Louis CK is DONE

Illustration: Maarten de Boer/Getty Image

A New York Times Investigation 
 published today put names and specifics to unsourced stories that had been circulating for years, alleging that the filmmaker-performer pressured five female colleagues to watch or listen to him masturbate. A one-line summary on the Times story strikes at the heart of the charges: “As the powerful comedian found success by talking about his hang-ups, he was also asking female comics and co-workers to watch him masturbate.”

The Times investigation by Melena Ryzik, Cara Buckley, and Jodi Kantor arrived mere hours after the announcement that C.K.’s movie distributor canceled the premiere of his new film, I Love You, Daddy, a controversy-stoking two-fer in which C.K. plays a C.K.-like television producer who has a sexual relationship with an actress who’s about to star in his new TV show, while his teenage daughter (Chloë Grace Moretz), a legal minor, is having a fling with a much older, Woody Allen-like film director (John Malkovich). The black-and-white photography and orchestral score are both modeled on Allen’s Manhattan, likewise an uneasy comedy about an older man’s relationship with a teenager. The movie includes a long bit in which the C.K. character’s assistant (Charlie Day) loudly mimes masturbating on an office couch with other people present — including a female producer played by Edie Falco, who looks disturbed but still carries on a conversation with C.K.’s character as if this sort of thing happens all the time. The film’s very release now seems to be in jeopardy.