A lot has been said about Jacob Geller, and the nature and mystery of restorative justice, of what his victim is owed and of what we can and cannot know about the crime he committed, about the secret workings of his heart and whether his admission of guilt (such as it is) constitutes adequate self-recrimination for us to keep watching his videos.

The question which is being batted around, with various levels of care and sincerity, is this: has Jacob Geller atoned? If we take Geller at his word (which is an enormous “if”), he made amends with the victim, turned himself in to the authorities, accepted the consequences (“very mild, I concur”), and has spent the last decade making up for his misdeed by—checks notes—making YouTube videos about videogames. This version of the story assumes a ton of facts not in evidence; in fact, each element of that story is tangibly unsupported even by his own narrative. But for some voices in the conversation, it has been ten years, during which Geller has comported himself admirably; is that not what restorative justice means?

There is, I think, a deeper flaw in this logic than the minor inconvenience of all of its parts being wrong. Because this framing is asking about whether Geller has atoned for what he did in 2016. I cannot answer this question, nor can anyone other than his victim, who has wanted no part in this conversation. That is also, I think, not the wrongdoing that is actually at issue here.

The reason we are discussing this now, the injustice that has us all spinning, is not the sexual assault that Jacob Geller committed in 2016. That is the greatest of his transgressions, and it is plenty to reckon with on its own. It is horrible, and it is haunting, but it is not what we are dealing with now. The reason that we are having this conversation is not the wrong thing Jacob Geller did in 2016. It is the wrong thing he has been doing, constantly and pervasively, for the last ten years.

We are not victims of Geller’s assault. But all of us, even those who just watched his videos once in a while, have been lied to about something essential. We have not all been hurt in the same way, nor to the same extent, and none of us suffered even a fraction of what his victim in 2016 did. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t been harmed.