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.

A number of essays against these questions have entered the Discourse, and several of them have brought forward a point that I regard as absolutely essential to this conversation and then forgotten it as more or less irrelevant. I aim to take it up again. I will frame it as a question here, one that will cast a lot of is in a poor light, and then I will ask is to sit with it until it feels less stupid than it might at the first.

The question is this: are we among Jacob Geller’s victims?

a lit review in a blog post, why are we all like this

Will Borger says no, in what is to my mind cavalierly strong language:

Let me be clear: you are not a victim of what Geller did. You watched a YouTube video (or several) and believed in a public persona of goodness crafted by a man who has none. This is not about you, and framing it that way is disturbing. You should consider why you need this to be about you. You may have your own personal response to Geller and his work, but there is no “we.” There is just each of us, and how we deal with it ourselves.

What I think he intends to say is not what he is actually saying, because he proves himself wrong in spectacular fashion a few paragraphs down. What I think he intends to say is this: Jacob Geller did not sexually assault you. To treat ourselves as a victim to that crime is, I agree, unacceptable. But I think Borger is wrong to say that there is no “we.” If there were no “we,” we would not be having this conversation right now.

Flora Merigold similarly brings up and lays aside this question. Or rather, she asserts obliquely that we are Geller’s victims, but that it maybe doesn’t matter?

Geller dug his own grave by not disclosing his past actions to his current collaborators and audience.

This sentence stands out starkly from the essay around it, to the extent that I keep thinking it is perhaps a quote or a position she is summarizing. But it does not seem to be. The remainder of the essay is focused on the question of whether Geller has adequately atoned for the sexual assault he committed at UNC. I do not think we can know this; for my part, the question of “restorative justice” as it applies to this issue has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I am not a victim of that crime.

But the thing Merigold and Borger both seem to acknowledge without acknowledging is that that is not the only harm that Geller has done here. Geller has committed one crime that we are aware of. He has not as far as anyone knows gone faced criminal prosecution for that crime, and the consequences he did face were, in his own words, “very mild.”¹ But for the moment let us imagine, as some of Geller’s defenders seem so powerfully to want to do, that Geller has behaved with pure moral perfection since the moment of his crime. Let us say he has atoned for the crime he committed in 2016.²

Does that mean no further harm has been done?

And if you have not yet seen through my very transparent misdirections, I am arguing here that Jacob Geller has done more than one thing wrong. There is the sexual assault itself, which is self-evidently a heinous crime. Justice for that is beyond us. But there is also a second, broader wrongdoing: hiding what he had done from his audience and collaborators. This does not compare in scope to his actual crime, but it is real, and it does matter, and it is not wrong of us to think of ourselves as having been harmed.

Some specific, tangible harms worth considering

Of course not, and Merigold and Borger both know this. Borger in fact enumerates this specifically:

Did Geller inform the folks at Cane and Rinse of what he had done? No. How about the people at MinnMax? No. Lost in Cult? No. Nebula? No. None of those organizations, or the people within them, agreed to platform or work with a man who committed, by his own admission, an act of sexual violence that was, at one point, a matter of public record. Not one.

All of those organizations had past partnerships with Geller, and all of them immediately cut ties once Geller’s crime came to their attention. As I understand it, Geller was a huge draw for Nebula and a significant earner for the platform. That likely represents a substantial loss of income for Nebula as a platform. Lost in Cult has pulled Geller’s upcoming book from production and started issuing refunds. This is after a ton of work has already gone into the product. Artists and writers have been paid; copy has been edited; the guy who comes up with the tiny numbers that go on the copyright page has been working for months. I imagine that they have already paid Geller an advance that they will not likely see again.

I know less about MinnMax or Cane and Rinse, but it seems obvious here that all of these people entered into collaboration with Geller under false pretenses. If they had known, they would not have worked with him. Because he hid what had happened, they now are making financial sacrifices that will potentially affect a whole bunch of people’s income and livelihoods. Can Nebula stay afloat without Geller? Can Lost in Cult afford to refund all of their preorders, given that presumably the preorder money was already spent on production? I don’t know. But it’s not at all out of the question that people will get laid off because Geller was dishonest.

A hypothetical (but not-that-hypothetical) harm I can’t stop thinking about

In his video about The Last Guardian, Geller gestured in the vaguest possible terms at how the consequences of his crime (again, such as they were) had affected him. Of course, he did not mention the crime part. Here is what he says:

A few years ago, I was in a really rough spot. I had moved back home and I was working part time in a restaurant, and I had through my own actions isolated myself from like 99% of the people who had been in my life, and in my search for reasons to, like, keep…being a person who did anything meaningful, I got a dog!

I’m not gonna link the video, but if you want to watch this section, qvotoms on bsky has clipped it. There is sad piano music.

I will note that, to my reading, the acknowledgment of wrongdoing on Geller’s part is ambiguous at best. “Through my own actions” means he made a choice, but when I heard those words for the first time I did not for an instant assume that this was an allusion to a crime had committed. But of course, now we know that it was. The content of the text is this: I was in a dark place, I got a dog, and it helped.

When I say that Geller’s decision to hide what he had done has a broad range of victims, this is what I mean. He is speaking obliquely here about something that, if he spoke plainly, would have caused his audience to recoil. Viciously and immediately. But he chooses language that obfuscates the significance of what he did, handwaves it away not only so as to make it seem like his crime wasn’t a big deal, but to give us no particular reason to think he’d done anything wrong at all.³

When I first rewatched this clip after having found out what Geller did, an imaginary person sprung full-formed into my head, and I cannot stop thinking about her.

The woman I am imagining was a victim of sexual assault. She was not believed by her peers or supported by her institution. And so she found herself alone, lost, and depressed. In a dark place. Isolated. And she watched this video, and she thought yes. That will help. I will get a dog.

The question I keep asking myself is, how does this woman feel about that dog now? Is it possible for her to feed her dog without thinking about Geller, and what he did, and her assaulter, and what she suffered?

Again, I made this woman up, and this hypothetical is pretty on the nose. But here’s the thing: just because I made her up doesn’t mean she isn’t real.

I am in a lot of video essayist communities. Some are fan spaces for various creators, including my own odd little Patreon server. Others are collaborative spaces for working video essayists. All of them have been knocked ass over teakettle by this revelation, and all of them are trying to make sense of it.

Many of them cannot engage with any of it without also having to renavigate their own sexual assault or abuse. The number of long messages in spoiler tags with content warnings I have seen is truly immiserating. And while, again, it does not compare in any meaningful way to the harm Geller did to his victim, this is still real harm. The people who are being triggered, retraumatized, forced to sit there and make sense of a world where their favorite youtuber just brought the worst thing that happened to them in their entire life right back into the room with him while he’s talking about fucking fungus in videogames or whatever, that is real harm.

There are others I have seen who are looking at this from the other side. Some of us are looking at what has happened to Geller in the last few days and thinking, I have done bad things in the past. Is this how I should be treated? This is, in part, why I started by disclosing my own past before I even started. I have done bad things in the past. Not, I think, on the scale of Geller. But I understand why some might look at the consequences Geller is facing and think “does anything I have done to atone for my own failures matter?” This is, I think, also harm—though of a different kind.

The problem, as I have been suggesting, is that we are treating two misdeeds as if they were the same. There is the sexual assault that Jacob Geller committed in approximately 2016. We should not take him at his word that it’s cool, bro, we worked it out. Obviously. But even if we pretend we did, even if we stipulate that yes, restorative justice happened (which again we do not fucking know a single thing about), if we imagine that that crime was somehow atoned for, it doesn’t matter a single bit to what is happening now. That is not the misdeed for which Geller is currently facing consequences.

He is facing consequences because hiding what he did from his collaborators and audience caused harm independent from his initial crime.

…but what was he supposed to doooooooooooo?

I have heard this a lot, usually with some sarcastic absurdity attached. “What did you expect him to do, start every video with ‘hi, i’m a rapist?’”

I think that is a very silly way to think about honesty. Like be for real. This is the same as saying that we should all start every conversation by disclosing when we pooped last. No, I do not think Geller should have done that. I think he should have been fucking honest.

In 2011, I found myself playing God of War III, and in the manner of my people, I also found myself writing about it. Essayists are horribly predictable in this way. What I was writing about was how the violence Kratos did seemed to mean nothing. And so I did what I think any essayist worth their salt should: I told the fucking truth.

When I mentioned above that I had reckoned with my own past history of violence in my writing before, I meant it as literally as I can. If you want to know more detail about what happened, you can read that essay. I published it in Kill Screen, which is now defunct, but it’s on the Wayback Machine. You can read the whole thing, as best I remembered it 15 years ago, which is better than I remember it now.⁴ Because the most essential rule of being an essayist is this: do not avert your eyes. If you are looking at yourself, and you see a thing you want to hide or shy away from, you have to fucking stare at it and wrestle it onto the page or else the essay you are making is meaningless.

I don’t talk about what I did when I was 13 in every essay. It’s usually not relevant, even obliquely. But if there is a part of my experience that matters to the essay I am making, I have to face it. That is what being an essayist is. If I don’t do that, I am a liar, because the mind I am showing you in my essay is not real. It has no integrity.

In many of the spaces where I have discussed this, many of my friends and fellow essayists—including people who are just viewers, for the most part, now thrust into essay in long discord messages— attempt to drag themselves across the field of broken glass that Geller has strewn around us all. I have seen people cry in voice calls. I have seen friends and strangers share their trauma and recount their own past misdeeds as their to make sense of what this situation says about who they are.

And all of those people, without having to consider deeply or go through any extra effort, have included in a part of that conversation their positionality. We can’t talk about something this big without having our own experiences inform and interfere with how we think, and so we have to foreground who we are in relation to the question. Some people chose to identify themselves as SA survivors. Others disclosed their own wrongdoings, however vaguely, as a part of explaining why the rehabilitation aspect of the conversation hit them so hard.

And, as referenced in the angry pep talk I gave on bsky the other day, I’ve seen a lot of people unsure if they can continue to be essayists, knowing what Geller is. That, too, is a harm he has done. Every essayist who gives up making art because of this is a loss we all suffer.

It does not compare to the literal, physical and emotional harm he did to his victim. That cannot escape our attention. These other harms I am laying out do not eclipse or even approach the scope of his actual crime. We are not victims of that crime.

But through Geller’s refusal to introspect, to speak honestly and vulnerably about the things he did in the moments when it would have mattered, he has done harm to a lot of people. Some of it is financial, some of it is emotional. People are losing friends. Communities are in turmoil. I’ve seen a number of people referring to Geller as a pillar of the video essay community, and they’re not wrong. And when a pillar fails, the structure is at risk of collapse.

why am i still writing this

Because of you, maybe. Because I got so mad at what Borger said, that “you are not a victim of what Geller did,” that “there is no ‘we’.” Because that is self-evidently false. “We” are absolutely not the victim of Jacob Geller’s sexual assault. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t harmed us.