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Earlier today we reported a story about Warner Brothers President of Production Jeff Robinov, who allegedly made an idiotic comment to producers in and around the WB family. In a nutshell, Robinov stated that the studio was no longer going to be interested in making movie where the lead character is a female.

The story was broken by the semi-dubious Nikke Finke over at Deadline Hollywood, who very quickly alerted the authority on anti-female defamation, Gloria Allred. Then this afternoon, the internet community went on a mission to find out the truth and then hang Mr. Robinov out to dry. John Campea at The Movie Blog wrote a post, as did Alex at First Showing and Peter at /Film. Michael at Movies Online also got in on the fight. Of course, we all attempted to contact folks at WB with no word, until now.

John Campea finally got in touch with someone over at Warner Brothers who was willing to make a statement. And as could be predicted, the statement was very protecting of the company’s production chief:

From The Movie Blog:

After waiting for 9 hours, calling 2 different numbers and 3 email addresses, Warner Bros. Finally got back to me. A very nice woman from Corporate Communications got a hold of me (After my last message said that CBS News wanted to interview me tonight about the situation…THEN SUDDENLY they get a hold of me) and made this statement. It’s only fair to WB to openly share here with you what they said:

WB Rep – “Mr. Robinov never made that statement, nor is it his policy.”

TMB – “So are you saying it is not now, nor will be Warner Bros. policy to stop producing films with female leads?”

WB Rep – “Correct. That is not our policy. A blogger (assumably Nikki Finke) made a statement without giving us the opportunity to first respond.”

TMB – “All right, that’s all I needed to know. Thank you for calling me.”

So there you have it. Mistake, exposure and then plenty of plausible deniability to go around. No matter what was said behind closed doors, the official public position of Warner Bros. is that they will not be using any gender profiling techniques when choosing who will be taking top billing on future projects. So that’s good news. At least, that’s what they’d have us believe.

Update: Robert from IESB weighs in on the issue here.