Chloe Fineman’s Camp Counselor Story Isn’t Cute
SNL’s Chloe Fineman is taking heat online over a confession she made at Vanity Fair. The comedian said she ‘pantsed’ a boy as a camp counselor, and she was subsequently fired as a result.
Vanity Fair tested how well the SNL cast members know each other. The members needed to guess the answers for questions they prepared for one another. First up was Chloe Fineman, who asked, “What job was I fired from and later rehired?”
Her castmates joked that it’s probably because of her “bad attitude.” They also speculated that some comments she made that got her fired. Either way, it’s all in good fun—people lose their jobs for different reasons, not all of them necessarily controversial. When Fineman said she was 16 when she lost her job, the cast assumed it was a server job at a restaurant gone wrong. They also assumed she was hired at American Apparel, then let go—like most high schoolers are.
She confessed, “I was fired as a camp counselor.” Mikey Day joked, “For hitting on a camper?” “No, I pantsed a boy, and he wasn’t wearing underpants, and then a giant school bus drove by,” Fineman replied.
Day clarified, “How old was the child?” Fineman replied that the child was only six when it happened. She tried to defend herself. “It was a different time,” she said, stating that the boy would hug her and then lift her shirt ‘all the time.’ Fineman said she had to get back at the child.
“We were on a hike… And then I yanked his pants down. He wasn’t wearing underwear, his little dingaling was hanging out… and then I was fired,” Fineman said. She also said that two other children saw the incident and mocked the six-year-old for not wearing underpants.
Variety edited out cast member reactions
The confession above was sourced from the unedited video initially released by Variety. Ashley Padilla even reacted in the clip, saying, “Oh honey, I think you’re on a list somewhere.” While the act could never be compared to the atrocities done by Epstein, pantsing a boy when she is more than twice his age is wildly inappropriate.
What’s even stranger is that Variety edited Padilla’s reaction out in the new video. Their attempt to hide it just invoked the Streisand effect—people gave more notice to the issue when Variety released a cleaner version.
James Austin Johnson was also freaked out by the confession. He said, “I’m done with the Berkeley mess. Every time you tell us a Berkeley childhood story, I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ You grew up on a Dr. Seuss planet.”
This reaction was not edited out. Despite taking Padilla’s remark out, the discomfort on the cast members’ faces was visible. Even Day was covering his face as Fineman recounted the story—as if it were a normal childhood story to share. Siblings get into fights as kids—and they usually become WWE matches. That’s normal—but pantsing a boy as a teenager, then embarrassing him to other kids his age? It’s outright wrong and unsettling.
Internet backlash
Needless to say, there was online outrage over Fineman’s statement. Even the Vanity Fair comment section below the video thought that her statement should be addressed.
One commenter wrote, “Aren’t y’all gonna adress the elephant in the room? A crime was confessed in this video.” Another social media user reacted, “My jaw when she said how old he was… what the fuck?”
Needless to say, it was an unsettling confession. Teenagers are prone to doing impulsive things, but it doesn’t excuse the fact that she exposed a child to his peers—it is, by legal definition, child sexual abuse. Even if the boy had been lifting her shirt as she suggested, there were other avenues to resolve the issue.
It all makes sense that she was fired, but perhaps the disturbing part is that she was eventually rehired.
(featured image: Vanity Fair)
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