Fired Netflix Employee Doesn’t Want Dave Chappelle’s The Closer Pulled

Dave Chappelle’s The Closer special on Netflix brought a lot of controversy, but the employee who was fired for leaking information about the special doesn’t want it special pulled.

Former Netflix program manager B. Pagels-Minor spoke to Newsweek about the experience. Pagels-Minor was let go earlier this month for “sharing confidential, commercially sensitive information outside the company.” That information was later published in a Bloomberg article.

Pagels-Minor spoke to the Let’s Go There with Shira & Ryan podcast where they expressed their feelings on the matter. Any call to take the special down was not coming from the internal team, instead there were “external individuals” who were calling for the special to get nixed.

“So that’s one of the things that I think has been most misconstrued. People who talked about wanting the concept to come down were pretty much all external individuals. They were not internal Netflix employees.”

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“One of the things that happens when you are a Netflix employee, is that you do understand the cultural value of Netflix…Taking down the special was not a demand from the internal team, because that would’ve went against the cultural values of Netflix.”

“The ask was always quite simply, how the heck we lower the amount of harm that this type of content creates—there’s a few different ways to do that. One aspect is to make sure that you’re actually creating a trans-affirming content.”

“The second thing, is also potentially ensuring the people understood the content in this special could be considered transphobic, or homophobic so people are aware. These are all reasonable demands.”

Netflix walkouts and protests over Dave Chappelle filed social media. The media didn’t cover counter protests much, but they were also a reality.

Dave Chappelle said that he is willing to meet with LGBTQ groups, but he has conditions. There might be a considerable amount of pushback at this point due to The Closer special, but not everyone wants the special to get pulled.

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