Trans Netflix employee who publicly criticized Dave Chapelle resigns

A vocal transgender advocate at Netflix who helped rally LGBT activists against Dave Chappelle’s stand-up special, “The Closer,” resigned from the streaming company on Monday.

Terra Field, a now-former Netflix software engineer, follows the departure of her colleague, B. Pagels-Minor, who was fired last month for leaking internal financial information, including production costs for “The Closer,” which ended up in a Bloomberg story.

Field had previously been suspended, then quickly reinstated, for posting a viral tweet about Chapelle’s special and attending a virtual executive-level meeting she had not been invited to.

Pagels-Minor, who uses they as a pronoun, was a leader of the trans employee rights group that staged a walkout on Oct. 20. The extent and size of the walkout was not clear, as much of the company was working remotely.

The two ex-employees also dropped a formal complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board against Netflix. They had alleged the company had retaliated against workers to prevent them from speaking up about working conditions and the impact of Netflix’s “product choices on the LGTBQ+ community.”

Lawyers for both sides have declined to say whether there had been a settlement.

Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos initially defended the “The Closer” in internal emails following its release saying he did not believe it “crossed the line” or directly translated “to real world harm” for the LGBT community. After the messages were leaked, Sarandos backtracked. “I should have led with a lot more humanity,” he admitted, but kept it on the platform.

Chapelle has responded as well to criticisms he had not been willing to engage with the LGBT community.

"It's been said in the press that I was invited to speak with transgender employees at Netflix and I refused," Chappelle said during a recent Nashville show. "That is not true. If they had invited me I would've accepted, although I am confused about what we're speaking about.”

He blamed corporate media for creating a false narrative that pitted him against the entire LGBT community and praised CEO Sarandos as “the only one that didn’t cancel me yet.”