Amy Pascal, who stepped down as co-chairman following the hacking scandal, has opened up about her exit at the Women in the World conference in San Francisco.
Pascal, who had implied that it was a mutual parting of ways when she stepped down as Sony’s co-chairman in the official statements, said seeing her private emails in public was a “bad moment”, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
“All the women here are doing incredible things in this world — all I did was get fired,” she told journalist Tina Brown.
When asked how she felt when she first realised her emails would be made public, she said, “I ran this company, and I had to worry about everybody who was really scared... People were really scared... But nagging in the back of my mind, I kept calling and being like, ‘They don’t have our emails, tell me they don’t have our emails.’ But then they did. That was a bad moment. And you know what you write in emails,” Ms. Pascal, who will now produce at Sony, said.
When asked about being called a racist for her messages about Barack Obama, Pascal said: “It was horrible. That was horrible.” She and producer Scott Rudin had joked about Mr. Obama’s supposed taste in movies in their emails. He famously called Angelina Jolie “minimally talented spoiled brat”. Other embarrassing incidents included name calling Hollywood personalities.
“Everybody understood because we all live in this weird thing called Hollywood. If we all actually were nice, it wouldn’t work,” she said, adding Jolie “didn’t care”.
The studio head, however, is upset that the press chose to publish her private messages.
“People found reasons that going through my trash and printing it was an OK thing to do. They found a way to justify that. And they have to live with that.”
