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At one point, a pro-Chappelle protester shoving his way towards a microphone the activists supporting the Netflix employees had set up was pushed back and there was a brief tussle before several pro-trans activists stood in the way. One of the activists threatened, "I will beat you down." The protester backed off but shortly afterwards got into another confrontation with a pro-trans rally attendee, almost knocking them over before exiting the area.
Counter-protesters showed up at the walkout.Photo by Samson Amore
Chappelle's special debuted on Netflix Oct. 5, and the internal battle at Netflix has been raging since. Several Netflix employees declined to go on the record out of fear of retaliation.
B. Pagels-Minor, a former Netflix programmer and Black, trans and nonbinary person who is 33-weeks pregnant, was one of the original organizers of the walkout alongside transgender activist Ashlee Marie Preston.
Pagels-Minor said they were fired Oct. 14 after being accused of leaking private financial information to Bloomberg. Pagels-Minor denies involvement in the leak and told dot.LA they were fired roughly two and a half hours after the walkout was announced.
"How can you have transphobic content and not have counter-content that specifically shows trans lives," Pagels-Minor questioned. "Like most people, I didn't think it was very funny," Pagels-Minor added. "I'm a black trans person, and Dave Chappelle seems to think those people don't exist."
The walkout organizers' demands include creating a new fund for investing in transgender talent, revising internal policies to determine what content on the streamer is "harmful," and hire more transgender executives.
"Transparent" showrunner Joey Soloway addresses the rally.Photo by Samson Amore
Netflix has social media accounts to promote its LGBTQ+ storytelling that posts under the handle Most. Ahead of the protest, it tweeted: "brb walking out."
"Trans people are in a Holocaust. But trans people are also out here dreaming of safety, dreaming of time, which is a privilege… time to imagine, create, to write their stories," said Joey Soloway, a showrunner for Amazon's Emmy Award-winning series "Transparent" who attended the rally. "The line is simple: Stop making things worse."
In his new show, Chappelle called himself "Team TERF" (Trans-exclusionary radical feminism), a term that's used for people who, among other things, don't believe transgender women are women. "TERF" is a term that's also been used to describe "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling, whose own anti-transgender missives have caused a stir in recent years. Chappelle was keen to align himself with Rowling in "The Closer" and spent a sizeable portion of his special arguing against transgender people's right to exist, claiming sex and gender are "a fact."
The backlash on social media to Chappelle's comments was swift. Netflix's "Dear White People" showrunner (and transgender woman) Jaclyn Moore tweeted the day after "The Closer" aired that she was leaving the company. "I will not work with them as long as they continue to put out and profit from blatantly and dangerously transphobic content," Moore said. Several other Netflix employees have vocally opposed the special on social media.
LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD criticized the special after it aired and said, "Dave Chappelle's brand has become synonymous with ridiculing trans people and other marginalized communities."
Netflix has addressed the issue – CEO Ted Sarandos made it clear Netflix wouldn't drop "The Closer" from its platform since Chappelle is one of their top performers – and Variety reported last week Sarandos also said the streamer has "a strong belief that content on screen doesn't directly translate to real-world harm."
Chappelle's jokes have targeted transgender people before. Daphne Dornan, a transgender actress living in San Francisco, was the butt of Chappelle's jokes in his past special "Sticks and Stones" and again in "The Closer." Dornan, who was a comedian, died by suicide in October 2019 and left behind a young daughter.
Burbank City Councilmember Konstantin Anthony warned that Netflix's decisions could harm its larger ambitions and echoed support for a boycott.
Netflix recently inked a lease for a 170,000 square foot animation studio in Burbank. Anthony said he'd advocate for the company's transgender employees in the area.
"We don't need millions and millions of dollars backing those words," Anthony said at the rally.
Follow dot.LA reporter Samson Amore's coverage on Twitter @Samsonamore.
This story has been updated to clarify how the tussle unfolded.
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Like other alcohol purveyors, Winc has seen a "significant increase" in direct online sales since March 2020, according to an SEC filing published last week. As the pandemic shuttered bars and restaurants, more people splurged on bottles of wine and spirits to drink at home. Excessive drinking spiked during lockdowns, too.
Winc's executives say the online frenzy reflects a "permanent shift in consumer behavior," away from buying bottles at brick-and-mortar stores.
Winc produces its own wines in collaboration with vineyards and other wine brands, such as Yes Way Rosé. And in a sense, Winc can be thought of as a wine-brand factory. It aims to pop out as many as ten new brands per year based on the data it gathers on customers and their ordering habits. To that point, Winc says its mission is to "become the leading brand builder within the alcoholic beverages industry."
The majority of Winc's revenue today comes from its subscribers, who pay monthly for bottles tailored to their palates, but the company also sells its brands through wholesalers. In all, Winc says it sold more than 430,000 cases of wine in 2020, up 80% from the prior year.
While the pandemic has been a boon for Winc's sales, another global emergency poses a threat to its bottom line.
Photo by Klara Kulikova on Unsplash
Climate Change and Wildfires
Winc warned in its filing that destructive events linked to climate change, such as wildfires and extreme weather, "could negatively impact the quality and quantity of grapes available to us and our producers for wine production."
The wine industry at large has already suffered from fires and extreme weather. For example, smoke taint has ruined harvests and rising temperatures have disrupted growing regions.
"We are already beginning to see the effects of climate change on wine in many regions of the world," Columbia University climate scientist Dr. Benjamin Cook told dot.LA. For example, droughts and wildfires in the West are "linked in part to climate change, and these events are having impacts on grape growers and harvests in California and elsewhere in the region," said Cook in a comment on the wider industry.
But Winc sells a ton of California wine. All five of the company's "core brands" — which each bring in between "$1 million and $10 million in annualized revenues" — feature California grapes, though not always exclusively. Winc's "Wonderful Wine Company," for example, sources grapes from California as well as Spain, Argentina, and Chile. For its part, Winc says it is "not reliant on any one vineyard or geographic" because it outsources production.
As the impacts of climate change nevertheless grow clearer, climate-related disclosures such as Winc's have also "grown dramatically" in the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission said earlier this year.
And wine is one among countless industries affected by the climate crisis.
Google, for example, has cautioned that hotter temperatures could drive up the cost of cooling its data centers, while drugmaker Eli Lilly has said the warming Earth may boost demand for some of its medicines.
Winc's Footprint
While noting the threat of climate change, Winc also laid out in some detail how it limits its carbon footprint. The company said in the filing that it uses "flexi-tanks" to pack more wine into shipping containers and it plans to embrace corks that are "100% plant based, 100% sustainable and made from discarded materials."
Winc also says it strives to produce 75% of its wines "from sustainably farmed grapes by the end of 2021." The wineseller advertises many of its bottles under a sustainability banner, but it offers little information on how it determines whether a bottle of wine was produced sustainably.
Winc did not respond to requests for comment on its coming IPO.