The terminated employee has requested that their name not be used publicly, for fear of harassment.Īnother trans employee, Terra Field, was suspended from the company but subsequently reinstated after she reportedly attended a director-level quarterly business meeting to which she was not invited. “We understand this employee may have been motivated by disappointment and hurt with Netflix, but maintaining a culture of trust and transparency is core to our company." "We have let go of an employee for sharing confidential, commercially sensitive information outside the company,” Netflix confirmed in a statement. The reason for the termination, the company says, is that this employee allegedly leaked confidential internal data about viewership of the special and how much the special cost the company - a reported $24 million. Now, as The Verge reports, one trans employee, who is Black, and who leads a trans resource group at the company that was organizing a walkout protest about The Closer, has been fired.
Roxane Gay may have summarized it best, saying, "This is a faded simulacrum of the once-great comedian, who now uses his significant platform to air grievances against the great many people he holds in contempt, while deftly avoiding any accountability."Įmployees at Netflix are not all on board with CEO Ted Sarandos's defense of the company's decision to air the special, and in particular some trans people who work at the company are beside themselves with anger. Or it's about how he thinks he should be able to make juvenile jokes about trans people and also see their humanity and claim that he's an empathetic human being, all while saying a bunch of shit about how gender constructs are real and important to him. Or it's about his perception that the only people who get upset and try to cancel Black comedians are white people. And while the first third of it includes at least one funny bit about Martin Luther King directing activities at a glory hole, the entire thrust of the thing is about Chappelle's anger at the LGBTQ community for being angry at him. If you haven't watched Chappelle's special, The Closer, you don't have to.
Dave Chappelle's exhausting, transphobic, grievance-filled rant of a comedy special continues to be a problem for Netflix as news came out late last week that the Los Gatos-based company had fired a Black trans employee who was helping the organize a walkout protest related to the special.