The wealth and status earned by his comedy is what gave him the power and position to commit his abuses in the first place.
I get there is an issue here, but what is the answer? There are all sorts of avenues for men to achieve wealth and power. So would he be allowed to become successful in other ventures? Or is it only comedy that he can't be trusted in? Do we monitor that he doesn't become too successful or too powerful in time, somewhere else? How do we do this? For how long?
The fact that he'll use (if he hasn't already) his crimes as fodder for jokes (self-deprecating ones, I'm sure!) doesn't help.
Then people can criticize the content and the intent of his material. I saw a clip from his special with a giant "Sorry" sign lit up behind him, and without knowing the exact context of this, found it glib and in poor taste. And it doesn't have me rushing out to watch it, even though in the past I considered him possibly the greatest living comic.
He's not above criticism. He's not above scorn. And if it is about what he says or how he behaves, people can go at it for all I care when it comes to how much they hate the guy. I don't have any particularly great sympathy for him. He's pretty obviously a prick and an ******* and a sex offender. But I'm also against the notion that he's somehow doing something inherently wrong by getting on stage. And that people are doing something bad by being in that audience.
Now this isn't to say I would say there are NO issues with that, and I would agree that there is definitely discussion to be had regarding it, but the idea that this is a settled matter, and you are complicit with him unless you condemn his behavior on every level of what he does or does not do, has no traction with me. And that is definitely the hot take some people seem to be peddling
Also, and sorry if this isn't fair or whatever, but it can be hard sometimes to separate out the "He did a bad thing but I still respect his talent as a comedian" fans from the "He did nothing wrong and he shouldn't even have said sorry" fans.
There is an enormous gulf between these two groups of people. I don't see why they should ever be confused with one another. The only commonality between them is neither accepts the idea that there is only one way to deal with an offender like CK. But still, the distinction is huge between them. Mostly because those in the latter group are rejecting the premise he did anything wrong, and that these sorts of things don't need to change. I'm in the former group. He did something wrong. These things have to change.
These kinds of discussions remind me of the kind of arguments I had with others when I was younger, when they spoke of people in prison who have better cable packages then they do, and get to study for diplomas, and how they all should be breaking rocks on the side of the road all day and in hell every minute for the rest of their time in jail. And when I reminded them that most of these people are one day going to be reintroduced to society and we might want to consider what a prison sentence like this might turn them into (ie. something much worse than went in), these people would look at me like I was absolving their crimes. That I had no respect for their victims. As if the simple notion of looking at what happened outside of the accepted narrative that these people were awful, unworthy scoundrels, I was now in cahoots with them. And so if the insinuation above is that what I've said is somehow indistinguishable from someone who claims Louis CK did nothing wrong, um, let's just say I disagree.
In what ways do you think he's done anything toward redemption?
I have no idea what he's done. Possibly nothing. And that would be unfortunate. But as I am not living in Louis CK's conscience, and I don't know what he does in his private life, I'm not going to suggest that redemption isn't for him. Maybe he doesn't deserve it. But I'm not the one to make the official declaration on that.
Should he have done some grand public thing to show that he learned his lesson? Maybe. I don't know. Or maybe it would be better sometimes if people just did such things on the side, away from the public, on their own, like any average person would have to do if they are trying to make up for the wrong's they've done. I imagine even if he did do some perfect public gesture of atonement, no matter how sincere his intentions were, it would still be greeted by skepticism and complaints that he didn't do it right.