Joss Whedon's wretched past comes back to haunt him

It looks like the film/TV producer and occasional comics writer who created the Buffy franchise isn't really the "feminist" he wants everyone to think. His former wife Kai Cole called him out on his apparently adulterous past in an article on The Wrap (via One Angry Gamer), where she tells how he betrayed her during their years of marriage:

There were times in our relationship that I was uncomfortable with the attention Joss paid other women. He always had a lot of female friends, but he told me it was because his mother raised him as a feminist, so he just liked women better. He said he admired and respected females, he didn’t lust after them. I believed him and trusted him. On the set of “Buffy,” Joss decided to have his first secret affair. [...]

Joss admitted that for the next decade and a half, he hid multiple affairs and a number of inappropriate emotional ones that he had with his actresses, co-workers, fans and friends, while he stayed married to me. [...]

And we can only wonder who the lady on the Buffy set was whom he committed infidelity with. He may not be as bad as some of the other anti-Gamergate screwballs out there who were accused of much worse, and clearly attacked the GG campaign just to feel good about themselves. But he's still evidently a huge disappointment, and after this, Buffy fans may not be able to look at the 1997-2003 series the same way again. Come to think of it, nor will comics readers who read the Fray miniseries he wrote, and the Astonishing X-Men spinoff title from the mid-2000s. One of the commenters to Cole's article said that now, some of his work may look creepy cast in the new light.

On which note, those of us who've kept track of his work in comicdom know he wrote the introduction to Brad Meltzer's repellent Identity Crisis when it came out in trade collection format. And then there was that time he oversaw a story in the Buffy comics from Dark Horse where his vampire hunting creation went coma-drunk at a party and somebody sex-ploited her, impregnating her for the sake of a tale where she goes for an abortion. Those should serve as additional clues just how understanding he really could be of women's issues.

Soon after the headlines this scandal made, a major fansite dedicated to Whedon's work closed down (Hat tip: Breitbart). And, we're reminded of the time Whedon was originally hired to write up a screenplay for Wonder Woman as a movie:

In June, a 2006 script that Whedon wrote for a Wonder Woman movie that never went into production leaked online, with many DC fans calling the director's take on the character sexist due to the character description, dialogue and the majority of the important action falling on male lead Steve Trevor (played by Chris Pine in the Patty Jenkins-directed feature).

Well there's another clue where he could really stand on all these topics. There's every chance now that his works aren't going to age well, and he's bound to lose some of the fans he's enjoyed over the years. He recently got the assignment to direct the planned Justice League movie, and it'll remain to be seen how well that'll fare now that the cat's out of Whedon's bag. Even the brief TV show he created called Firefly is bound to lose some of its retrospective value.