, also a Thursday, they confirmed what the whisper network (Gawker and Jezebel have been on this for years) has been saying about CK for a long, long time. And Louis, like Harvey, is not a standalone situation either. As noted in the NYT’s report, several of CK’s victims felt that his manager Dave Becky was warning them not to come forward – he denies the accusations but… it’s not a good look. And when you consider that Dave Becky also manages some of the biggest names in comedy, like Aziz Ansari and Amy Poehler and Kevin Hart, well, it’s going to be interesting how this shakes out. As Marlow Stern pointed out on Twitter, for a long time it was women who were letting people know about Louis CK’s behaviour. Most of the men (with the exception of Hannibal Buress, also a Dave Becky client) refused to go there: 

Click here to read Marlow’s piece for The Daily Beast about CK’s “Powerful Army of Celebrity Enablers”. 

Oh and by the way, here’s another one – Matthew Weiner, who created Mad Men, has now been accused of sexual harassment by a former writer on the show, Kater Gordon. Kater and Matthew won an Emmy together. A year later she was let go. 

Yesterday I was thinking about the Golden Globes. They’ve yet to announce a host this year. Which reminded me of Ricky Gervais. You remember all the times Ricky hosted the Globes and, right up on that stage, he’d call out all kinds of assholes in Hollywood (Mel Gibson) and the Hollywood Foreign Press and he’d make fun of the studios? And at the time, the celebrities, so many of them, got into their feelings about how mean he was and how unnecessary his jokes were. They wanted him to be nicer, that it was ruining the vibe of the show, remember that? Because they didn’t deserve to be treated this way. 

Harvey Weinstein even joked after Ricky’s first time hosting the Globes that Ricky wouldn’t “make it out of town” that night, adding that, "There are seven people that we've hired to kill him and deservedly so. Knowing that Ricky Gervais will never work again means a lot to me, I'm going to make sure of it”. Again, at the time, it was a joke. But knowing now what we’ve suspected forever about Harvey and learning now that it wasn’t just Harvey, it’s been studio heads and producers and writers and comedians and agents and actors, men occupying all kinds of spaces in Hollywood, why SHOULDN’T they have been f-cking scolded by someone for 10 minutes during an opening monologue at an award show? The LA District Attorney announced yesterday that a sexual abuse task force has been set up for the entertainment industry. Like a separate predator department had to be created!  

Here’s a hard turn, because there’s no elegant way to do it, and I’m sorry about that but I do want to say it and I do mean it…

Have a great weekend!

Yours in gossip,

Lainey