"What do we do with Jacob Geller?" (Self admitted sexual assault, removed from Nebula streaming)

Earlier this week, a friend noticed Jacob Geller’s book, How A Game Lives, sitting amongst my living room shelves. Under almost any other circumstances, this would have been an exciting invitation for me to talk about his work: the strange intellectual confidence of his video essays, his characteristically interdisciplinary approach to examining video games, the persistent demand to take emotional works with gripping severity. Instead, I told her what I had been reading online that morning. Jacob Geller, a figure I have looked up to for the better part of a decade, had been plausibly accused of sexual assault. Her shock mirrored mine. 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.

That refuge no longer exists. On October 1, the day of this writing, Geller released a statement confirming that the University of North Carolina records circulating online concerning him were true. The archived university record lists Jacob Geller’s name under “Sexual Assault or Sexual Violence” and notes a definite suspension of one semester. Geller himself subsequently stated that he had assaulted the woman involved and that she later reported the incident to UNC’s Title IX office. 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.

There is consequently very little useful work for euphemism to perform here. When concerning myself with the matter of Jacob Geller, and how I reckon with this unearthed information, I question not whether this allegation should be believed, nor whether an administrative finding constitutes proof of something it technically does not establish. Geller has confirmed the essential fact himself; he sexually assaulted someone. Whatever affection I have for his work cannot mitigate that fact, and whatever argument I make about what has happened since cannot retroactively reduce the harm he caused. In our debates about public figures and the moral seriousness of rehabilitation, we begin with the observation that rehabilitation means nothing if we first diminish the wrongdoing from which somebody supposedly rehabilitated.

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.

The story initially spread after posts on Twitter claimed that Geller had been fired from UNC student radio station WXYC while under investigation and had subsequently received university discipline. A ResetEra thread rapidly assembled those posts alongside archived records, an earlier accusation from June, and the subsequent statements from Geller himself. The UNC documentation became public following litigation that culminated in a 2020 North Carolina Supreme Court ruling requiring the university to disclose limited disciplinary information concerning students found responsible for sexual assault. 

Geller’s statement on this matter claims that the records were recently circulated without the victim’s permission. I have found no public statement from the victim confirming what she herself wanted, and her absence from this spectacle cannot responsibly be interpreted as evidence of forgiveness, opposition to (or approval of) disclosure – or anything else, for that matter. Indeed, the insistence on imagining her wishes is one of the stranger features of the discourse developing around this case. People ostensibly concerned with centering a victim can very quickly end up ventriloquizing her, constructing an imaginary person whose desires conveniently ratify whatever punishment (or forgiveness) they already wanted. Geller says he does not know her present wishes and therefore will not disclose potentially identifying details. We should probably accept the epistemological boundary contained in that statement. Namely, we don’t know (yet) either.

This uncertainty makes the circumstances of the revelation deeply uncomfortable to me, but does not make the assault less real nor Geller its indirect victim, as some have claimed. Multiple morally relevant things can exist simultaneously, even when the internet desperately wants one of them to annihilate all the others. A person can have committed an appalling act; the public can have legitimate reasons to reconsider its relationship with that person; employers and collaborators can decide that continuing the relationship is impossible; and, as I’ve recently been reminded in the discourse surrounding the film Primetime, the process through which private trauma becomes public entertainment can still be exploitative. None of these propositions logically obviates the others.

The swiftness with which Geller’s public associates have issued public action has been remarkable to behold. As of today, MinnMax announced that Geller is no longer part of the organization, that he will not appear in future content, and that the week’s episode of The MinnMax Show will not be released publicly, stating that its members were understandably “in shock and deeply hurt.” Cane and Rinse, where Geller contributed earlier in his career, effaced his written work and his appearances across over twenty podcast episodes. The scale of the response is particularly striking because much of Geller’s professional identity was constructed through collaboration, as many people found his work through the intersection of these platforms. What happened at UNC a decade ago has therefore arrived in the present not as an isolated revelation but as a detonation inside an entire creative community, which is why I haven’t been able to stop fretting about this issue all day.

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

As always with discourse around public “cancellation,” the aforementioned Resetera thread devolved into an argument over whether subsequent conduct could possess any moral significance whatsoever in our current reassessment of Geller. Some people rejected attempts to discuss rehabilitation as inappropriate mitigation. Others wondered whether a decade without publicly known repetition, combined with Geller’s admission and description of his efforts to change, ought to matter when deciding how to understand the person who exists now. 

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 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.

One of the unfortunate lessons that ought to survive the collapse of parasocial confidence is that we simply do not know public figures like Jacob Geller in the comprehensive way their work can make us feel that we do.

Still, there is a peculiar trap in insisting that no subsequent evidence can ever count, morally speaking. 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. 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.

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. That observation is not praise for him as a person and certainly not absolution. I have seen too many botched public apologies in which assault is denied, excuses like alcohol and youth are blamed, political enemies are scapegoated, and so forth. To give the devil his due, Jacob Geller explicitly says the punishment he received was too mild. He avoids providing details that might identify the victim. Most importantly, he describes the assault as something he did to another person, rather than primarily as the tragic event that is now happening to him.

That ownership is an extraordinarily low bar for moral misbehavior, of course. It is also a bar public figures routinely tunnel underneath.

Obviously, an apology cannot un-assault somebody. 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.

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. But ultimately, I cannot decide whether to forgive or not forgive Jacob Geller because Jacob Geller did not sexually assault me. Treating ourselves, the audience, as the injured party risks turning another person’s trauma into the raw material for our own moral drama – and I’m seeing too much of that in the wake of this horrific news.

I own Geller’s book, and I’m not burning it any time soon; it’s not as though his insights about video games are any less relevant to the work I intend to do. At the same time, I understand the temptation towards torch-and-pitchfork catharsis in this moment. There will forevermore be a haunting asterisk attached to my intellectual admiration for Geller’s body of work, because learning something this significant about an artist necessarily changes the context in which I encounter the art. I’ve written an entire treatise against the Harry Potter game, for goodness sakes. I do not know whether I will ever comfortably watch his essays again. I certainly cannot experience them with the uncomplicated curiosity I possessed before this week. There is grief in that, even if it is crucial to remember that the audience’s disappointment is microscopic beside the harm experienced by the person he assaulted.

What bothers me is what happens when public grief becomes pleasurable. The internet has developed a social economy around the destruction of public people. There is status to be gained by discovering the incriminating screenshot first, by producing the definitive thread, by demonstrating that you were never fooled. Moral judgment becomes participatory entertainment. The public figure becomes an object onto which thousands of strangers can project their righteousness, anger, disappointment, politics, and red-meat appetite for spectacle.

Sexual assault deserves moral condemnation, full stop. It does not follow that every behavior performed under the banner of condemning sexual assault is therefore morally admirable.

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. The discourse becomes about Geller’s career. Even arguments ostensibly undertaken on behalf of the victim can become elaborate debates among strangers about what punishment she should want. The person who actually experienced the harm becomes almost mythologically real: invoked constantly, known hardly at all. That absence, when realized, should produce humility rather than certainty.

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.

Perhaps some or all of Geller’s present-day consequences are appropriate. I am not interested in drawing a little sentencing chart and deciding how many years of professional success constitute the morally permissible amount for somebody who committed sexual assault. The grotesqueness of that exercise should be obvious. But its impossibility is precisely why I distrust the certainty with which internet crowds perform their ritualistic condemnation reflexively. 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. The moral bitterness Geller is facing is certainly overdue, considering this is now a public revelation, but I lament the moral outsourcing and automation I now bear witness to in daily online discourse. Jacob Geller just happens to be the most recent arbitrary subject; overdue or not, the capriciousness is ineluctable.

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.

The alternative is not restorative justice. It is permanent informal sentencing administered by whoever happens to possess the largest audience at a given moment.

None of this requires MinnMax to rehire Geller, nor Cane and Rinse to restore his archive. Institutional association is not a human right, and consequences are not synonymous with vengeance. 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.

A society that claims to believe people can change must construct some imaginable future for people who actually do. Otherwise, every incentive points in the opposite direction. Why admit wrongdoing if admission and denial ultimately produce the same permanent identity? Why undertake the humiliating work of confronting what you have done if nothing you become afterward can possess moral significance? Why should someone who has caused harm believe in rehabilitation when the rehabilitative society itself demonstrably does not?

I’m broken up about this news, obviously. This heinous revelation does not merely destroy an adoring relationship to an artist whose work mattered to me. It also forces several moral convictions I hold simultaneously into uncomfortable proximity. 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.

Maybe that means I will never return to Geller’s work. Maybe the book stays on my shelf and acquires that strange radioactive quality objects sometimes develop when their originators disappoint us profoundly, like the Harry Potter books I left at my mom’s house or the former relationship photos I threw away. 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. I do not yet know what my relationship with Jacob Geller’s work will be, though I am increasingly suspicious of the demand that everyone formulate a permanent answer within twenty-four hours.

What I do know is that Jacob Geller sexually assaulted someone. He cannot undo that. His statement does not undo it. Ten years do not undo it. A decade of admirable public work, to whatever extent we judge it admirable, does not undo it either. But “cannot be undone” and “nothing afterward matters” are not the same notion.

If we believe they are, then we should stop claiming to believe in rehabilitation. 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. I cannot accept that regressive worldview, even here – perhaps especially here, in a moment where simply accepting it (i.e. excommunicating Jacob Geller immediately) would be the easiest path forward.

The more arduous position is to leave several truths standing alongside one another, where my anger at the situation, the internet discourse, and Jacob Geller’s actions can coexist. Somewhere between absolution and annihilation, there has to be a moral vocabulary capable of describing what happens after a human being does something unforgivable and nevertheless remains human. I don’t know what that vocabulary is yet; I only know that I desperately want us to keep looking for it.

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