Vanity Fair has been doing some editing, but it may be too little, too late.
During a Saturday Night Live cast interview, Chloe Fineman shared a startling anecdote.
She said that she was once fired from a job after pantsing a 6-year-old boy.
The backlash was swift. And selective editing doesn’t seem to be making that go away.
What job did she get fired from, and why?
In a recent video, SNL cast members played a game in which they guessed how well they know each other.
This kind of video usually crops up among besties or romantic partners, but also works for castmates. (Especially funny castmates!)
In addition to Fineman, the video featured Mikey Day, Sarah Sherman, Ashley Padilla, Jane Wickline, and James Austin Johnson.
The trouble began when Fineman asked her castmates if any of them could guess what job fired and then rehired her when she was only 16 — and why.
There were various guesses, most suspecting a restaurant or retail gig. In reality, she was a camp counselor.
The now 37-year-old revealed that she was “fired as a camp counselor.” This would have been about 21 years ago.
“I pantsed a boy,” she explained. It was, it turned out, retaliation.
“He would lift my shirt all the time,” Fineman revealed. “It was a different time.”
She detailed: “He would be like, ‘Hey, could I have a hug?’ And then I’d go to hug him and he’d lift my shirt, like a dick.”
Fineman added: “And then I was like, ‘I’m going to get back at you.’”
‘And then I yanked his pants down’
“And so we were on a hike,” Fineman narrated.
“And,” she continued, “I was like, ‘Hey, Ollie, go look over there. It’s a hawk.’”
Presumably — hopefully — the now-adult-but-then-6-year-old is not actually named Oliver.
“He looked,” Fineman described, “and then I yanked his pants down.”
She added: “And then I was fired.”
Because the internet is forever (only in the bad ways — save the things that you love and put effort into so that they will live offline no matter what), multiple folks have documented how the video has changed since it was uploaded on March 31.
Vanity Fair appears to have changed aspects of the video, removing any mention of the boy being 6 years old.
Additionally, Fineman originally told her co-stars that the child’s “ding-a-ling was out” due to the pantsing.
“He wasn’t wearing underpants, and then a giant school bus drove by,” she said in the original video.
There is a line where an anecdote about youthful misbehavior starts to sound like a description of a crime. This may be a factor in Vanity Fair‘s edits.
Well, that’s uncomfortable!
Ashley Padilla quipped: “Oh, honey, I think you’re on a list somewhere.”
The backlash is understandable — and palpable, if you’re brave enough to check YouTube comments. But some of it is out of proportion.
We are talking about a 16-year-old exercising extremely poor judgment over two decades ago. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did.
Also, as is so often the case when comedians (or Robert Pattinson) share personal anecdotes, aspects may have been exaggerated or entirely fabricated.
One of the key ingredients of being funny is surprising and shocking people, sometimes at the expense of things like good taste or honesty. We can’t rule out that Fineman exaggerated for laughs — only to regret it.