“Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner said he doesn’t remember telling one of his staff writers — with whom he shares an Emmy — that she owed it to him to let him see her naked.
Last November, Kater Gordon said that’s what he told her one night when they were working late on the show.
“I really don’t remember saying that,” he told Vanity Fair in a recent profile. “I’m not hedging to say it’s not impossible that I said that, but I really don’t remember saying it.”
The Vanity Fair writer followed-up a few days later, asking Weiner to clarify what he meant. After saying he didn’t remember using the word “hedging” in his initial answer — which the writer said she double-checked — Weiner said, “I can’t see a scenario where I would say that,” referring to Gordon’s accusation.
“What I can see is, it was 10 years ago and I don’t remember saying it. When someone says you said something, like the experience we just had right now — I don’t remember saying that.” He added: “I never felt that way and I never acted that way towards Kater.”
Vanity Fair followed-up with Gordon, too, who said, “That was not an isolated incident, but it was the most affecting.”
“Bullies with unchecked power create environments of fear,” said Gordon, who has since created the nonprofit Modern Alliance, which fights sexual harassment.
After Gordon came forward, consulting producer Marti Noxon voiced her support.
“I believe her. I was at work with her the day after what she described transpired. I remember clearly how shaken and subdued Kater was — and continued to be from that day on,” Noxon said in several tweets.
Weiner said in the Vanity Fair piece that Noxon’s tweets made him rethink some of his actions as a boss. “What you don’t realize . . . I think this goes with all of it,” he said. “It goes with sexist language, it goes with jokes, it goes with everything about what I believe I have examined in my own behavior — is just that you don’t know that you have any power.”
At the time of Gordon’s accusation, Weiner denied it through a spokesperson, who suggested the comment may have come as he was workshopping dialogue.
“It felt like a lose-lose situation,” Gordon said in her interview with The Information. “I thought. ‘I can’t do anything to jeopardize.’ I need this credit. I saw no value to speaking out. So I did what I thought women were supposed to do.”