Joss Whedon responds to Justice League accusations for the first time
After being called out by a number of former collaborators for misbehavior on various sets, filmmaker Joss Whedon has resurfaced in a new interview to respond and clarify to accusations. Specifically, he denies claims actors Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot, made across several social posts in 2020 and 2021, about Whedon’s misogynistic and racist actions on the set of Justice League. Anonymous associates charge that the movie’s former director Zack Snyder could be at the heart of Whedon’s troubles, and that fans of Snyder’s became incensed by tribalism.
“The beginning of the internet raised me up, and the modern internet pulled me down,” Whedon says in the story. “The perfect symmetry is not lost on me.”
The cover story in the latest issue of New York Magazine describes Whedon’s journey from growing up in a “palazzo-style apartment” on the Upper West Side, to British boarding schools and Wesleyan, to writing the original Buffy script, to taking Web 1.0 by storm as Buffy’s cast and crew embedded within message boards. But the substance of the article deals with the wide variety of abuse allegations now thrown at Whedon.
These allegations span just about every TV show in which Whedon has been involved —Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and Agents of SHIELD, which Joss co-created with his half-brother and half-brother’s wife. In some cases, Whedon reportedly abused power dynamics to start dating women on these shows. In others, he humiliated female writers, and got physical by grabbing a number of women by the arms. An unnamed writer on Firefly recalls in the New York story a time when Whedon called a staff meeting for an impromptu lecture to mock a female staffer’s script. “I’ve had my share of shitty showrunners, but the intent
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