‘Mad Men’ Creator Matthew Weiner: I Had to Rethink My Conduct After #MeToo Allegations

Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner said he has had to re-evaluate his conduct and his relationships with his coworkers after sexual-harassment allegations emerged last November. In a new profile published in Vanity Fair ahead his new show, The Romanoffs, Weiner spoke about the allegation that first brought him into the #MeToo spotlight: Mad Men writer Kater Gordon’s claim that he once told her she owed it to him to see her naked. Weiner denied any memory of the incident. “I can’t see a scenario where I would say that,” he said. “What I can see is, it was 10 years ago and I don’t remember saying it.” He noted, however, that he was also struck by a second series of allegations tweeted by a consulting producer on the show: that Weiner was, in the words of a colleague, an “‘emotional terrorist’ who will badger, seduce and even tantrum in an attempt to get his needs met.” Those tweets, he said, led him to rethink his behavior: “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.” Later in the interview, he expressed regret for that conduct. “I wish that I had been more sensitive and less defensive, and more able to put myself in the place of the people that worked with me sometimes,” Weiner said. “If I have wronged somebody, yeah, I would like to apologize. In a general sense. I am that kind of person. It makes me sad to cause other people unhappiness or if they even perceive it that way.”