longer.blue

Jacob Geller spent the years after the sexual assault building a public identity in progressive cultural spaces, becoming known for work that was thoughtful, empathetic and often morally serious. He discussed violence, masculinity and sexual abuse in games. He co-hosted a podcast, Something Rotten, that touches on these subjects in several episodes. He worked as a consultant on the Silent Hill 2 remake, a game in which sexual abuse is central to one of its most important characters. I don't think that having committed abuse necessarily makes someone incapable of speaking meaningfully about abuse. But I think that history has to be part of the context in which they are speaking. I can imagine Geller admitting openly, years ago: "I sexually assaulted somebody when I was younger; I have spent years trying to understand how I became capable of it and trying to become a different person." But that was not the position from which Geller was publicly speaking. He did not enter, nor was he invited into, these conversations as someone openly reckoning with having been an abuser. He was invited as a progressive critic whose personal history, had it been known, would plainly have changed the way people understood, received and consumed some of his work. There is a difference between protecting somebody else's privacy and never acknowledging your own conduct at all. And even if he believed public disclosure was impossible, silence was not the only choice available to him. There were also choices about what work to accept and what subjects to place himself at the center of. If you know that you have sexually assaulted someone, and you are unwilling or unable to disclose that publicly, then perhaps, for instance, a paid consulting role on a work so directly concerned with sexual abuse is simply something you decline. Not because you are forbidden from thinking about those subjects, but because accepting the role while withholding that history creates a contradiction that becomes difficult to ignore once that history becomes known. Maybe hypocrisy is the right word for that. Maybe denial is closer. Maybe it is simply an extraordinary capacity for moral compartmentalization. Whatever it was, it makes me wary of the argument that his later work should itself be taken as evidence of rehabilitation or change. That is where some of the discussion around rehabilitation loses me. Of course people should be able to become better than the worst thing they have done. But becoming better and acting with integrity are not exactly the same thing. You can genuinely regret something, change in important ways, and still benefit from other people's ignorance of a fact that would materially affect how they saw you. In this case, that ignorance was particularly consequential because of the kind of career Geller built. There is a tendency in discussions of rehabilitation to focus on whether society is willing to forgive, as though the alternative is permanent punishment. But accountability also involves surrendering some control over how other people see you. It means giving them enough information to make that judgment for themselves, even when doing so may cost you work, status, collaborators or an audience. I could believe that Geller regrets what he did. I could believe that he is not the same person he was then. What I find much harder to accept is the idea that the public persona and career he built while keeping that history hidden can now be offered as proof of that transformation. The question, for me, is not whether an abuser can ever speak about abuse again. It is whether you can build a public identity around empathy, feminism, moral seriousness and the thoughtful treatment of sexual violence while withholding the fact that you yourself committed sexual assault, and then ask that same identity to stand as evidence that you changed. I don't think you can.