Tiffany Haddish “deeply regrets having agreed to act in” “Through A Pedophile’s Eyes” sketch
The comedian broke her silence about the lawsuit with a statement on Instagram
Aux Features Tiffany Haddish
Tiffany Haddish is speaking out after a 2014 sketch, “Through A Pedophile’s Eyes,” became the subject of a lawsuit against her and fellow comedian Aries Spears. The Jane and John Doe plaintiffs accused the comedians of sexually abusing a minor while filming the sketch.
“I know people have a bunch of questions. I get it. I’m right there with you,” Haddish begins in an Instagram statement. “Unfortunately, because there is an ongoing legal case, there’s very little that I can say right now. But, clearly, while this sketch was intended to be comedic, it wasn’t funny at all — and I deeply regret having agreed to act in it. I really look forward to being able to share a lot more about this situation as soon as I can.”
As previously covered by The A.V. Club, the lawsuit focuses on two different sketches filmed seven and eight years ago. Jane Doe presently represents herself in the case, and the suit accuses the pair of “intentional infliction of emotional distress, gross negligence, sexual battery, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse of a minor.” It also alleges that Haddish is guilty of “negligent supervision/failure to warn, breach of fiduciary duty, and constructive fraud.”
The alleged content of the sketches, which are not presently available on the internet, is upsetting. According to the Daily Beast, John and Jane became involved in the project after their mother met and bonded with Haddish about their shared experiences with divorce. When Haddish offered the then-14-year-old Jane a role in a “commercial,” she was allegedly instructed to mimic fellatio on a subway sandwich, and Haddish “showed Plaintiff Jane Doe how to give fellatio, including movements, noises, moaning, and groaning.”
A year later, Haddish reportedly approached the family once more about a second sketch for Funny or Die, centered on John, then age 7. This sketch, titled “Through A Pedophile’s Eyes,” featured Spears, in character, ogling the boy character, who spends most of the video in his underwear. Per the Daily Beast, “In another sequence, Spears smokes a cigarette while observing the child nude in a bathtub and pours water on his feet.” According to the suit, after filming, “Mr. Doe called his mother crying, saying he did not want to film anymore.”
As of this writing, Spears has not publicly commented on the accusations.
If you or someone you know is suffering from sexual abuse, contact the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.
80 Comments
She regrets “agreeing to act” in it? I guess I shouldn’t expect anything more than the most passive language imaginable from someone involved in an active case, but I can comfortably say fuck her.
Not just for this, but yes. Fuck her.https://atlantablackstar.com/2021/01/16/i-am-bullying-because-i-just-told-the-truth-tiffany-haddish-addresses-claims-of-bullying-and-spreading-covid-19-conspiracy-theories-on-clubhouse-app/
This was fun too: https://www.theroot.com/tiffany-haddish-says-shed-like-to-work-with-bill-cosby-1797283072
Wow. It would be bad enough to just ignore the raping, but to actually joke about it? Not the best look.
also this one! https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/vanessatsehaye/tiffany-haddish-eritrea-isaias-afwerki
Man. This is why for all people’s complaints about cancel culture, there’s plenty of shit I wish I knew way sooner.
I wasn’t aware! What a uniquely terrible person.
QUICK! There’s a black woman trying to be successful: EVERYONE ATTACK!!
LMAO
yeah i’m pretty sure keke palmer isn’t a genocide denier and aisha tyler never sexually traumatized two children
I know plenty of comedians think shock, discomfort and boundary-pushing are part of the job, and in general I’m inclined to agree, but just the descriptions of these skits make my skin crawl.
Was Dan Schneider connected to this project? There has to be something in the footnotes.
you said foot
“My only note is can you put on this lip gloss while you seductively eat the subway sandwich?”
And would you slowly but with great force squirt the mayonnaise on it?
I need a shower.
lol, comedy.*vomits*
Yeah, but it was only after Quentin dropped out….
Why do you even publish this garbage? Her shitty acting isn’t the issue. She was in charge of the shoot where the children were abused and exploited. Fuck her. What a garbage human being. Fuck the AV Club for pushing his lying pedo fuck for years.
I’d call this allowing her to hang herself with her own rope. There’s nothing in this article that remotely resembles a defense. Meanwhile the fact that she made these horribly misconceived films in the first place becomes public, along with her lawyer-directed “no comment.”
She once bragged during an interview that an ex-boyfriend was a pimp and that she “stole his bitch” and then she started exploiting the woman sexually and financially. The interviewers keep trying to make sound less horrifying than it is, but TH doubles down and goes on to explain she called the woman dogface. (Starts at the 36 minute mark)
Her statement is garbage and she has a track record of exploitation. Fuck. Off.
Yikes. It’s somehow worse than you described.
I read her autobiography. It was $1.99! She wrote about the pimp situation as well as a lot of incredibly disgusting decisions she made. This video thing does not surprise me at all.
She also once stated in an interview (can’t recall if it was one of the Jimmy’s or Colbert) that she was very attracted to Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape because she likes her men kinda stupid (i.e. mentally disabled).
She also wrote about pimping this woman in her autobiography. Other highlights include splicing pornography into a copy of Charlie’s Angels for her ex-boyfriend’s family (that she knew would be watched by kids) and, in the audiobook, imitating a developmentally disabled man’s voice for a solid 20 minutes.
This is a clear deflection of responsibility and not remotely akin to remorse. She is sorry she has to face consequences.
“Funny Or Die found this video absolutely disgusting and would never produce such content,” said the company in response to the lawsuit. “We were not involved with the conceptualization, development, funding or production of this video. It was uploaded to the site as user-generated content and was removed in 2018 immediately after becoming aware of its existence.” Wait, it took Funny Or Die *how long* to realize the video was on their own website??
The website operated like YouTube at the time. Comedians could freely upload videos without prior approval.
Like, sure, but this isn’t YouTube. There aren’t a billion hours uploaded every day on FoD. Nobody flagged it, nobody watched it and thought something was inappropriate?
Good question. Seems like it’s either they were making money off it (so kept it up) or weren’t really tracking/moderating anything. I would be curious to know what kind of money they made off the video. Gross.
More troubling is the fact that the video became self-aware.
“But, clearly, while this sketch was intended to be comedic, it wasn’t funny at all — and I deeply regret having agreed to act in it. I really look forward to being able to share a lot more about this situation as soon as I can.”Why am I reading that in Kevin Spacey’s voice doing the characata from House of Cards that he got fahhd from but he still did a weyad voice in a videya protestin’ that he didn’t do it!
Where’s the video of the sketch so we can see what really went down? All I could find was this.
My man I don’t think you want that in your browsing history
Wait, so this was a Funny or Die sketch? If that’s the case why isn’t that production company/website the one being sued?
That’s a good question. Maybe Spears and Haddish wrote it? IDK.
IIRC It was apparently user-submitted content, not something that Funny or Die themselves produced. Spears and Haddish were the ones who wrote and produced it, they just uploaded it to Funny or Die.
Comedians and such were able to upload their material without previous Funny or Die approval, kind of like a walled-garden YouTube. That ability was removed in 2018, the same time the sketch was brought to their attention and deleted.
times like this, I’m glad I never liked her to begin with.
Hope she loses a pretty penny. Then maybe she can actually come up with something funny.
Like silly face on her mugshot?
my favourite was at the oscars this year when someone asked her who she rented her dress from and she was “oh i bought this i own this why would you think i rented this?”and its like standards for women on the red carpet to be lent out dresses for designers. I’m guessing no one wanted her representing their brands. i wonder why?
I mean, they’re done, right? This sounds terrible.
“Unfortunately, because there is an ongoing legal case, there’s very little that I can say right now.”Is this true? I often wonder, as the go-to response for (insert legal trouble), is there any legal reason she couldn’t say more? Aside from the obvious (she’s a shitty person, did exactly what was described, etc.).
No law stopping her, but she could self-incriminate and give the prosecutor legal ammo.
It’s not a legal restriction. It’s more like, “My lawyers told me about 700 times that I shouldn’t talk about this in public.” They want to be able to control as much information related to the case as possible and having your client talking about it freely in a public forum hugely diminishes that control.
It’s basically her rights against self-incrimination. The more it’s discussed in public, the more chance that information that could potentially damage her case could be revealed, accidentally or otherwise. Legally speaking she could technically say anything she wants, but that would risk completely fucking her defence if and when it comes to any kind of legal proceeding.
It’s similar to “never talk to the cops.” Guilty? Don’t talk to the cops! Innocent? Don’t talk to the cops! You’re up against someone whose job it is to find guilt in you, and you’re not as experienced at defending yourself as they are at incriminating you, so shut the fuck up and let your lawyer do the talking.
I always suggest people view “Don’t Talk to the Police” a 48 minute video on youtube. It answers the questions “why not talk to police if I did not do anything wrong?” and “What’s the worst that could happen?”
If you’re in a legal case, pretty much anything you say outside the courtroom is fair game to bring back into the courtroom. Once my family was involved in a legal arbitration, and while my brother was in the middle of giving either testimony or a deposition (I can’t recall which), the other side’s lawyer grilled him about a post he’d made on his Facebook page the night before. The comment wasn’t obviously related to the case, but you could interpret it that way.
Also “having agreed to act in it” which makes her involvement sound as passive as possible.
Lawyer here, and yes there are a number of reasons. It’s basically lawyering 101 that you instruct your client to almost always never talk about a lawsuit while a case is pending (of course there are exceptions to every rule).The biggest reason is evidentiary. There’s really nothing you can say in public that will help your case (or be admissible as evidence); but there’s plenty you can say to fuck your case. The best/easiest rule: shut your mouth and run everything through the lawyers. Yes it sucks from a PR perspective, but it’s the best move.And on a related note, lawyers always want to try and control the narrative of the case. Clients regularly think they’re smarter than everyone else; or they think a comment is innocuous, but again, it fucks their case. A lawsuit/trial is a story, and the lawyers want to control that story and not have to deal with a thousand pointless footnotes that might fuck it up.
I’ve only been involved in a couple of legal cases, both in professional environments, and the shit I had to sit there and listen to the other side say made my blood boil, including willfully misreading the message and spirit of emails between myself and their client. And that was just a business dispute. I cannot imagine feeding one drop of potentially twistable info to the other side, especially given the matter here.
Also a lawyer here. Can confirm.
Considering she’s on tape, im not sure how much more guilty she can get.
I had a family member who worked in insurance who told me that when you’re in an accident you are never supposed to say “I’m sorry” at any point because it could be construed as an admission of fault. I imagine this is similar.
It’s the advice any lawyer gives you for any legal issue. I sued an insurance once upon a time, and my lawyer actually had a one-page prepared essay mailed out to me stressing how important it was not to discuss any aspect of the issue on social media.No one knows what can be turned and used as a weapon against you, such as someone with debilitating depression smiling in a family photo or obviously enjoying sunshine.It’s the most believable part of any accused’s pre-charges/-trial public statement.
And I simply thought I didn’t like her because she’s not funny.
Even in the comparatively libertine days of 2014, who in the world thought a sketch titled “Through A Pedophile’s Eyes” was anything like a good idea?
IDK about 2014 but it feels right at home in the peak shock humor era, like classic South Park and Family Guy.
I feel dirty.
yah, even the Sarah Silverman Program did some similar shock comedy. I think Silverman is a good voice in comedy, but some of it is pretty crazy it aired.
Yeah, but even then they wouldn’t use an actual child. They’d animate it or have an obvious adult portraying the child. They wanted the humor to be shocking, sure, but not the process of making it.
I vaguely recall Silverman doing some video bit where it was like a parody of erotic french indie dramas or something, and it had a kid act out scenes with… Tensions, iirc
There are a bunch of ways you could make something similar to this without traumatizing an actual child. It’s done all the time – the kids are doing something innocuous and filmed completely separately from the adults. The fact that kids were filmed in their underwear or fellating a sandwich is just fucked-up from the jump.
“So, I’ve got this great new idea for a sketch. What we’re gonna do, right, is, we’re going to molest a child.”“You mean… pretend to molest? An actor playing a child?”“Nope. We’re literally going to molest an actual child.”
“But… that’s pedophilia! That’s a crime!”“No, no. It’s not. Because, see, when we do it, we’re doing it for comedy.”
“But… you’re still doing it…”“I know. As part of a sketch. It’s gonna be hilarious!”
Well, “funny or die”, right?
More like “Funny or Have Your Career Take A Hit Unless People Continue To Inexplicably Think You’re Hilarious For Some Reason.” Catchy.
“This is the one thing we didn’t want to happen”
A reference so glorious it’s a shame it’ll be lost on these knuckle-dragging troglodytes.
What the actual fuck though
After she got Tucker “She’s passed out, so she’s not saying no” Max to co-write her biography, I knew she was suspect.
That seems in bad taste in any year. Not really sure what the joke was supposed to be.
“I know people have a bunch of questions. I get it. I’m right there with you,”Yeah no. Given that she’s the one who wrote, produced and acted in the paedophile sketch and I’m not, there’s a pretty big gulf between us.
Did ‘Jane Doe’ grow up to become a lawyer? If not, if this has any merit, why is she representing herself?
You know what they say: “the anonymous victim who represents themselves has a fool for a client. Unless they have proof on tape, in which case, no.”
Whitest Kids U Know did it better with the Serial Grapist sketch.
“Hey, Jews. It’s me, Hitler. How about that Holocaust? Pretty fucked up, huh? I get it. I’m right there with you.”
Can someone explain to me why it’s being described as a “sketch”? Am I missing something?
Question to the lawyers on here: how many times have you told your client to post something about your case on instagram?