Judd Apatow made an unfortunate joke about President Trump over the weekend.
While doing a standup set in Los Angeles on Saturday, Apatow compared Trump's presidency to the feeling of being raped, according to The Daily Beast.
The director and comedian reportedly said that after Trump was elected, he felt like "a person about to get raped, but I didn’t know how bad it would be." And now that it's been a month since Trump's inauguration, Apatow said, "I feel like I’ve just been raped, and I just don't know if I'm going to get murdered."
Apatow is an outspoken critic of Trump's administration. His Twitter account frequently features tweets and retweets about the president's policies. That's all well and good — we're all for celebrities using their platform to bring awareness to issues they're passionate about. But rape comparisons are never appropriate.
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There are so many ways to criticize President Trump that don't involve referencing traumatic sexual assaults. Using rape as a comedic trope is tired, in addition to being offensive. Surely, as a writer and producer, Apatow could have found a way to criticize Trump without insulting rape survivors.
.@JuddApatow, if you KNEW what rape "felt like," you would withdraw from your friends & society. You would be a ghost. From a rape survivor.
— Sheri Allen Chaves (@SherChavez) February 20, 2017
Making reference to rape in relation to a democratic presidential election outcome is pathetic. @JuddApatow https://t.co/SJO2cO66tp
— Dana Rochelle (@DanaRochelle35) February 21, 2017
@nypost @PageSix @JuddApatow please don't use rape in your sentence. You don't know the definition that it means to be truly raped, hurtful
— Mary Mac ???? (@mary_mcintyre09) February 21, 2017
Apatow is far from the only celebrity to inappropriately use rape as a comparison point for bad situations. In 2010, Kristen Stewart apologized for comparing assault by the paparazzi to being raped.
Refinery29 reached out to a rep for Apatow, who said he had "nothing additional to add" about the director's comments.