Dear Bill Maher: Please shut up
The Real Time host doesn't understand why domestic abuse victims don't "just leave" their partners, because that would require critical thinking, empathy, and two seconds of Googling.
Bill Maher has never been what you’d call a great champion of gender equality.
A fixture on late night TV since the 1990s, when he regularly palled around with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion, Maher’s history of sexism is so pervasive that even his friend Ann Coulter once told the Real Time host that evidence of his misogyny was in “every single thing you say about women.”
He once joked that Tila Tequila deserved to be choked. He called Sarah Palin a “cunt” and a “dumb twat.” He claimed that Harvey Weinstein was simply “lazy” in his approach to women. He has questioned whether it’s possible for an adult woman to rape an adolescent boy. When asked by a young female assistant what he wanted on his pizza, he allegedly responded, “Your cum,” according to a 1995 article in Spy magazine. (A hat tip to Maggie Serota for uncovering that horror story.)
He also has a sorry track record for hiring women as writers on his show, as I discovered in 2019, when I wrote a piece about the gender gap in late night. Of the dozen shows I looked at, Real Time had the second-lowest percentage of women writers on staff. After the story came out, the show’s publicist called to complain that Maher wasn’t pictured in the photo collage that ran with the story. (Yes, really.)
Maher has a history of being wrong on a whole lot of other things, too. He said the N word on his show in 2017. He is a long-standing fan of “just asking questions” about vaccines who has regularly invited anti-science quacks onto his show. And there’s the time he praised Trump so effusively after dining at the White House that Larry David, his HBO colleague, skewered him in a New York Times piece called “My Dinner WIth Adolf.”
But Maher reached previously unimaginable levels of ick last week with a segment about the Diddy trial in which he proposed “new rules” for reporting sexual abuse and domestic violence in the wake of #MeToo.
For those who are somehow unaware, the rap mogul otherwise known as Sean Combs is currently on trial in Manhattan, facing charges of racketeering and sex trafficking. A key witness in the prosecution’s case is his former girlfriend, Cassie Ventura (known as Cassie), who in four days of harrowing testimony last month alleged that Diddy subjected her to horrific physical violence and coerced her into performing often humiliating sexual acts against her will. (Days after testifying in court while heavily pregnant, Cassie gave birth to her third child.)
Through his lawyer, Diddy has admitted to domestic violence in his relationship with Cassie.
But in Maher’s warped mind, this only makes Cassie look worse, serving as evidence she was in the relationship for fame.
“If you're being abused, you've got to leave right away,” he said in the segment, which you can watch here, if you feel like making yourself scream. (But be warned: it also features frequent reaction shots of Jake Tapper laughing.)
Maher doesn't understand why women like Cassie stay with their abusers—because that would require critical thinking, empathy, and roughly two seconds of Googling.
And that, apparently, is too much to ask of Maher, who has hosted Real Time since 2003 and was wealthy enough to buy a minority share in the New York Mets back in 2012.
As Maher sees it, #MeToo has inspired more women to report abuse, and also made it more likely that they will be believed. Cassie, who was with Diddy on and off for roughly a decade, should have spoken up sooner.
“We're not in the no-one-listens-to-women-or-takes-them-seriously-era anymore. Operators are actually standing by to take your calls,” Maher said, making one of the dated references that are a hallmark of his comedy. (He also cracked a joke about Hammer pants, which were a thing back when Johnny Carson hosted Tonight.)
“It's not victim-shaming to expect women to have the agency to leave toxic relationships,” he said.
Actually, it is.
Maher’s claims about domestic violence were so off-base that even TMZ called him out. When you’ve ceded the moral ground to an outlet that pays law enforcement sources for scoops about dead celebrities that sometimes break before the families have been notified, it’s probably time to reconsider your life choices.
Maher’s spin on the Diddy case is wrong on many levels, starting with basic chronology. Cassie and Diddy were involved from 2007 until they definitively broke up in 2018. Nearly all of the alleged abuse took place before #MeToo erupted in fall 2017.
This includes the time Diddy viciously beat Cassie in the hallway of a Los Angeles hotel, an incident that was captured by a security camera. Diddy allegedly paid $100,000 to bury the incriminating footage, which the prosecution is using to argue that Diddy used physical violence to coerce Cassie into participating in sex parties known as “freak-offs.”
If #MeToo has supposedly made it easier for women to report abuse, like Maher claims, then why is he slamming Cassie for not speaking up about abuse that occured before the movement took hold?
Then there’s Maher’s fundamentally flawed idea that we should “take every accusation seriously”—but only if women “tell the police right away.” This ignores the connection between intimate partner violence and sexual abuse. It ignores the fact that many of the women who do report sexual violence to the police are either not believed or treated more like suspects than victims.
And it also ignores the existence of men like Pete Hegseth, Andrew Cuomo, and Donald Trump, who retain enormous influence despite being credibly accused of sexual misconduct. The #MeToo backlash that paved the way for some of these men to stage comebacks was one that Maher helped stoke by likening the movement to McCarthyism.
Maher also argued that we need “to have an honest conversation about what people are willing to do for stardom. If you want a No. 1 record on the chart so bad you'll take a No. 1 on the face, some of that is on you.”
It was a stunningly crude (and cruel) reference to Cassie, who testified that Diddy made a male sex worker urinate in her mouth so forcefully she felt like she was choking.
But it also undercut Maher’s very argument.
By implying that Cassie stayed with Diddy because she wanted to be famous, Maher only emphasized the economic power differential between the couple—one of the many things that made it so toxic.
Cassie met Diddy in 2006, when she was a 19-year-old up and coming singer recording her debut album for his label, Bad Boy Records. Their romantic relationship reportedly began on her 21st birthday in 2007. At the time, he was a 37-year-old hip-hop superstar already worth hundreds of millions, and she had signed a deal to make a staggering 10 albums for Bad Boy.
As she testified in court, “I'm a young, new artist who did not really know the lay of the land.”
Rather than becoming a huge pop star, Cassie never released another album after her relationship with Diddy began.
Instead, “the freak-offs became my job,” she said in court, referring to the sex parties Diddy allegedly coerced her into. Cassie also said that Diddy threatened to release videos of these encounters, which often involved sex with strangers, if she refused to participate.
But sure, she was in it for the fame.
Perhaps most egregiously, Maher wrapped up the segment by invoking the legacy of Tina Turner. He praised the legendary singer for leaving her abusive husband Ike “in an era where there was no movement to help her… and she did it with 36 cents in her pocket and a Mobil card.”
All of this is true. Turner was as resilient as she was talented.
But Maher left out the part where Turner was in a romantic relationship with Ike for 16 years, despite horrific physical and emotional abuse that began even before they were married.
Like Cassie, Turner was still a teenager when she met the older man who would become her musical mentor and romantic partner. She stayed with Ike even though beat her with a shoe stretcher while she was pregnant, gave her third-degree burns by throwing hot coffee in her face, and tormented her so relentlessly she attempted suicide in 1968.
"I felt obligated to stay there and I was afraid," she once said of the relationship. “Maybe I was brainwashed.”
Does it matter that, as Tina endured this nightmarish abuse behind closed doors, she and Ike were also becoming one of the most celebrated duos in R&B music? Does the overlap between his violent behavior and their rise to the top of the charts mean Tina stayed with Ike “for stardom”?
Of course it doesn’t. Only an asshole would say that.
Right, Bill?
Meredith Blake is The Contrarian’s culture columnist.
Look, Mr. Stupid started as a standup comedian, and even that was a stretch for him. He's really just a blowhard who happened to ride the insult comic wave. He doesn't have insights, he has a chip on his shoulder.
When I compare him with the great George Carlin, who besides being very funny was also the classic societal gadfly, Maher looks like a piece of dogshit on the bottom of George's shoe. It makes you wonder what Bill was willing to do for stardom.
Maher has always been one of the smuggest assholes on TV. Never could stand the guy even if he occasionally said things I agreed with. This and the Trump sane-washing were all I needed to add him to my never watch again list. Not that I was watching him anymore anyway.