Longtime E! News host Catt Sadler walked away from her coveted gig at the network on Tuesday, citing a pay gap between herself and her male co-host as the impetus.
In a post on her personal blog, Sadler said she recently discovered her co-host Jason Kennedy “was making close to double [her] salary for the past several years.”
“My team and I asked for what I know I deserve and were denied repeatedly,” she wrote.
In a statement, the network wished Sadler well but maintained it “compensates employees fairly and appropriately based on their roles, regardless of gender.”
Without access to concrete numbers, it’s difficult to judge the situation conclusively. That said, the story still instructively encapsulates — and will worsen — one of Hollywood’s most pressing problems in the post-Harvey Weinstein era.
A search of E!’s website for “pay gap” or “wage gap” yields plenty of headlines, from “How Today’s Hollywood Gender Wage Gap Fight Got Its Start” to “Will Jennifer Lawrence Help Balance the Scale? J.Law & 12 More Mega-Stars Taking on the Gender Wage Gap in Hollywood.” Beyond the headlines, the network’s coverage of the pay gap has been predictably favorable toward those who use facile number-gathering and overly simplistic arguments to assert its importance.
But E! didn’t just provide a platform for others’ moralizing on the wage gap — it went ahead and moralized on its own. Take this video from last August covering the gap between top-paid male and female actress, punctuated with a sassy, “Let that soak in, people.” The video’s complaint about Emma Stone’s salary being “just $26 million” is another matter entirely, but also underscores why the plight of wealthy celebrities is not one that resonates with people of less privilege.
Perhaps now more than ever, Hollywood insists upon its own moral authority, lecturing incessantly on politics and culture from award show podiums and social media. But the industry’s credibility fell right along with Harvey Weinstein, who appears to have benefited from a vast network of enablers, along with other fallen titans of Hollywood.
Until people see Hollywood broadly and seriously accepting responsibility for its moral failures, there will be no great appetite for its sanctimony. Perhaps not even then.
As the industry approaches its award show season, the veritable season of sanctimony, that diminished appetite comes at a bad time. The impact of stories like Sadler’s (whether or not it’s wholly accurate), confirms a suspicion most of us held about Hollywood for years: the very people eager to cast judgement on others never had any moral authority on those matters to begin with.
