In a video shared to his YouTube channel, comedian Chris D’Elia—who was accused last year of soliciting underage girls on social media and exposing himself to women—addressed the allegations at length while continuing to argue that all of his relationships have been “consensual and legal.”
At the beginning of the nearly 10-minute video, D’Elia said he wanted his initial statement to “speak for itself,” adding that he also wanted at the time to immediately dive back into work and remain in the public eye.
“But I thought that might not be the best thing,” he said. “What might be the best thing would be if I just take this time to be with my family, try and take a long hard look at myself, and just do that. It was a lot. It was hard. I, first of all, I do know how it looks with all the stuff that’s been said, the emails that have been put out there, and what the media has been trying to say. And I know it looks bad. It doesn’t show the full scope of what happened. I stand by the fact that all my relationships have been consensual and legal. That’s just it. That’s the truth.”
From there, D’Elia said he’s since come to believe that sex controlled his life, and that last year’s fallout (which included having a Netflix project scrapped) “needed to happen” because he wouldn’t have stopped otherwise.
“I would use the familiarity that I had with these women to have sex … and I was talking to one of my friends about this and about the power dynamic and about the familiarity and not having to use that and I said ‘Why is that behavior not okay? Why is it not okay to sleep with somebody if it’s consensual and they wanna sleep with you?’” he said later in the video. “And he said, ‘It’s okay, well, it is okay until it’s not.’ And that was when, you know, a lot of it clicked for me. It was something that just became life-controlling.”
In June of last year, D’Elia was dropped by CAA and other talent reps amid the sexual misconduct allegations.
