It's been about six months since Louis C.K. apologized for the sexual misconduct allegations brought forth by five women in a New York Times exposé.
In a new cover story for GQ, Sarah Silverman opened up about her complicated friendship with the disgraced comedian.
During the interview, Silverman said she's talked to C.K. since news of the scandal broke. However, she didn't go into detail about the conversation.
"F--k you! ‘Let me tell GQ about my conversations with Louie,'" she said when asked about it by GQ's Drew Magary.
Perhaps this is because Silverman doesn't have a definitive answer for how she feels.
"Life is complicated. Love is even more complicated. But you can't not do it," she continued. "I don't have some definitive sound bite or nutshell of how I feel about it, even to myself. But I'm also okay with that."
However, she seemed to have compassion for C.K. for admitting his wrongdoing. At one point, she even referred to him as her "brother."
"I think that there are people who were caught and there were people who were not caught, but the important thing is that they are forever changed," she told the magazine when asked if she hoped C.K. would return to the spotlight. "And if that's the case, I don't see any reason why they can't continue being artists. Now, whether they're popular artists or not is up to the audience. I have compassion. There are people that just deny everything they're accused of and they continue to be the politicians or the filmmakers that they are. And there are people that come and say, I'm guilty of these things, and I'm wrong, and I want to be changed from this. And yet those are the ones that kind of are excommunicated forever. He's my brother, so it's hard. I may not have a very clear perspective on it, but I'm trying to."
This isn't the first time Silverman has opened up C.K. She spoke about him shortly after news of the allegations broke in an opening monologue for I Love You, America—saying she needed to address the "elephant masturbating in the room."
"One of my best friends of over 25 years, Louis C.K., masturbated in front of women," Silverman, whose sister Laura had also accused C.K. of masturbating in front of her, said. "He wielded his power with women in f--ked up ways, sometimes to the point where they left comedy entirely."
Silverman said she could "couch" these allegations with "heartwarming stories of our friendship and what a great dad he is" but that it would be "totally irrelevant."
"It's a real mindf--k, you know, because I love Louis, but Louis did these things. Both of those statements are true," she said. "So, I just keep asking myself, can you love someone who did bad things? Can you still love them? I can mull that over later, certainly, because the only people that matter right now are the victims. They are victims, and they're victims because of something he did."
The comedienne then said she was both "very angry for the women he wronged and the culture that enabled it and also sad because he's my friend."
During her interview with GQ, Silverman also talked about being a female comic in the modern entertainment industry.
"Women are so keenly aware of the male experience because our entire existence had to be kind of through that lens. Whereas men have never had to understand the female experience in order to exist in the world," she explained to the magazine. She then told a story of how she and Nick Kroll attended a benefit, where Natasha Leggero asked the women in the audience if they had ever seen a man masturbate in front of them in public. Silverman said every woman raised her hand.
"When I first started comedy, my male comic friends would say, ‘You have to focus on making the men laugh. The women only laugh if their date laughs," she added. "It's something I actually accepted as an 18-year-old comedian. It took a while for me to say, That's f--king insane. We're all complicit in this f--ked-up society; it's just that men actually, truly benefited from it and women didn't."
To read GQ's full interview with Silverman, visit GQ.com.