In 2016, not long after writing the first raw, spitting version of “I don’t like being raped, I guess that makes me a weirdo” on medium, a Seattle acquaintance and sex educator I’d done some work with assisting consent workshops was outed as having been abusive in his relationship. Charlie responded in earnest, wanting to take accountability, and in doing so enrolled me as one of his confidants in proofreading his public apology.
At that time, feeling abandoned by the ‘sex positive’ community that generally protected predators as well as my cohort of male relations as I stopped condoning and accepting things like rape apology, I was so fucking thankful to see a man of stature, privileged and white even, doing the work I was also doing. I was honored to assist.
That apology proved to be very detrimental, self focused, harmful, controlling, and not well written at all. I hadn’t caught it. Any of it. Which genuinely dumbfounded me.
After awakening to rape culture and seeing a tiny bit of notoriety from writing about my experiences, I had been neck deep in the dunning-kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. I proofed along with a few others and put my stamp of approval on it, only to see the flaws when others pointed them out after release.
I couldn’t see the flaws in his approach on my own while serving as a sounding board for him, and I felt a sense of responsibility for that as the nature of his apology quickly blew up online. The communal response and resulting discourse opened my eyes, to Charlies limitations, my shortcomings, and eventually, the functional incompetence of us at large in holding him accountable through restorative justice.
The first attempt to repair was in public on facebook and it was an absolute shitshow. The result was more harm, more pain, more disappointment. Charlie, rightfully so, withdrew, to the upset and scrutiny of many, including myself, who encouraged him to leave his charge as a sex educator entirely. A short while after that, he emailed me to apologize, but again, the controlling nature of his tone kept me from taking him up on his offer to make amends with me for the situation his actions had placed me in.
Charlies situation and the role I played in it showed me in no uncertain terms that I was not nearly as far along as I needed to be to do the work of helping others heal from rape culture that I was doing. I came to understand through that experience with Charlie that a large portion of my advocacy trying to redeem abusive men alongside facing myself was actually serving as cover for them, and that I wasn’t doing the good work I thought I had been by openly pursuing my deconstruction.
The main reason I don’t write online about my personal development much at all anymore is that I came to understand I was actually misdirecting people from the support and accountability they (and I, ultimately) actually needed, not to mention consistently triggering survivors and inadvertently giving covert abusers in my life more tools and language (and a relationship with me) to hide behind. Similarly, I had no business trying to coach anyone through making things right when faced with the reality that sexual abuse had occurred by their actions, simply because I was aware from the vantage point of a looping victim/perpetrator cycle and good at articulating words about it.
So, after Charlie, I went off to handle myself, which has included being celibate for the better part of ten years, leaving my career as a healer/coach, avoiding or quickly leaving relationships that trigger my own icks, and focusing on secure platonic connections. I’ve fundamentally changed the ways I move and behave in groups, uprooted from the mentors, teachers, friends, and social circles I frequented that encouraged my abusive behaviors, and eventually ceased seeking the leadership, teaching positions, and ‘public figure’ status I was accustomed to, completely.
Through these actions, various therapies, and loads of transformative artwork, I’ve evolved quite a lot.
However, the community support required to be held accountable to the people I’ve hurt in my past, and to integrate my personal healing into actual social gains, is still missing for me. It’s missing for a lot of people. Most of us don’t even know what it looks like, or could look like, and are either forced or self select into exile.
Charlies foibles were, and have continued to be, my only firsthand experience in transformative justice to my knowledge. In these few days processing Neils predation and how it’s impacted me personally, my anger, my total lack of hope for any authentic redemption in listening to how he responded to the harm he’s caused, the sheer breadth of the emerging timeline of his abuse, and from the new angles I view my past relationship with him from, I was reminded of Charlie.
The situations are profoundly different, but the humility for me in not being as smart or discerning of warning signs as I am capable of being is not. Having not thought about him in many, many years, my first notions were “wonder what that guys up to now, he better not still be teaching sex and relationship shit to anyone!”.
It turns out, he IS still doing that. And, it also turns out that in 2018, two years after the clusterfuck on facebook and that really crappy apology to me, he tried the accountability process again.
Charlie Glickman Accountability Pod: https://cgaccpod.medium.com/
Charlie and his supporters left us a roadmap for what they did over the 5 year process to hold him accountable, support him in his healing and growth, and right the wrongs he did to his former partner and the community he still represents.
Few people enjoy such privilege and support to do the work Charlie and his team have done, and I do still have reservations about the sheer amount of fucking labor it takes just to keep people with history of abuse, including myself, in positions where they retain access to vulnerable people of any kind within an imbalanced power dynamic.
Consent mistakes do happen sometimes, however, in my case (and in the case of serial abusers of any kind imo) my earnestness to transcend my generational programming does not negate the risk I pose in positions of power over others, and I personally don’t want that for myself or the communities I’m a part of. I would rather give up the power, and be around people with abusive tendencies who feel the same way about protecting others and stepping back.
That all stated, hopefully, the rarity of processes like Charlies changes.
Punishment and accountability are not, in fact, the same thing, though they are often functionally synonymous in western society. Performance, saying the right words, throwing money at people, and kicking “abusers” out of their support networks is still about as far as most of us know how to go.
Certainly, there is no redeeming someone who refuses to be redeemed. Yelling at the Cosby’s, the Gaiman’s, the Weinstein’s of the world to apologize and mean it when they don’t have the will, skills, or capacity, while exposing ourselves and our stories of abuse to appeal to a morality they don’t have, is not cutting it. The horrific excuse for a “justice” system is not cutting it, either, and I’m thankful I’ve never looked to it for closure after being assaulted. The time for excommunication, victims impaling themselves in public, and carceral/monetary punishment being our only tools for handling abusive behavior is coming to an end.
I see Charlies accountability pods’ medium writings as a valuable resource for those voluntarily seeking methods of accountability and restoration in their communities, even with whatever flaws and critiques are to be had of it. Stumbling upon it lifted me up while a lot of things are weighing me down right now. Given the current climate, I thought it, and my story about Charlie, was worth jotting down and sharing.