It's worth noting that by slinking back into the public eye in the way that he did last night, Louis CK has opened up a long list of women to a whole new round of abuse and sexual harassment.
In taking the stage without engaging in any sort of reckoning with his bad acts, Louis CK put the onus for insisting on such a reckoning on women, making it inevitable that they would be harassed and attacked.
There's a path CK could have taken that would have minimized new harm to his victims and to other women speaking out on #metoo issues. He didn't take that path. That was a choice he made.
I've seen people saying we can't know what Louis CK has done or learned in the last nine months. But how he did what he did yesterday speaks to those questions, and what it says isn't good.
People are asking what he could have done differently. There's a lot of possible answers to that question. Rather than giving a laundry list, let me put it this way...
If CK had asked women who are rightfully angry about his misconduct how he should have approached a possible return to public life, none of them would have said "show up at the Comedy Cellar without notice, do a set, and then go silent again." Not a single one.
If you're one of the folks who's suggesting that he should be given the benefit of the doubt, ask yourself what he's done to indicate that's warranted.
Again: By just popping back up without an apology or a reckoning, CK put the burden of raising the issue of his past conduct today on women, rather than taking on that burden himself. In so doing, he made it inevitable that they'd be attacked for raising it.
