Tig Notaro feels free to open up about her complex history with Louis C.K.
But that wasn’t always the case.
On Monday, the 46-year-old comedian appeared on “The View” and spoke candidly about her close association with Louis C.K., who helped Notaro sell her show “One Mississippi” to Amazon and served an executive producer on the project. During the discussion, Notaro admitted that having Louis C.K.’s name removed from her show was a huge weight lifted from her shoulders.
“It’s a huge relief … to have him removed,” Notaro said. She then addressed the allegations of sexual misconduct lodged against Louis C.K. and said she knew about them before they became public.
“I found out right after we sold the show, that this was happening, and I started publicly trying to distance myself from him for almost two years now,” she said. “When this all came out, even though I knew firsthand from people, it wasn’t my place to call out names, [it’s] somebody else’s story.”
Notaro and Louis C.K. have had a rocky relationship for years.
In 2012, he helped launch Notaro’s career by offering her now-famous stand-up set about being diagnosed with cancer on his website for $5. Yet, earlier this year, she accused Louis C.K. of plagiarizing her short film “Clown Service” for one of his “Saturday Night Live” sketches. Then in August, a frustrated Notaro spoke to The Daily Beast about the rumors surrounding Louis C.K. She told the site that though he had an executive producer credit on her series, he had “nothing to do with the show.”
In fact, a Season 2 episode of “One Mississippi” includes a scene that closely resembles the claims against C.K. featured in the New York Times’ November exposé.
The episode depicts a character named Kate, played by Notaro’s wife Stephanie Allynne, being forced to watch her male boss masturbate at his desk.
“Our entire writers’ room is all female, and every person in the room has had an experience with assault, abuse or harassment in some way,” Notaro told the women of “The View” on Monday when questioned about this particular scene. “Every story on ‘One Mississippi’ is based in truth, and it’s not necessarily my truth, but it’s somebody’s truth and something that somebody experienced or knew of the experience happening.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story indicated that Tig Notaro’s stand-up set about having cancer was called “Hello, I Have Cancer.” While that’s the well-known first line of the set, it in fact is called “Live.”