Marc Maron was trying to get to the bottom of these Louis C.K. sexual harassment stories before the explosive New York Times piece detailing five women’s disturbing experiences with the comedian — who masturbated in front of them — was published last week.

However, when he addressed the rumors with C.K. himself, Maron said the comedian straight up lied to him.

During the Monday episode of his podcast, “WTF, Maron,” the host talked about his conversation with C.K. regarding the blind items published about his sexual misconduct.

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“Sadly, I knew what most people knew: There was a story out there, I guess going back several years, there were unnamed people in the story, it took place in a hotel room in Aspen,” Maron said on the podcast. “It was always out there, but then it would pick up momentum at different times. And I would ask him about it. I would say, ‘This story about you forcing these women to watch you jerk off, what is that, is that true?'”

“He goes, ‘No, it’s not true. It’s not real. It’s a rumor,” Maron said of C.K.’s response. “And I would say, ‘Well, are you going to address it somehow? Handle it? Get out from under it whenever it shows up?’ ‘No I can’t, I can’t do that. I can’t give it life, give it air.’ That was the conversation.”

Maron said that he wants to believe victims, “but in this particular instance, there was no one named in that [Louis C.K. blind item], there was no place for women to go tell this story, there were no women attached to it. I didn’t know their names until Friday.”

“So I believed my friend,” Maron said “It’s just that the environment enabled the dismissiveness of it.”

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The host said work and social environments make it difficult for people to come forward with accusations and be believed. “It is pushed aside, it is dismissed, it is framed as an annoyance or an embarrassment, it is used against people, it is used as a threat, that is the structure that exists in life,” Maron said.

Maron says the power dynamic “is real and it exists, because things have been the way they are for a long time.”

The comedian also told a story about a time a professor in college kissed him in college unexpectedly and how it made him very uncomfortable.

“It’s scarring, even if it’s mundane,” he said. “What I went through was mundane — there were no c–ks involved — but it’s something women go through all the time. It was a disrespect of personal boundaries.”