A friend has done something pretty bad and I want to defend him. How can I do this without making the situation worse?

Daria, by email

A break from normal, style-based proceedings this week, because Daria raises an interesting and extremely relevant issue. On Monday, I went to see Jon Stewart and Dave Chappelle perform in London and someone in the audience asked Stewart about his friend, Louis CK. As you may have heard, Louis CK has been in a spot of bother of late. He admitted last year, after years of denials, the claims of sexual midconduct made by five women in the New York Times.

Before Louis CK confessed the truth, Stewart had defended him. In a filmed Q&A with Stewart from 2016, which is painful viewing for any Stewart fan, a member of the public asked him whether he had considered putting the rumours – which were circulating on Twitter – to Louis CK when he had him on as a guest on The Daily Show. Stewart’s response was – oh Jon! – to laugh: “Wait, I’m a little lost. So, the internet said Louis harassed women?” he asked. “I didn’t see the ‘tweets’,” he continued, with audible air quotes, adding: “All I can tell you is I’ve worked with Louis for 30 years and he’s a wonderful man and person.”

*Insert classic Dinah Washington music* Lord, what a difference a day makes!

The following year, Stewart admitted that his response reflected “the blindness a man has, like: ‘Oh, he’s a good guy, what are you talking about?’ That’s an error on our part.” At the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, Stewart went further, saying: “You can like someone as a friend and not like everything they do.”

By chance, the night Stewart was talking about Louis CK in London, another of the comedian’s friends was doing something similar in the US. Sarah Silverman went on Howard Stern’s show and said she thought Louis CK probably did not understand the implications of what he was doing when he masturbated in front of women, because he did it in front of her and she did not mind. “When ... he asked if he could masturbate in front of me, sometimes I’d go: ‘Fuck yeah, I want to see that!’ … Sometimes I would say: ‘Fucking no, gross,’ and we’d get pizza,” Silverman said.

Silverman stressed that her situation was not analogous with the women who accused Louis CK of harassment (“the dynamic was different ... he could offer me nothing”). When one of those women, Rebecca Corry, tweeted her objection to Silverman’s take, pointing out that Louis CK had “nothing to offer me” either, Silverman was abject in her apologies: “Rebecca I’m sorry. Ugh this is why I don’t like weighing in … he fucked with you and it’s not ok. I’m sorry, friend. You are so talented and so kind.”

Now, I like Silverman and I understand her resistance to “weighing in”. But if she knew that Louis CK had a predilection for masturbating publicly and did not say anything when Corry made her original accusation and was abused online and sneered at by people who knew her and Louis CK, then she was always involved. Because she was complicit.

Let’s recap here, I say, putting on my Miss Marple hat. Louis CK had masturbated in front of Silverman multiple times. He had also done this in front of her sister, as Laura Silverman confirmed last year on Twitter. So, when Louis CK was insisting he definitely did not harass anyone, was there no part of Silverman that suspected he might be lying? How would that thought process even go? “Yeah, sure, Louis asks if he can beat it in front of me all the time and he’s done it in front of my sister loads. But these other women claiming he does it in front of them? That doesn’t sound like my friend at all. Carry on, everyone!”

What Louis CK actually did was gross, but it was his denials that always seemed to me his greater crime. He left his accusers – who went on the record – to twist in the wind, to be abused by people he knew and people he did not, while he publicly denied their accusations.

#MeToo has focused primarily on the acts: the harassment, the assaults, the rapes. But it is time to look more at the cover-ups and the enablement, because all the high-profile men who have been exposed as predators had enablers around them. Harvey Weinstein’s former colleagues are starting to talk about what they knew; Louis CK’s friends, male and female, should acknowledge what they knew, and ignored, too. Quite why Louis CK has this compulsion to masturbate in front of people is something I will leave for his therapist to decode. But a lot of people need to ask themselves why they think some men are so delicate that they need to be protected, even by means of lying and complicity. Because being a loyal friend is one thing; throwing women under the bus is quite another.