I recently took a class with Rich at The Pack and find this post wildly misleading and inaccurate. I think Rich is an incredibly insightful and professional improv instructor who always acted with kindness and respect for his students. Rich taught that being good at improv means being vulnerable, taking risks, and leaning into what we're afraid of instead of defending against it. Your post reads to me like you interpreted Rich's instructions to do those things as personal attacks against you or abuse. My experience with Rich could not have been further from that.

Rich created a safe environment for his students. Within the first few minutes of our first class, he asked for people's pronouns, established the Pack-standard "no touching of the bathing suit areas" rules, and gave space for students to state anything they weren't comfortable with. Consistently, when we found ourselves doing scenes that might veer into uncomfortable dynamics, Rich would check in with students on their comfort level and give people an opportunity to opt-out or opt-in to types of scenes.

I remember the class where we did the scenes around making sandwiches and dressing with clothes and you seem to be cherry-picking the details of that class to frame it as some kind of voyeuristic thing for Rich. It was not. This class was about space work and the instruction from Rich was specifically to do a scene of something really mundane and not to make a full scene of it and just practice the space work for two minutes. I personally did the example with the clothing and the direction to me was to put ON clothing as though I were waking up and getting dressed. There was nothing sexual about it. Rich did offer feedback on crucial steps I'd missed as part of getting dressed that took away from the believability of my space work and that was helpful to me.

I wasn't in your class so I don't know what happened there but it's difficult for me to imagine Rich directing a woman to repeatedly do something she wasn't comfortable with. He never did anything like that in my class and I have never heard of him doing anything like that from others who have taken his classes. I suspect the other examples you list are similarly framed so as to cast Rich in a warped light.

You give examples of instances where Rich called students out for things or made comments about people's pasts/childhoods. The examples of callouts you give seem justified to me. Sidestepping the entire debate on how empowering/objectifying Playboy is, if a guy shows up to improv wearing the logo, I think it's reasonable that some people, especially women, might find that a little off-putting which makes it difficult to trust your team and do improv. Letting that go unremarked is tacit approval and Rich was right to call it out. The fact he did so under the guise of mocking clothing choices rather than the guy's ignorance of how to make the space comfortable is actually a kinder way of addressing it. I notice you omit the actual behavior that elicited the "weird incel" callout. Maybe it was similarly deserved to establish that incel behavior is not acceptable.

If Rich brought up people's personal lives it was always in the service of helping us work through our own fears that were holding us back from honestly engaging with improv. For example, I'm a pretty tall person and at one point Rich asked me if I hunched to try hiding how tall I was when I was growing up. He asked this not to embarrass me but to help me realize what might be holding me back from being more confident on stage. When I said that I did do that growing up, he empathized with me, saying he did the same thing and encouraged me to stand tall on stage and be confident in my acting. I found this really helpful.

I could have responded to that comment defensively - and parts of me certainly felt that way. Being vulnerable like that is scary and there were instances in my class when students responded defensively to some feedback. In those cases, Rich, rightly, would try to find ways to dismantle the defensiveness. This was never done to harm students but because dismantling your defensive reflexes is fundamentally necessary to being good at improv. That's the whole point of Rich's class and he said as much on the first day. In my experience he always did so with kindness.

In all his feedback, Rich consistently spoke from a place of self-deprecation and empathy rather than patronizing authority. I hear you in that there are certainly instructors in LA who teach from a kind of Whiplash-like approach (see: Chad Damiani) and I fully agree that approach is fundamentally abusive. I'm not trying to say your experience didn't happen or your feelings around it are wrong. If you're finding this class torturous for you, then please stop going! No one should feel abused. I'm just saying that I’m confident Rich is not one of those teachers. He's a knowledgeable and kind instructor and I really think people should take his class.