Sony Pictures Entertainment’s top executives have come under fire since their private emails were leaked by hackers. But Oprah Winfrey cautioned against rushing to judge studio chief Amy Pascal and her colleagues.
“I would hope that we would not stand in such harsh judgement of a moment in time where somebody was hacked and their private conversations were put before the world,” she told CNN’s Don Lemon when asked about the Sony hacks.
The leaked correspondences included an exchange between Pascal and producer Scott Rudin, in which the two of them mocked President Barack Obama’s film preference. Winfrey was questioned about the hack while promoting “Selma,” the acclaimed Martin Luther King, Jr. biopic she recently produced, but she didn’t publicly take them to task.
Instead she pointed out that the Sony executives conversations were meant to be private.
“I try and write everything as though it’s gonna show up in the New York Times,” she continued. “But there are things you say in your private conversations with your friends and your colleagues that you would not want to be broadcast on CNN.”
“Selma’s” director Ava Duvernay was less forgiving of the hacking victims. She recently called the email exchange “sickening and sad.”