Reading: What to Do with Jacob Geller
By: Flora Merigold (2026) related tags: #YTAbusers
I'm not sure I'll like this based on its opening... (I wanted to read it before someone else's opinions changed my perspective on it.)
At the time, there remained the miserable refuge provided by uncertainty – the possibility that the information circulating was incomplete, misidentified, exaggerated, or otherwise different from what it appeared to be.
I'm not sure why people look for this 'refuge' in places where it most likely doesn't and will not exist. Rather, I know people will do it, but I fail to recognise good reasons for why that happens.
I know, in talking with a friend who said that the feelings they went through when reading about Geller must've been like those that a lot of Neil Gaiman's fans went through when they learned of his sexual abuse, that there is a degree of 'refuge' taken in other things, like whether or not someone knew what the (“alleged”) abuser had been doing. This game up with regards to Gaiman's partnership with Terry Pratchett, and this is an area in which I openly said to them: “I feel like it'd make me even more insane to speculate on what Pratchett knew, and I also think it would be easier for Gaiman to hide it. Their sole work was done at the end of the 1980s and published in 1990, and they weren't even in the same country. Which would make it easier to hide. (I also don't trust Gaiman on his side of the relationship, especially because Rhianna has at least disputed the “best mates” bent that's put on it.)”
As I told them, that's my “I would feel insane and I don't want to” justification. However, if someone provided me with information that Pratchett knew and what he did after learning, my perspective would likely shift depending on what those actions had been. (It's also worth noting that Pratchett died nine years before the very public allegations came out, so we can't know what he would've done had he learned of them as we had.)
This is also something that even people who have collaborated with Jacob Geller have been saying. They didn't know about his sexual abuse, and he kind of was assisted by his proximity to so many people who had talked about their own traumas. They unknowningly provided him image rehabilitation, and a lot of them are upset that they weren't given this choice about whether or not to work with (and tacitly support and promote) an abuser. This is particularly true for those who asked him to voice lines in videos about abusers. But people may not see them make these statements of frustration, and they may not recognise that these people were largely duped by someone they had trusted. (Which is what abusers do.)
If anything, that is the only refuge I can understand people taking... not in the small hopeful glimmer that maybe, just maybe, this abuser was “wrongfully accused.” (And while that does happen, it is far less frequent than people's worries would have everyone believe.)
In his public statement, Jacob Geller called the semester suspension “very mild,” described what he did as the greatest regret of his life, and said that for more than a decade he has attempted to reckon with the person he was when he committed the assault.
I would question everything he said in his statement. If he was trying to reckon with this, why did he never mention it in relevant videos? How could an sexual abuser play Mouthwashing and critique it without ever coming to terms with their own actions, which would be mirrored back at them in the narrative, and making it clear to the audience that they recognise themselves in those characters? Why would he only ever vaguely reference having been “in a really rough spot” where he had, “through [his] own actions, isolated [himself] from 99% of the people who had been in [his] life?” It's kind of clear that this references the troubles that he had stemming from his own actions, yet it's written in a way that is supposed to make us sympathetic to it without us knowing what it's truly referring to.
And yet, I have found myself profoundly unsettled by almost everything surrounding this story – not because I think Geller is secretly innocent, but because his guilt is now the easiest moral question before us. That certitude, justifiable though it certainly is, has allowed cynical actors to emerge, capitalizing on this news. And that just makes me sick.
This happens with great frequency. If anything, the cynical are the people we should also drown out and view with skepticism.
And who exactly is capitalising on this news? His colleagues most certainly are not, and a number of survivors that he's worked with have obviously taken great issue with his actions. (If someone is capitalising on this—and I'm still not sure who could be because this article provides not even a vague example of how—then clearly this person is also someone we should view with great scepticism.)
On Twitter and Bluesky, the same disagreement appears in harsher language, where, for some people, the revelation permanently determines Geller’s moral identity. And for others, treating a person as reducible to the worst thing he has ever done makes the language of reform almost meaningless. After all, if Geller isn’t a relevant moral example to consider, then what, exactly, do we mean when we imagine people reforming, rehabilitating themselves? I worry the answer is fatuously simple: we live in a carceral state dependent on the mythology of retributive justice. So long as we believe in that vapid principle, I worry the nuance I am aiming at will continue to be lost in the discourse, necessary though it certainly may be.
I think his audience has the right to determine that 'moral identity' because he hasn't given anyone the choice to disassociate from him. He knew that what he had done would cause himself great harm; that's why he kept it from everyone, even as he built a platform under his own legal name... You know, the very same name that appears on that UNC record.
It's absurd to think that this kind of distancing, especially as he did not disclose his abuse—and the author points out that he “dug his own grave” by not doing it (though this is only mentioned in reference to his collaborators, and I think this should also apply to his audience because of the topics he engaged in discussing and the way he framed himself to the audience).
This is not carceral. This is very literally the consequences of your own actions. No one has said that he's not allowed to participate in society; they've just said that he shouldn't have a public platform. No person is owed a public platform, and he can go back to being a private citizen and still do the work that he claims he's doing to improve himself. Rehabilitation does not require the opportunity to have an audience.
ALSO, while I'm not a huge fan of this person and do not entirely agree with what he's done, he could've taken a page out of Christian Picciolini's book if he wanted a public platform (which I still don't think is a good idea). He was part of the neo-nazi movement in the US, got out, and has been putting in the work to help other people get out. And it is slow and arduous, but he puts himself in those situations to deal with the very harm that he engaged in. How has Geller been rectifying a problem that he caused?
I find myself incapable of accepting the first position completely, because I do not believe in retributive justice as a moral ideal. If our politics around criminal justice, education, and social harm mean anything, then the possibility of human transformation cannot suddenly become embarrassing when someone like Jacob Geller, whose transformation we must now contemplate, has done something genuinely abhorrent. Rehabilitation is easy to endorse when the wrongdoing remains abstract. Its actual test – the one I fear we are facing right now – arrives when extending the concept makes us uncomfortable.
Once again, rehabilitation does not mean a person needs a public platform. Rehabilitation only seems to be considered when we think about the abuser. Would his victim want to see his name plastered everywhere? He doesn't need a public platform. He could've gone on to work anywhere else as a private citizen, and this would've been acceptable; if he were to work at a specific office, all his victim has to do is... avoid that office. (I also think that his history of sexual assault should keep him out of public-facing institutions where his victim could run into him and or positions where he might mishandle any accusations he receives against other people, such as being a teacher in a school.)
The test this author thinks is happening is not; they are, once again, not considering what it means to victims to see an abuser promoted. (I think a good run-down of a similar issue is Emma Chang-Kredl's video about Andrew Callaghan.)
This also isn't purely about “speaking for the victim” but also denying abusers access to spaces that rehabilitate them without them doing anything that helps decrease the harms they already engaged in. (Abusers rarely pay any consequences, but their victims always do.)
If a person commits serious harm at twenty, accepts responsibility for it, experiences consequences, spends ten years attempting to become someone who will never inflict that harm again, and reaches thirty only to discover that nothing done during those intervening years possesses any moral weight whatsoever, then “rehabilitation” has become a word describing a process whose successful completion we have defined as ontologically impossible – asymptotic, even.
If a person commits a serious harm at twenty, the person who endured that harm is living with it forever. Jacob already said he received a light sentence (one whole semester suspension). Has he changed? He withheld this information to rehabilitate his image, which manipulated his colleagues into believing he was someone he isn't.
We have to ask repeatedly the same questions that this author won't: Why did he withhold that information? Why did he not give people the opportunity to refuse to engage with his work by making it clear what he'd done? How can anyone (even the people closest to him) truly know that he's changed if he withholds information from them? Should his victim be made to have his name pop up into her feeds over and over just because he wants a public platform? Why do we almost never ask how to make spaces safe for victims and survivors, and why do we hyperfocus on whether an abuser has changed instead of caring about the people they hurt?
The original act remains irreversible, as it should. But the moral identity of the person who committed it has also been declared irreversible, which is a much larger proposition and one I am not prepared to full-throatedly accept.
It hasn't been declared irreversible, and you are being intentionally obtuse by conflating the most common sentiment that anti-abuse advocates have made. This is just apologia at this point, but with a left-wing bent.
Geller’s statement is therefore difficult for me to digest precisely because, considered solely as an act of public accountability, I genuinely do not know what a substantially better version of it would look like.
How about a statement that is made for the largest parts of his audience instead of the smallest contingent? Why hasn't he put anything on Patreon or YouTube? He, again, is withholding information from people. This does not show rehabilitation; this shows faux accountability.
But, in terms of accountability, if reversibility is the standard by which remorse becomes meaningful, then remorse can never be meaningful for serious wrongdoing precisely because serious wrongdoing is itself defined in part by its irreversibility. That is, the purpose of accountability cannot be to invent a time machine. Accountability must instead involve a complex tapestry of acknowledging harm, accepting consequences, changing behavior, reducing the possibility of future harm, and recognizing that the person harmed retains no obligation whatsoever to participate in your redemption.
It's so cute how people are so intentionally obtuse. No one is asking him to reverse the wrongdoing because we're not foolish enough to believe it is possible. He is not deserving of a public platform, full stop.
And while he acknowledged his actions (in a rare turn of events), he still has not been fully accountable. Withholding this information from people, including his audience, has given him undue credit that has helped rehabilitate his image. He knows this.
I am a broken record at this point.
As a longtime fan, I feel deceived about a vital part of Jacob Geller’s history. I feel betrayed and injured, but in a way that is categorically different than the victim at the center of this story.
... Because you're not the victim, so this is obvious. And the audience is an injured party, even if we don't want to acknowledge it; it is a different kind of injury, as you said here.
As a survivor of sexual abuse, I want abusers to actually be accountable to their actions. Abusers who supposedly want to create safe spaces should not withhold that information; everyone has the right to choose how to interact with an abuser. (It's weird because there's a social expectation of people outing private aspects of themselves, like a medical condition, an addiction, or a mental health issue... But raping someone isn't a private aspect of a person; that person has quite literally forced themself on someone else, and other people deserve the right to determine if they feel the 'reformed rapist' is safe to be around.)
What bothers me is what happens when public grief becomes pleasurable. The internet has developed a social economy around the destruction of public people.
... I hate this direction so much. Everyone's always talking about how we love cancelling people! But... Where is this ire for people who are actually cancelled over, like, nothing? Did Flora get this upset when Stephanie Sterling basically lost a fuckton of followers for the “abominable act” of coming out as trans? And also never shutting up about how awful the video games industry was, constantly letting people know about the abusers in the industry? What about all the women who've been targeted by smear campaigns?
People are always coming out for men like Jacob, men who gave no one an option on how to engage with them knowing who they were, men who've claimed rehabilitation! But I don't see the same ire for people who've been silenced as a result of being who they are or who've been silenced by their abusers.
Indeed, one of the things that most disturbs me about this story is how rapidly the woman at its center risks disappearing from our moral concern.
Ironically, she barely features in your article because you've never once asked any questions about what she (and even other victims) may have thought. I'm not asking you to find her and out her (that would be abhorrent), but I don't think it's so much to present a thought experiment about what it'd be like to have your abuser's name pop up in your feed at random because they're a public figure whose platform is growing. Or to know that there's a project you'd want to support, but you're uncomfortable with the fact that they're working with your abuser.
All of which should lead you to the answer that an abuser can 'rehabilitate' themselves, but that does not mean they need a public platform now or ever.
We do not know what justice looks like to her now. We do not know whether seeing Jacob Geller’s name become a trending subject is vindicating, retraumatising, or some complicated combination that cannot be translated into the crude emotional vocabulary of social media. Unless she chooses to tell the public, none of those things belong to us.
No, we can't know. But we also know that him being a sexual abuser (which is what people who commit sexual assault are) is triggering to other people who are victims of sexual abuse. And while the victim should be part of the conversation, Jacob should know better. He clearly knew that people would not want to work with him, that his platform would not grow, if he came clean about his history even with his colleagues.
He made decisions. He “dug his own grave,” and now you're trying to fill it in before he buries himself.
Even Jacob Geller admits that his punishment was too mild, and yet he served his time — a phrase we employ once someone emerges from criminal corrections facilities without questioning it further.
Not all people who've “served their time” should've, so this is... inappropriate and does not engage with the actual carceral system. Jacob has had barely a blip of consequence, and we know this because he has a public platform where he misled and deceived many people, including colleagues who were also survivors of sexual abuse.
He has not “served his time.” He has obfuscated his own behaviours and weaponised them for sympathy.
If the principle is that someone who has committed sexual assault should never again possess a public career, then we should at least have the courage to articulate that principle explicitly and confront what it means. If that is not our principle, then we eventually need a more sophisticated vocabulary for the conditions under which someone who committed terrible harm can continue existing in society without their continued existence being interpreted as an injustice.
It should be the principle we have, but most public individuals who've committed sexual abuse (or any kind of abuse) work under individuals who are just as grimy as they are. Jacob Geller being dropped by most of the projects he was associated with shows that this is the principle they want to operate under.
Just because fascist media loves abusers (for obvious reasons) does not mean independent media should happily keep them around. In fact, if that independent media has any inkling of working towards liberation of all... Perhaps they most certainly should hold principles that support victims and survivors over abusers, even if it means abusers must be private individuals.
The alternative is not restorative justice. It is permanent informal sentencing administered by whoever happens to possess the largest audience at a given moment.
Hey, quick question: How has restorative justice supported the victim? Huh. Strange. It hasn't, and it's only being weaponised in favour of Jacob Geller. This is called apologia.
Stop doing that.
What it does require, at least for me, is resisting the intoxicating simplicity of believing that maximizing someone’s suffering is identical to maximizing justice.
He could've been working at, for example, a Starbucks for the same time he's had a YouTube (and more) career. Again, his “suffering” (which this isn't because he still hasn't publicly said shit on his largest platforms, interestingly) is of his own making. If you're going to say that he dug his own grave, at least have the temerity to stick with it instead of being wishy-washy.
A society that claims to believe people can change must construct some imaginable future for people who actually do.
BROKEN RECORD. An imaginable future for people who change does not mean they get to have a public platform. Jesus fucking christ, why don't you just think about this for two whole seconds instead of pretending Geller had a normal ass job when he very much does not.
Why admit wrongdoing if admission and denial ultimately produce the same permanent identity?
Why did he admit to the wrongdoing only when it came out? Let's think about that.
Why undertake the humiliating work of confronting what you have done if nothing you become afterward can possess moral significance?
What humiliating work did he do in confronting what he did? Please, elaborate. I don't know what he did to confront his actions, which probably means that you don't either (unless you're in contact with him, which makes me side-eye whether you're safe because of this whole apologia article).
Why should someone who has caused harm believe in rehabilitation when the rehabilitative society itself demonstrably does not?
Why does his rehabilitation rest on whether he keeps a job with a public platform? How do we know that he actually is rehabilitated? What we do know is that he rehabilitated his image by manipulating his colleagues into believing he was someone else, by “digging his own grave” through the withholding of information.
I don't know how this isn't obvious.
I believe victims of sexual violence deserve to be believed and protected. I believe nobody is owed forgiveness. I also believe human beings can change, that punishment and justice are not synonyms, that privacy still matters when wrongdoing has occurred, and that reducing a person permanently to the worst act of their life is incompatible with any serious commitment to rehabilitation. I refuse to solve the contradiction by sacrificing whichever principle happens to be inconvenient today, as so many online seem to.
You also believe in repeatedly doing apologia, apparently, because you refuse to recognise what Jacob has willingly done in his so-called “rehabilitation.”
I can’t shake the dozens of times I’ve revisited his Florence video on Rhopography, the times I’ve chatted with Geller in DMs, nor the countless charitable efforts he’s made for causes like trans rights – hell, just two months ago, I called Jacob Geller “the most interesting writer about games today” – but I know I now have to reckon with my relationship with him and his work, despite its indissoluble influence on my own thinking.
So... because you've talked to him? Hm.
We should admit that what we actually believe in is a secular version of damnation, the foundational myth that one sufficiently terrible act fixes the human being permanently in place, that everything afterward is merely biography occurring after the verdict.
What's strange is if you frame other situations, people would be like “obviously this person shouldn't work here.”
Like, if we traded Jacob (a sexual abuser) in this scenario for a high school teacher who had sex with one of his students, some people would sort of believe that the teacher should not work in a school again and that he shouldn't work with kids. (Granted, this is not a universal because plenty of pederasts do continue to work in schools despite any consequences they've faced in the past.) Even if that person “worked to rehabilitate themselves,” we'd recognise that them working in that environment would not be safe or children or teenagers.
Should we also provide this information to that teacher's students, we'd more than likely find that a good chunk of kids would refuse to engage with them. I'm making this guess based on how whispered accusations of teachers engaging in sexual abuse of their students often makes students who've heard those accusations want to disassociate from those teachers (even if they're required by the school to participate in their class). This is something I've seen with my own eyes about a colleague who I kept reporting for his inappropriate actions with students in our school, especially since most of the girls didn't want to be around him once they had learned of the accusations other girls had made against him (weird how that works).
While I doubt the colleague I kept reporting has rehabilitated himself (as he fled the country to work in another international school after getting 'let go' from the international school we worked at and the same whispered accusations spread about him at another international school in the city I live in), let's assume that he has taken accountability for these actions. Flora probably wouldn't have written an article supporting a teacher who as admitted to sexually assaulting a student staying in a school. Other people might be fine with it (so long as the abuser was a cishet white man), but I suspect Flora would recognise that any teacher (even if they admitted wrongdoing) working in a school would be inappropriate even if their victim said nothing and wasn't known to anyone (much as Jacob's victim is to us).
Yet... The same isn't afforded of Jacob Geller and his position with a public platform.