Netflix chief communications officer Jonathan Friedland is leaving the company due to a controversy over insensitive remarks.
Friedland announced the departure on Twitter Friday, saying that he felt awful about “the distress this lapse caused.”
Friedland had joined Netflix as VP of communications in 2011, and became the company’s chief communications officer a year later. His ascend at the company coincided with Netflix’s first major PR debacle, the proposed split of its DVD business into a separate company called Quickster — which Netflix quickly walked back on.
Before joining Netflix, Friedland had served in communications roles for Disney. He was a journalist by trade before crossing over to work in communications, and worked for a decade for the Wall Street Journal, where he served as the paper’s Los Angeles bureau chief.
A Netflix spokesperson said that the company didn’t have anything further to add.
No replacement for Friedland is set yet.
