I was, some years ago, falsely accused of sexual assault.

Let me begin by stating this clearly. I have never had non-consensual sex with anyone. I have never sexually assaulted anyone. I have never coerced, threatened, or duped anyone into having sex with me. I have never drugged anyone to make them compliant. I have only ever been interested in fully consensual romantic and sexual relationships, based in mutual desire, for mutual benefit.

I have made mistakes, over the years, in my relationships with women. But none of them involved the violation of consent.

Public false accusations are an extreme form of violence. In our current social environment, they are very difficult to counter. Fortunately, it is easier than ever before for victims of sexual assault to have their voices heard and their stories believed. Unfortunately, the same social movement that made this advance possible has also made it easy for false accusations to go unchallenged. People typically believe all accusations, making false ones almost impossible to fight against.

Sometimes, false accusers are deliberately malicious. They are seeking revenge for a perceived or actual slight, or willing to do any amount of damage in order to make money from a lawsuit. Those were certainly factors in my case, but I do not believe they were the primary motivators driving the cadre of people who organized against me.

As I see it, the group of people who came together to sue me were convinced they were on the side of justice. Though I had inadvertently caused harm, this group was led to believe I had done things far worse than anything that actually happened. They amassed power and influence to make sure I couldn't harm anyone else. Then, misguided by toxic leadership, and under the stultifying influence of ideology, they misused that power. This group did massive damage - to me, to their own community, and to some of the very women they ostensibly came together to protect.

I understand how easy it is to inadvertently misuse power. Had I understood power then, in the ways I do now, this mess never would have happened.

But I did not understand. As a result, some women were unhappy, at least in retrospect, about their romantic relationships with me. Separating out the actual harm I caused from the lies they chose to tell, or were pressured into telling, is more complex than you think, and is something I will attempt to do here. But there is a massive divide between what happened, which always involved clear consent, and the insane accusation of deliberately engineered sexual assault. There is almost no comparison between unintentionally misusing power, which I did, and deliberately dominating women with no care for their well-being, which I have never done.

Given what I'm asserting, why would a group of my former students, in service of winning a lawsuit, choose to lie so blatantly to you, and, for that matter, to everyone I've ever known? Why did they, under the guidance of a litigation attorney, choose to paint me publicly as a predatory master manipulator and serial rapist? What led to a group of people wanting to erase me, and my life's work, from the Earth, and nearly succeeding?

I'll tell you the story as I have come to understand it. It is, in many ways, a story about power, and about how easy it is to unintentionally misuse it.

I have tried, and failed, to write this piece for many years. It has seemed to be a psychologically impossible task. What happened to me is so hard to conceive of. Though I still don't think I can do this justice, I will try. Here's what I'm hoping to convey.

1. I am not the evil character you may have read about, invented by a litigation attorney to help a small cadre of people win a lawsuit. That lawsuit was packed from top to bottom with lies, as was the article written to be the lawsuit's public mouthpiece. I will correct some of those lies, telling my side of the story as briefly as I can. I know, within the community of my former students, many people doubted the veracity of the narrative a small group was spinning about me, but I never came forward to provide them an alternative. I want to finally clear up the confusion I have allowed to persist amongst people who knew me personally. I also want to provide an alternative perspective for anyone who might, in the future, encounter the libelous article about me that still exists online.
2. That said, I did, inadvertently, misuse my power in some of the sexual and romantic relationships I formed with my former students. I want to talk about how, even as someone who thought he understood power dynamics, I was able to make such poor judgment calls, causing emotional distress to people I cared deeply about. I want to offer up some of what I've learned in the hope that other leaders and teachers (as well as their students) can avoid the mistakes I made.
3. You may have been misled to believe I was sued by a group of six women I had been romantically involved with. That is not the case. I was sued by a group who recruited those women to be a part of their efforts, and who deeply traumatized some of those very women in the process of using them for their own ends. The complete group consisted of a few organizers, the six women in question, and a dozen other former participants of my counseling training (who did not allege that I did anything to them), simply tacked on to the group as a litigation strategy - strength in numbers. For the most part, the people in that group were convinced they were making a positive difference. They, too, inadvertently misused power they didn't fully realize they were wielding, swept up in something they quickly lost control over. I hope to help some of the people in that group reevaluate their choices, perhaps to resolve tensions some others have been living with since their involvement in this debacle, and to forgive each of them for being so careless with so many people's lives.
4. The allegations against me were engineered by a litigation attorney. The group that wound up suing me began as an effort to collect complaints some women had about our romantic relationships. Those complaints inventoried ways I had misused my power and regrets women had about their involvement with me. Seeing how I had hurt people I cared about was motivation enough for me to step down from leadership and spend some years cleaning up my act. The organizers of this group, however, were out for blood. It was only after consulting with a lawyer about how to win a lawsuit that they began making sexual assault allegations. You can't sue someone for upsetting you emotionally, but you can sue them for assaulting you.
5. In the years since the events I'm responding to here, I have counseled many men who have been publicly falsely accused of sexual violence and abuse. I'll say more later about how violent the effects are of false accusations. Our culture has benefitted from recent efforts to help victims of sexual assault reclaim their voices. But all nuance has been lost in the fervor, allowing people who are not victims to easily wreak destruction in the lives of innocent men. Victim and perpetrator roles are often all too clear. But they are not always so. There are enormous grey areas, and huge spectrums around power and consent. We fail to understand these gray areas when we oversimplify everything into black and white. If we wish to truly shift the paradigm around sexual dynamics, our social dialogue needs to mature to include the complexity in these areas. Indeed, part of why I feel now is the time to finally write and publish this, is the slowly developing sense of balance and nuance on these topics.

This is clearly too much to do in what I'm hoping will be an article of reasonable length. I will try to hit all the most important points, and leave the rest for future elaborations.

Some Context

For many years, I led an annual, year-long counseling training called Interchange. It met one weekend per month, over ten months. People came to learn counseling skills and to do personal growth work. I led it for well over a decade, during which time it grew to a size of around 150 students per year.

Interchange was considered by many who took it to be the best workshop they'd ever encountered. It was highly effective at teaching counseling skills for professional and personal use, in ways that academic programs tend to fail at. The experience of the training itself made a positive, frequently life-changing, difference in the lives of students. The training was well-loved and helped many thousands of people through its ripple effects.

The best way to learn counseling is by doing it, specifically through peer counseling in which students take turns counseling one another. That requires a community learning environment where people build trust so they can be real. As a result, Interchange wasn't merely a counseling skills training. It was a community.

When you teach something you care deeply about, your friends (and friends of friends) wind up joining, and you attract students who share your interests and values, people who you would naturally affiliate with had you met them in another context. Over the years, my personal community came to consist more and more of people who had taken my training. Some of them became my closest friends, colleagues, housemates, business partners, and lovers.

Interchange was the community I wanted for myself. But being the leader of a community comes at a cost. If you're the leader, you can never be a member. You may feel like one of the group, but some percentage of your constituency will always see you as something else. The kind of "something else" they imagine you to be is at the heart of what "power dynamics" really means.

If you're a good leader, some of your followers will see you as more than merely human. All of your followers will be vulnerable to this fallacy to one extent or another. You may come to believe it yourself. I'll say more as we go about how this dynamic came to wreak havoc in my personal relationships. For now, I'll only say that I did not understand it at the time, and I assert that very few people ever do.

I did my best to remedy the universal tendency of students to pedestalize leaders. I always encouraged students to think for themselves and find their own ways of doing things. I humanized myself as a teacher, acknowledging my limitations and mistakes, even letting myself be counseled in front of my students on my personal issues. I'm sure my efforts to de-guru-ize myself were helpful to some people. Others, for better or worse, just interpreted my authenticity, or my capacity to be vulnerable, as another reason to pedestalize me.

Every teacher knows some students are all too eager to relinquish their authority. A small minority of my students had the need to project their idea of teacher on me - teacher with a capital "T". In the therapy world, that same "T" stands for "transference". Some people desperately want to believe someone has all the answers. Some are searching for the idealized, perfect parent figures they never had, or that they imagined their parents to be when they were young.

I thought I could tell the difference between students who projected onto me in these ways and those who didn't. I believed that my former students who became close friends, and certainly those whom I chose to date, were amongst the people who could see me as a peer: a regular, flawed person who was in the role of teacher because I happened to teach counseling skills well. I thought they were in the category of people who didn't have a need to imagine me (or any other teacher) to be a superhuman or a guru.

I was wrong. There are not really two distinct categories. Everyone projects onto leaders to one extent or another. Some fawning, younger students were quite obviously on one end of the spectrum. Some more mature students who were themselves leaders were obviously on the other end. Everyone else was somewhere in the middle, sliding unpredictably back and forth across the spectrum.

During those years, I sometimes began romantic or sexual relationships with graduates of my program. All these relationships were with fully consenting adults. I didn't think what I was doing was wrong. It wasn't a secret, and I didn't think my dating life was harming anyone. Please keep in mind, I was not a spiritual teacher who hypocritically taught about abstinence or sexual repression. On the contrary, outside my counseling training, I taught radical workshops about relationships, with names like "Deep Dating" and "Ending Jealousy Permanently".

I was, for that matter, never in the closet about my very Bay Area, alternative lifestyle choices. I have been in open relationships most of my life. I participated in and organized sex parties, euphemistically referred to as "play parties", long before they became commonplace. I am a proponent of psychedelics as a means of expanding consciousness. If you are interested in none of these things, or even wish to judge me for my involvement in them, I certainly understand. Personally, I have no interest in, for instance, fine wines, BDSM, spectator sports, or playing poker. On the other hand, I'm a big fan of psychedelics, play parties, mountain climbing, and the New York Times crossword puzzle. We are all different. I have always had non-traditional ideas regarding sex, love, and relationships. I have been fortunate to belong to large and growing communities of people who share these ideas, and put them into practice in proactively ethical ways.

Do you find what I just said to be scandalous? You were supposed to. The lawsuit against me, and its tabloid-like accompanying article, sensationalized my participation in these alternative practices for shock value. That's understandable as a litigation strategy, but it's also entirely disingenuous. The majority of the group that sued me, including most of the women at the center of the lawsuit, were also a part of these communities.

Defending Myself

When you are falsely accused, it is very difficult to defend yourself.

So many of us have been victims of assault and abuse, but have had nowhere to direct our anger. Others of us have seen our loved ones hurt and have felt powerless to do anything. Whether you have been a victim yourself, or wished you could rescue someone else from victimhood, you may not think you're waiting for a scapegoat to come along. But when one does, it probably feels good to see them suffer. This form of socially sanctioned sadism can be even stronger in those of us who consider ourselves to stand on moral high ground. Finally, we are presented with someone we can feel righteous about hating.

The majority of people who hear accusations immediately demonize the supposed perpetrator. When an identified perpetrator is dehumanized in this way, their voice is silenced. Anyone who stands up for them is equally subject to the violence of social aggression. As the person accused, it is a no win situation. Silence is considered to be agreement. Apology for any wrongdoing is treated as admission of guilt and invites further attack. Attempts to counter the accusations are seen as defensiveness, which is also considered a sign of guilt.

It is like the stories of the Salem witch trials. Accused women were bound and thrown in the water. If they were witches, it was believed, they would float back up, only to be found guilty and killed. If they sank to the bottom, they were exonerated. Only your death can prove your innocence.

These are among the reasons I didn't fight back from the beginning. I was attacked, and did not defend myself. I am finally defending myself now. I need to start with a bit of explanation about the lawsuit, the article, and the six women at their center. Then I'll show you how much the reality of my relationships diverged from the fiction.

Why Lawsuits Lie

If you are lucky enough to be unfamiliar with lawsuits, the first thing to know is that they are always about money. For this reason, the vast majority of them (somewhere between 80-95%) settle out of court. Both sides calculate the considerable cost of going to trial, and determine whether a settlement is likely to be the most economical outcome. Settlements occur without any admission of guilt. Lawsuits are often designed to pressure the defendant into settling.

This group sued me to extract money from the insurance companies Interchange used. The lawsuit was settled after a year. The plaintiffs, along with their attorney, were well-rewarded financially for their considerable efforts. I had little to do with it. From my perspective, it was a rather nasty game played by litigation attorneys and insurance companies.

Just to make this point clear, the women who falsely accused me, and later stood by those false allegations, made a lot of money off of doing so.

Litigation attorneys, as far as I can tell, come in two varieties - those who operate with integrity, and those who play dirty, morality be damned. The cadre who initiated this lawsuit found themselves an attorney I consider to be squarely in the latter category. She packed the lawsuit from top to bottom with deliberate distortions and complete fabrications. This is a surprisingly common strategy when the plaintiffs don't expect the suit to reach trial. It puts them at no risk, and, though the suit is published in the public record, it is exempt from defamation and libel laws, regardless of how outrageous its claims are. The group's attorney individually coached each of the accusers, under the cloak of anonymity, to distort the truth, to pretend that consensual sexual activity was non-consensual, and to make their stories sound similar to one another.

It was a Frankenstein's monster of a lawsuit, jamming together as many disparate kinds of allegations as they could come up with - about me, my relationships, my business, and the legitimacy of my training.

As an example, it contains a story about a woman who was ostensibly shamed and deeply traumatized by a counseling session I supposedly coerced her into doing in front of the room during one of the training weekends. Long after the lawsuit was settled, I showed this woman the story about her. She had had no idea the lawsuit included something about her in it. She read the story, and found it shocking and ludicrous. Her actual experience, as she reported to me, was that she was completely in charge of the experience, which she initiated, and found it to be, not perfect, but quite powerful and liberating. No one had asked her about it before using it as fodder for the lawsuit.

I can't repeat this enough. The lawsuit was an assemblage of lies, signed by a group of people somehow led to believe that lying about a training they loved was the right thing to do.

If you didn't know that lawsuits are routinely, deliberately full of misinformation, you are not alone. The naive reporter recruited by this group to write an article about the lawsuit was similarly ignorant, resulting in an article that broadcast many of the suit's fabrications. He was so inept at reporting the truth that, when one of the women accusing me refused to grant him an interview, he simply parroted the lawsuit's fictions, to horrifying effect. You'll hear more about that one soon.

The Myth Of The Master Manipulator

As I read it, the article about me describes an absolute monster. If I didn't know it was me being depicted, I would thoroughly despise the man the article pretends to be reporting on. In the story, Interchange is depicted as a sham, a front for the leader's nefarious appetites. I, as the leader, supposedly read through students' counseling notes in search of women with histories of sexual abuse. I am then said to have used my skills as a master manipulator to hunt down these supposedly 'easy targets', in order to sexually assault them.

Someone fabricated a horrifying narrative about a truly evil person and then put my name on it. Apparently, it is easier to believe in leaders with secret evil agendas than to imagine that a good person could inadvertently cause emotional harm to people he cared about. This master manipulator stereotype has been a mainstay of anti-Semitism since the inception of Christianity.

I'm a smart, Jewish leader who knows some things about human psychology and human relationships. Many people are envious of leaders. Some people are intimidated by intelligence. Put it all together, and you might be able to convince people I was an evil hypnotist. The real manipulator here was the attorney who engineered this narrative. Apparently, it's not hard to convince the masses to believe in the absurd stereotypes of good and evil they see in the movies.

Who was supposedly accusing me of being such a master manipulator? No one. The accusers were all anonymous.

The Double-Edged Shield Of Anonymity

It is easy to project onto anonymous victims. You can imagine them as naive and innocent, impressionable and defenseless.

You would probably not guess, for instance, that most of the women anonymized in the lawsuit were, at the time, professional counselors, coaches, and workshop leaders. All of these women were adults and perfectly capable of making decisions for themselves. None of them were my clients. None were currently students in Interchange. If you called any of them powerless, or incapable of making decisions for themselves about their sexuality, they would probably call you sexist, and they would be right.

As I have come to understand it, some of these women were pressured into participation. They were pressured into lying, and into using their stories for someone else's agenda. While they certainly profited financially from lying, that only partially compensates for the ways in which they were used by the collective. In this regard, I am glad that they were kept anonymous, and hope that can continue to be the case. They now have the chance to move on and put this episode behind them.

We all want actual victims to be protected by anonymity. I, however, do not extend that protection to unethical people who wish to lie publicly with no accountability for doing so. I was never asked to protect anyone's identity; I never agreed to do so; and I remain ambivalent about whether to continue to.

I have been back and forth on this one a lot. Initially, out of guilt, I wanted nothing more than to prevent further emotional harm from coming to any of these women. Later, out of anger, when I found out how brutal and blatant their lies were, I wanted nothing more than to expose them.

The first version I wrote of this article exposed everyone's identities and gave all the explicit details of each of my relationships, replete with screenshots of our text messages as evidence for the lies they later told. I thought if, in the public eye, they became real people again, some with their own questionable histories, it would break the spell of imaginary innocence provided by anonymity. I also knew those women would be forever plagued by having their names on Google, associated both with their false accusations and details about their sex lives. I knew personally how much damage Google search results were continuing to cause in my life.

By the time the decision about whether to fight the lawsuit came around, I wanted to protect these women from spending days on the stand defending their sexual histories, specifically the women I believe to have been pressured into participation in the suit. That was a major reason, beside loathing the idea of months in court myself, that I agreed to allow the lawsuit to settle.

What Really Happened

I will give you my side of the story as briefly as possible. I have no interest in providing the tabloid-level sensational details that were in the article about me. Given the extreme nature of the lies in that article, however, I need to talk somewhat explicitly about sex. I will avoid most details. My primary intent is to demonstrate how much reality diverges from the master manipulator narrative.

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The most heinous story in that article is about a former student I supposedly took to a party, who passed out only to find me on top of her when she awoke. That indeed would have been a terrible thing, had it really happened.

In actuality, that was not a random former student. That was my life partner. We had been in a relationship for over two years already, and we lived together. I did not take her to a party. We threw that party together, at our shared apartment.

The party was quite edgy, but it was an idea she had come up with. She called them "altered states naked cuddle parties". The event in question was the fifth such party we had thrown together. Each one consisted of a small, curated group of carefully invited individuals, in an intimate closed setting. In our opening "ceremony", everyone took the same psychedelic together, and then disrobed. The intent was to spend the night naked together, tripping, with sensuality or sex as an option for anyone who chose it, which of course always required mutual consent.

At this particular party, my partner and I had sex with each other multiple times, and also did so together with another couple. Shortly thereafter, at the end of the night, she fell asleep, as did everyone else. I woke her with sexual contact, which was something we had both done with each other numerous times over the course of our relationship. I believed it to be well within the scope of our agreements. As it turns out, I misjudged how that would be for her in that particular context, and it was jarring and disorienting for her.

The next morning, after everyone left, she was extremely upset. I apologized profusely, assured her I wouldn't make that error again, expressed my confusion, and did my best to understand why this particular interaction was so different for her. It was, from my perspective, a misunderstanding between partners about our pre-existing agreements.

We argued about it. We got help from some friends resolving the conflict. And we then stayed together for another two years, during which we threw another five of those parties together, and founded a communal house together!

Clearly, this is not the story you read in the article. Anyone who knows my ex-partner personally, is appalled to discover she was the woman from this deliberately misleading story. Lies of omission and decontextualization can be some pretty big lies.

I hope you can already see, from this example, just how little these stories have to do with the reality of what happened.

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Three of the women in the lawsuit made claims that they were unable to give consent to sex with me because we were on drugs together. In each of these cases, we first had completely sober, completely consensual sex, sometimes more than once. Only after that did we decide to take psychedelics together and have sex in an altered state. Each time, we made a specific, advance plan to do this. These plans even happen to be documented in text messages. In each case, we started having sex while sober and continued after the drug began to take effect. Complete, sober consent.

Each of these three women was later pressured by the collective, and convinced by the litigation attorney, to say they had been unable to give consent because they were on drugs. Each of them knew they were lying when they made such claims (or, at least, allowing a lie to be told on their behalf) under the safe cloak of anonymity.

But the fictions in their stories go far beyond that.

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One of these relationships was an unusual, collaborative experiment in dating for the explicit purpose of this person's sexual liberation. I was playing the role of sex worker in some ways, although no money was involved. It was non-professional. We had numerous collaborative conversations before and throughout the process about how to create these date/sessions. Over the span of two years, we had a dozen such encounters. After the final one, she summed up her experience in this message to me:

That wasn't the only such message she sent me. Partially as a result of our experiences together, she went on to become a counselor specializing in helping women overcome shame related to sexuality. We remained friends, and she later came back to attend Interchange retreats, and even did some seasonal work for us.

This was not the only of these relationships that was almost entirely positive.

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One woman abstained from giving an interview to the reporter writing a hit piece about me. She was willing to have lies told on her behalf, but presumably was unable to lie in person to the press. This did not stop the reporter from "reporting" on her supposed experience. He simply parroted material from the lawsuit. Without ever interviewing her, he wrote that I gave her drugs and then raped her. That is a complete fiction, and it is not reporting.

In reality, she and I had entirely positive, entirely consensual experiences together. She was upset, when the tensions started brewing that led to this lawsuit, that it interfered with our ability to keep dating. She had just re-enrolled in Interchange for a second year. She knew we would need to stop dating while she was a student, but was hoping we would have time together before the year began. As she texted me:

Later, she was pressured into joining the lawsuit and lying about her experiences.

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There are two cases that were somewhat more complicated.

One was the snowball that started the avalanche. We had two casual sexual encounters in the summer after she graduated from Interchange. One of these was at a play party thrown by a mutual friend at my communal house, which she signed up to attend completely independently of me. One was at Burning Man, where she chose (also independently of me) to stay in the camp I had been teaching with for several years. Both of those encounters were explicitly verbally consensual, completely sober, and fully mutual. She then unexpectedly returned to Interchange to review the training a second time, truncating the possibility of further sexual encounters between us, which would have been unlikely regardless.

A year later, her new boyfriend, who she met as a fellow Interchange student, was upset to find out about her sexual history with me. In order to save face, she told him a version of events that made it seem like she wasn't the fully agentic participant that she was. Shocked, he encouraged her to more fully develop the narrative she first told him, not aware of how much deceit it already contained. She doubled down on her face-saving distortion of events, and then quadrupled down. The written version of that story, loosely based on actual events, is replete with deliberate omissions, exaggerations, and inventions.

They distributed that story widely. I can only guess that she got so carried away that she didn't realize libel is against the law. Some people get committed to the lies they tell.

As a brief example, here are a few sentences from her story, about our experience together at a play party:

In reality, she knew what I wanted because we had made a plan, via text, before the party, to meet up in the sauna. Some hours into the party, I invited her to come meet me in the sauna, and went there on my own. I waited alone there for ten minutes, genuinely unsure whether she would choose to join me. Then she appeared, wearing only panties, and immediately came over and straddled me. I was naked. She was not hesitant or shy in the slightest. In my experience, she in no way resembled the non-agentic character she depicts herself to be in her story, and this holds true for all my subsequent experiences with her as well.

This brings up an important point about narratives, especially in the context of a lawsuit. You only need to make subtle alterations in how you tell a story before the meaning of events changes completely. It is how litigation attorneys routinely spin narratives. In this lawsuit, many of the falsehoods were far more overt and dramatic. Some, however, were just the minimum distortions needed to give a deliberately false impression.

By the time any of these stories reached the public eye, however, they were entirely engineered, beginning to end, no detail left undistorted.

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So far, I have touched on five relationships, which lasted for varying lengths of time, each involving multiple sexual encounters spaced out over time. I have absolute certainty that each of those women wanted to be sexually and romantically involved with me. Could they have wanted to for the wrong reasons? Perhaps. Were the relationships imperfect? Definitely. Did I fail to recognize the ways our power differential led to experiences that were less than ideal for my partner? Sometimes. That matters, and it will receive further examination here. Regardless, these were all women that wanted and chose, multiple times, to engage with me sexually.

The sixth case is different. The woman in question gave explicit verbal consent, and never expressed, before, during, or after either of our sexual encounters that anything was wrong. Nonetheless, I now suspect she was caught in some kind of dissociative state that led her to pretend she wanted something when she didn't. Of course, I didn't see this at the time. Only in retrospect was I able to examine how I misinterpreted her signals. Both times we had sex, she was quite passive. Some women tend to be, and it wasn't hard for me to interpret this as us just being sexually incompatible. Both times, we paused all sexual activity within a few short minutes, as neither of us was enjoying the experience. I wish I could have seen what was really going on. I would never in a million years have wanted someone to pretend to want to have sex with me. When I finally came to reinterpret things in this way, I was horrified. I feel terrible that I missed how incongruent her verbal and non-verbal signals were.

Whatever internal process led to her saying yes, however, I can't understand why she would later blame me for not being able to tell she was faking it. Had she ever declined an invitation, expressed disinterest, said no, or told me something was less than entirely positive, nothing would have happened between us. I may have been oblivious to signals I could have picked up on, but she did her best to hide those signals.

This particular case provides some foreshadowing for the discussion I want to have later about what went wrong, and my part in it. A woman convincingly faked interest in me, gave clear verbal consent more than once, said positive things about our first experience together, invited me to meet with her again, again expressed interest during explicit conversation, and never even hinted anything was amiss. Whatever her reasons for doing that, in any other relationship, I suspect she would have recognized that she had effectively deceived someone. On the other hand, if she believed me to be somehow superhuman, capable of reading her mind, she might imagine that I knew she was faking it, and that I went along with it anyway. She might later imagine that I must have known she didn't really want to be doing what we were doing, blame me for her choice to engage, and tell the people around her that I had manipulated her into it.

All Your Exes

Imagine this scenario. We have assembled all your exes together in one room to compare notes on everything they didn't like about their relationships with you.

The session will be led by two people. One of them is an ex-employee of yours who had always secretly resented you. The other is someone you dated briefly, who happens to have written a story designed to make you look as bad as possible. This particular ex wrote her story to mollify her current partner, who recently discovered she had been lying about your history together. To accomplish this face-saving task, her story deliberately omits essential information, exaggerates things that were minor, and throws in a few all-out falsehoods for good measure.

All your exes gathered are now asked to read the story, and consider whether any of their experiences were similar. If not, they are encouraged to reinterpret their past with you. Perhaps, the leaders suggest, you were secretly manipulating them the entire time. If they have been giving you the benefit of the doubt, they should stop immediately. If they dismissed anything less than ideal as merely one of the ups and downs of romantic relationships, they should reframe that as harm deliberately caused by you. They should consider you completely responsible for anything that went wrong or was left unresolved. In that spirit, they should then write their own story.

This is how the campaign against me began. The organizers of this effort collected stories from any women they knew I had been involved with, who had also been a part of Interchange. There was even one from someone who imagined (incorrectly) that I was coming on to her, but whom I never otherwise interacted with. This whole process was done in secret, with everyone sworn to keep me in the dark and to not leak anything to any of my friends, as we were all a part of the same extended community.

This was shortly before the new year of Interchange was slated to begin. Everyone on the incoming Interchange leadership team for the coming year (about two dozen people) was invited to meet up and read those stories. The stories were anonymized, and the team members were only able to read printouts in person in a group meeting, in order to keep them secret.

I was able, ultimately, to read a couple of those stories, and I got reports from several of the readers about the content of the others.

Two things were apparent. The first was that I had been causing quite a bit of emotional harm that I did not know I was causing. The second was that none of the stories talked about non-consensual sex because, of course, there had never been any. That content was added later as the stories were strategically distorted for the lawsuit.

The advantage of getting your most-disgruntled exes together to talk shit about you, is that you learn a lot about your worst qualities in relationship. Two of my worst qualities are of essential relevance here: I was often unable to tell when women overrode their own preferences in favor of what they thought I wanted, and I made myself unavailable for them to give me feedback when something was hard on them.

Before I finally learned who was writing stories about me, and what they said, I was panicked, but not for the reasons you might imagine. It's not that I was afraid I was finally 'getting caught'. It was the opposite. I could not figure out who had such significant complaints about me, or what the complaints could be about.

It was actually a great relief to finally discover who was saying what about me. The terror and confusion I had been taken by as this process progressed gave way to overwhelming shame. How could I have screwed up that many relationships, in various ways, without realizing it?

The group organizing all this had decided, rather than trying to involve me in conversation about it, to go full adversarial, though as yet I had no idea how far they were going to take that commitment. In the meanwhile, it was obvious they were angling to try to take me down. Once I finally began to understand all the harm I had done, however, they didn't need to. It was clear I needed to step down from a leadership role and devote some extended period to working on myself.

I met with the two dozen people who were to be Interchange's incoming leadership team. I was not in good shape. I had barely begun to understand what all of this meant. My life, my life's work, and my identity were all unraveling. Fortunately, some of the people in that group were true allies, proponents of restorative justice (rather than retributive justice), capable of holding the complexities of human relationships all at once, rather than preemptively sorting people into good and evil. They listened. I listened. I told them I considered myself unfit to lead, and that I would be stepping down.

This meeting ended with a group of senior leaders interested in taking over Interchange from me. They would inherit the business, take over my teaching roles, and get whatever support they needed from me to keep Interchange alive for the benefit of everyone else. Alas, cancel culture doesn't work that way. It demands total erasure. The people organizing against me managed to block that plan. I'll tell that story elsewhere, but it is how these things always go. A small number of angry, adversarial people control the fate of a much larger number who don't share their lust for blood.

Having done good in the world does not make up for having done harm. There is no such calculus. The good stands on its own. The harm does as well. Preventing someone from contributing in the future, however, also does not erase the harm. It just prevents countless people from benefitting. Those people have voices, too.

Toxic Leadership

All it takes is one toxic leader to rally the forces of the hurt, to exact revenge on a scapegoat.

Toxic leaders bring out the worst in people, rather than the best. They elevate pettiness to a virtue, make all conflicts into zero sum games, and force their agendas onto their constituencies while pretending to be of service.

Unfortunately, as I stepped down, such a toxic leader stepped up. As such leaders do, she demonstrated to as many people as possible that destroying feels, at least momentarily, as powerful as creating.

I am partially to blame for this. In the years this woman worked as an admin assistant for Interchange, and then led a small group as a member of the leadership team, I repeatedly failed to interrupt her bullying. This was during the years when the social justice movement was just starting to take a wrong turn, away from inclusion and tolerance, toward polarization and ideology. She was a quintessential example of someone who glorified antagonism while pretending to represent justice. I did not yet understand how oppressive this kind of power can be. I probably even celebrated, more than once, her expressions of righteous anger, or her publicly voiced fantasies about beating up people she thought deserved it. I failed her, and I paid for that failure.

This toxic leader, wearing the mantle of "ally," systematically gaslit the six women she was pretending to stand up for. She began by appointing herself the authority on these women's experiences. She did her best to convince them that they had been wrong about their own histories. Based on accounts from those she bullied, I understand she insisted that they re-interpret consensual sexual encounters as non-consensual.

These six women, by their own self-description, were unusually susceptible to influence by people in authority. That's why they claimed to have been unduly influenced by me. You might guess then, that someone in authority, claiming to be their ally, would be extra careful not to impose an agenda on them. Instead, the opposite happened. Each of these women was under pressure, throughout the entire long process, to yield their own authority to the will of the group, as determined by its toxic leader.

But they weren't only encouraged to change their own stories. They were lied to about the stories of the other women in the group.

Let's imagine you have lingering resentment toward a man you dated. Now you're told that he did much worse things to several other women than he did to you. Those women need your help. If you would be willing to stretch the truth, just a little, about what happened to you, it would really help these other women. In such circumstances, would you lie?

Most of these women did not have access to accurate information about the experiences of the other women in the lawsuit. Some of them believed they were lying in solidarity. They only heard engineered versions of the other women's stories, and they were under massive social pressure to allow their own stories to be fictionalized by the group's attorney.

Epistemic Charisma

For me to understand what went wrong in some of these relationships, I needed to learn about an aspect of power that doesn't get much airtime.

It is often easy to see when people use their power to unjustly dominate others. It is equally obvious when leaders take advantage of clearly delineated "positions of power" within an institution or hierarchy. These are aspects of oppressive or destructive power that we all know about.

There's a less obvious kind of power, however, that some people have. It is creative, rather than destructive; empowering, rather than oppressive; yet still capable of causing harm. It persists even in leaders who are the most benevolent wielders of power they know how to be. If I had to put it as simply as possible, it goes something like this:

When you have power, some people lose their minds around you.

I don't mean that they go crazy. I mean that some aspects of their intelligence go temporarily offline. They stop thinking for themselves.

If you consider an obvious form of power, like hierarchical power, there's an analog. If you are my boss, I don't necessarily say what I really think to you. I don't tell you what I think about you, and I don't tell you anything that might make me look bad from an employer's perspective, or whatever I imagine an employer's perspective might be. I believe that I have to present you a curated version of reality, or at least a filtered communication style. I am, however, aware that I am doing these things.

Now let's think about a less obvious form of power. Say you run into a rock star at a restaurant, or one of your favorite celebrities. Someone introduces you to them. What happens to your brain at that moment? It's almost a kind of shock. You're in awe of the person because you don't actually see them as a person. You see only the more-than-human image you've understandably formed of them. So you're nervous, but you want them to like you, and you don't want to look stupid, and all that pressure only increases your nervousness. By now, you're operating with a fraction of your normal brain power. In this case, however, you're also aware that you are compromised. The situation is extreme enough to make it obvious.

When it comes to your boss, you have to worry about someone exercising power over you. How they evaluate you can make the circumstances of your life better or worse. When it comes to a celebrity, they have no such pragmatic power over you. They can only bestow their liking upon you, or on the other side, judge or ignore you.

Let's say you hit it off with your new celebrity friend. You were flustered initially, but eventually your heart rate slows down and you regain your composure. The question is, do you regain your capacity to think clearly around them, to the same extent you would around most people you know? Or do you continue to imagine them to be smarter, or more capable, or more important than you? As a result, do you yield to them when it comes to making decisions, or in dealing with differences of opinion? What if, rather than a rock star, your new friend was a thought leader, someone known for their ideas rather than their performances? Would that make you more likely to outsource your thinking to them?

When you have this kind of power, some people will lose their minds around you. They, for the most part, will not know they have lost their minds. You also, for the most part, will not be able to tell that they have.

None of this happens because you're scary or dangerous. It's not even because you have access to resources they want. It's because your way of making sense of things offers a compelling alternative to what they currently feel limited by. They want in on your reality.

Steve Jobs has been described as projecting a kind of "reality distortion field." Some people, in his presence, felt as if they were swept up in an alternate reality. They would get excited by his ideas and plans, only to be confused later about how they could have so easily believed in the seemingly impossible things he was suggesting. He wasn't, from my perspective, deliberately manipulating people. He was genuinely opening up new possibilities that people found compelling, but those possibilities often collapsed when he was no longer around.

I don't know of a good name for this kind of power, but I think of it as a kind of "epistemic charisma" - the appeal of good ideas presented in accessible ways, especially by someone who seems to be a representative of those ideas in action.

This is the power to influence how people understand the world. It's the kind of power I had, and hopefully still have.

The Boiling Frog Of Power

It is easy for people who have never had real power to critique the misuses of power by those who have it. It looks simple from the outside. I know, because I was one of those critics. I saw how leaders misused power. I thought I knew how it worked.

The biggest problem with having epistemic charisma is the same as having any kind of power. It creeps up on you. You don't always realize you have it, and even when you do, it is easy to underestimate your influence. The easiest power to misuse is power you don't realize you possess.

People who have historically been powerless, or at least felt powerless, may continue to feel that way even after they have become significantly more powerful. That's part of what happened with the group that organized against me. They felt powerless even as they amassed a huge arsenal of weaponry. You can become incredibly aggressive and destructive and still feel as if you're "speaking truth to power." It all happens so gradually that you don't realize you have become the power that needs truth spoken to it.

A similar issue arises when it comes to epistemic charisma, even though it is a non-dominating form of power. When I was in the role of leader, at the front of a room, I knew I was inviting people into an alternate way of seeing the world. That was part of the job.

Then, when I was no longer the teacher, I usually thought of myself as just a guy. I didn't grasp the extent to which that role could not be abdicated.

Some former students, in totally different contexts, still imagined me to be the person in front of their room. They considered me to be responsible for their well-being as they tried on things that were unfamiliar to them. They imagined, without realizing they were doing so, that whenever they were with me, they were in a workshop I was leading. They sometimes stopped taking charge of their own decisions, or managing their own limits. They certainly stopped taking responsibility for their own risks.

---

While the cadre who organized against me was collecting stories, I was desperately trying to figure out what was going on. Numerous people advised me against reaching out to women I had dated, fearing I might be perceived as threatening. Despite this, I managed to have conversations with a couple of women I trusted about their experiences with me.

One woman told me, essentially, that she didn't enjoy her first date with me. At the end of the date, rather than saying so, she found herself suggesting we schedule a second date. She was bewildered by her own behavior. Only much later did she come to understand why her own mind failed her. Because she pedestalized me, if something didn't feel right to her, she assumed it must be her problem, rather than being a problem with me, or something incompatible about us together.

Another woman, with whom I'd had a number of dates over the previous year, shared something similar with me. On our first date, after fooling around a bit, we discussed the possibility of having intercourse. For reasons of our own, I was only interested in having unprotected sex, and she was only interested in having protected sex. It seemed we were just not in sync and wouldn't have intercourse. From my perspective, that would have been fine. At some point during our discussion, however, she thought she detected an edge of annoyance or irritation in my voice. I was not actually annoyed, but she imagined that I was, and soon found herself discarding her preference and going along with mine.

She was confused by her own behavior. Had it been anyone else, she said, she would have berated them for showing even a hint of anger about the topic. With me, she instead yielded to what she thought I wanted, even when that wasn't right for her. She was wrong about what I wanted, of course. I never would have wanted her to betray her own values or relinquish her preferences in favor of mine. Nonetheless, she found herself going along with what she thought I wanted.

In such encounters, I assumed that when one of these women said she wanted something, it was because she wanted it. I assumed that when she did something, it was because she wanted to do it. I assumed if she changed her mind, it was because she wanted to change it. I was informed by a naive anti-sexist stance. I wanted to respect whatever choices a woman I was with was making. They were, after all, her choices. But when someone replaces their choices with what they think I want them to choose, the meaning of choice gets pretty confusing for everyone.

Power In Relationships

I want to discuss what went wrong in some of my relationships.

Before I can do that, I have to emphasize that I am talking about relationships. When accusations of sexual misconduct are made, it is easy to assume we are no longer talking about real relationships between two people. Even though some of the sexual encounters I had with the women in question occurred in "casual" environments, like play parties, none of the relationships were limited to those environments. In each of the relationships in question, we had sex on more than one occasion. Some of them were dating relationships that lasted months or years. One was my primary partner for over four years.

Why does this matter? Because everyone comes to relationships looking for something. We seek love, intimacy, pleasure, security, a chance to be vulnerable, or to be seen and understood. We often have a sense of some greater possibility, something magical or healing, something that helps us remember why life is worth living.

In each of these relationships, I brought hopes and expectations, and so did the other person. Power differences led to both my expectations and theirs being unrealistic, in complementary ways.

Power differences in relationships always exist to some extent, and are by no means inherently harmful. They can be genuinely beneficial. That's one reason people often seek out relationships with people more powerful than themselves.

In the majority of the relationships that made it into the lawsuit, we had a conversation at some point early on about the power differential between us. We both acknowledged it, believed we could navigate it, and chose to proceed with some awareness of the challenge. Knowing what I now know, I look back on those conversations as well-intentioned on both our parts, but lacking in real understanding of what power differences meant.

You may hold the opinion that I should have held a universal boundary with my former students. That is a sure way not to risk misunderstandings due to power differences. If I were to do it again, I would definitely hold a boundary with former students of my year-long training. It's a long enough time frame for real transference to develop, such that students might develop an unrealistic fantasy of me, imagining me to be more than merely human.

However, it quickly gets more complicated. Nearly 1000 students had been through Interchange. Many of them had become my friends and housemates. Even more were a part of the large and growing sex-positive community in the Bay Area. There was significant overlap between people who taught and attended transformational workshops, and people who threw and attended edgy and experimental parties. I was firmly planted in both worlds.

In addition, there's something you might not appreciate about being in a visible leadership role. There is no end to the number of people who might project onto you because of your leadership.

What about the thousands of people who came to a day-long workshop of mine, or a three-hour workshop at Burning Man, or just an introductory evening for Interchange? What about all the people who watched my videos or read my articles? What about people who simply knew me by reputation? Is it obvious to you where to draw the line? Epistemic charisma is a form of power that is not role-based or hierarchical in nature. People from any of these groups could lose their ability to think for themselves with me, without either of us realizing it.

If you're a well-known teacher, a thought leader, a celebrity, or any other variety of rock star, the question of where to draw the line will haunt you. This is not a black and white conversation about consent, but a recognition that we need to talk about more nuanced distinctions and gray areas. This is the kind of conversation I wish we could have been having all along, instead of pretending consent is the only issue at hand.

Power And Misunderstanding

At the heart of my misunderstanding was my desire to be part of my own community.

I wanted to believe I could have peer relationships with people who had been my students. I wasn't entirely deluded in that regard. Some women I dated were free of transference, or capable of shaking it, or of meeting me as a kind of peer.

More often than I knew, however, there was a great divergence between how I made sense of the relationship and how the other person did.

I thought, in the context of a romantic encounter or dating relationship, that we were peers. To me, that meant we were equally responsible for the interaction going well for both of us, and equally responsible if something turned out to be awkward or disappointing.

I thought I could relinquish my power, but that's only possible when the other person steps into theirs. Unless that happened, like it or not, the other person still imagined me to be in charge.

I doubt any of these women explicitly imagined I was leading a two-person workshop just for them. They probably did not consider me to be their teacher or leader in the context of our one-on-one interactions. Even in my one experimental hybrid dating/counseling relationship, we were clear it was an ongoing collaboration. But even when they didn't realize they were doing it, some women acted as if I was solely in charge of creating a positive experience for both of us, and that I was solely to blame if anything didn't work out.

Why couldn't I tell these women were treating me differently than they treated other men? How would I have?

Can you tell the difference between someone who really likes you, and someone who just likes what you represent for them? Can you distinguish between someone genuinely attracted to you, and someone who just thinks they should be so they can hang out with you? It can be difficult for anyone to tell, but it's far more so if you've never been in a position like mine.

So here's the recipe for disaster. I'm dreaming that someone who was recently a student of mine can see me as a peer, have room for my human flaws and limitations, and care about my needs and desires. She is hoping, perhaps without realizing it, that I'm going to guide her, like a workshop leader, through our relationship. She might be hallucinating that I'm superhuman in some way I'm clearly not. She might be feigning attraction or interest in order to try to get something from me. She might have one foot on either side of any of those lines, making the whole enterprise less than entirely clear.

In that context, here are some things that got us in trouble, and led to pain for both of us.

I sometimes turned on my epistemic charisma without realizing it. I would be opening the door to some unusual possibility. Perhaps we could fall in love without needing the infrastructure of a long-term partnership. Perhaps we can be a part of an extended community together where sexual intimacy is easily available. Perhaps we can trust each other from the beginning. Perhaps we can bring altered states into our relationship, through psychedelics, in order to up the ante and go places we've never been.

In other words, I was inviting a prospective partner into the world of alternative relationships. Given that most people are dissatisfied with the world of dating, or struggle to create real intimacy, these alternatives can sound pretty good. But it was naive of me to imagine any given person, new to that world, could navigate easily within it. It was equally naive of some of them to dive into the deep end without knowing whether or not they could swim. They figured if it was me inviting them in, it must be a good idea.

As one friend of mine generously put it, I was just overly optimistic about who could hang. I imagined all kinds of people could remain self-aware in my presence who couldn't. I wished for people to flourish, like I did, within the chaotic intensity of intimacy without infrastructure, and within the amplifying force of altered states of consciousness.

Consider a conversation I sometimes had with someone before we got involved. I would make sure they understood that I was already in an open relationship, or was dating multiple people. I didn't want them to expect that I was available for, or seeking, partnership, even if we had an ongoing dating relationship. I would typically get responses that said they had similar objectives. Perhaps they had just come out of a long relationship and didn't want to jump into a new one. Or they didn't want to make dating too high of a priority. Or they had always wanted to try open relationships.

Many people who have such conversations discover that people are not always capable of what they think they're capable of. When the prospect of love and romance are in the air, we are all aspirational about our own capacities. Just because you have a clear conversation with someone in advance, and they say they can handle it, doesn't mean they can. Just because you think you know what you're getting into, doesn't mean that you know how you'll respond to unforeseen challenges.

Failures Of Aftercare

One thing most dating relationships have in common is that they end. This was true for most of the relationships we're concerned with here. (One didn't end, per se, but was artificially cut short. I needed to curtail my dating activities because something was brewing.) The relationships that ended were due, for the most part, to my not wanting to continue.

There are two ways I wish I had ended things differently.

The first is that I didn't understand, in some cases, how much more significant the ending was for the other person than it was for me. I was accustomed to feeling, and fostering, strong feelings of love outside the context of a relationship. Most people aren't. I suspect, in a few cases, my partner felt hurt that we weren't continuing to date, but downplayed it, or played it cool. I wish, even if I had reasons for establishing a boundary around further sexual contact, that I had found a way to more gradually bring things to a close, one that honored whatever ongoing feelings either of us had for the other.

My second mistake was a lack of aftercare. Had the distinction of 'aftercare' existed for me then, it's quite possible there would have been no lawsuit, no hit piece, no opportunity for toxic leaders to destroy Interchange. Had I consistently made myself available, as soon as someone expressed negative feelings, to really hear about my impact, to work through any feelings we both had, and to make amends where possible, this may never have spiraled out of control.

One example of this comes from the woman I had spent two years with in an experimental relationship. We were both clear that her explicitly stated goals for her sexual liberation would be the guiding inspiration for how we set up our dating relationship. We were also clear that I would be a real person in the relationship, with my own desires and boundaries, and that I was never solely occupying a role. Over the course of two years, she achieved all the goals she had laid out for herself at the beginning, so in that regard our experiment was entirely successful.

Along the way, however, she made at least two choices she later regretted. We had had a very positive experience together taking MDMA relatively early in our relationship, deliberately using it as a tool for overcoming shame. Much later on, after our dates together became less structured, I suggested we try psychedelics together, both one on one and at a play party. Both of those times, she found herself following my lead despite some degree of misgivings. We did not have any sexual contact during either of those experiences, as she was overwhelmed just trying to manage her altered state, and she was clear sex was neither desirable nor possible. Nonetheless, she later wished she had said no to those invitations to take psychedelics together.

Some time after we had stopped dating, she communicated about this with me, and told me she was worried I wasn't aware how strong my influence was. She shared quite a bit about this over text, but told me she wished to have a more in-depth conversation with me about it sometime. Despite some half-hearted attempts on both our parts to schedule a time, that in-person conversation never happened. I believe this failure of mine robbed her of the ability to feel heard, and to have my support in healing. It also robbed me of the opportunity to adjust my own self-perception of my power.

Another failure of mine involves the woman who started all this by lying to her boyfriend about our history. Some months after our second sexual encounter, she brought up some things that were unresolved for her. I'll leave out the details, except to say she brought it up at an awkward time, as I was in the middle of leading an exercise at a retreat she had decided to attend. The things she briefly mentioned being concerned about were quite odd to me, based on some incorrect assumptions she was making. I couldn't figure out a way to respond at the moment.

But however awkward the timing, and whatever the content, it was obvious she needed to clear something up. From my current vantage point many years later, I don't understand why I didn't invite her to talk things through later on. I wish I had, and not just because my failure to do so had grave consequences for me. Now it seems like basic courtesy, even with someone I had only hooked up with a couple of times in casual environments, particularly if they express a wish to talk. In this case, I really left her hanging. That must have felt pretty bad.

Aftercare, to me, means recognizing that relationships continue after they're "over." If I care about someone, I want to extend that care to checking in after we're no longer dating. If an ex is hostile, that's not always an option, but that wasn't (yet) an issue in these cases.

What does a good aftercare conversation look like? It's not just about how both people are feeling. It's also about trying to make sense of things together. Looking back, what did we think was going to happen? How well did our expectations match the reality? What, of what we were hoping for, did each of us get? Did that turn out to be asymmetrical? What went wrong? Can we identify why it went wrong? Is there any repair needed? Or possible? What kind of contact between us would make the transition away from this level of intimacy go smoother? What kind of contact later on would feel best, if any?

In a relationship between peers, aftercare is everyone's responsibility. In a relationship with a significant power differential, I'd now say it's the responsibility of the person with more power to see if aftercare is needed. Lack of aftercare can leave someone, or both people, feeling bad about the relationship in retrospect. Lack of aftercare by someone with more power can leave the other person feeling exponentially worse about the relationship.

There's a trope in the spiritual world that big lights cast big shadows. The corollary to this principle is that the strength of someone's positive projection predicts the strength of their negative projection later on, when the bubble of their positive projections finally pops.

I'm sure you know from experience, that after you break up with someone, it's easy to reinterpret the story of your relationship negatively. Anything you tolerated, overlooked, willfully ignored, or were simply okay with, looks different when you're no longer within the container of the relationship. If you jump into a relationship because of a promise someone implicitly offers, what happens when they fail to deliver? Do you look back and simply recognize you feel disappointed? Do you take responsibility for your unrealistic expectations?

Power differences amplify the good and the bad. If I invited someone to try something that worked for them, it sometimes had huge positive benefits. If I was too cavalier about inviting someone to play above their level, or if I missed when something went awry, or if I didn't take extra care to check in after things were over, all of those mistakes had a far more negative effect than they would have in a relationship with less power differential.

Lying About Sex Is Sexual Misconduct

I consider each of the women involved in this lawsuit to be guilty of sexual misconduct.

The helpful term 'sexual misconduct' is not synonymous with 'sexual violence,' which we already have many words for. People who equate the two are typically incapable of recognizing the massive gray area between black and white. Consent is not the only issue worthy of discussion. In the real world, sex can still be inappropriate, or problematic, without any domination, coercion, or abuse involved.

Public false accusations of sexual violence, are themselves acts of violence. False accusers are dangerous. It is never too late for a false accuser to come clean, and try to repair the damage they've done. If they refuse to do so, however, I believe we have a right to know who they are, so we can protect ourselves from them.

Private lying may or may not be violating, but can nonetheless be very problematic. We all know, for instance, how harmful "cheating" can be to everyone involved. There's a less-obvious form of private lying, however, that needs to be problematized.

If you pretend you want to have sex with someone when you really don't, you are luring them into a sexual interaction under false pretenses.

Past trauma, unfortunately, is not a justification for lying.

Current pop psychology uses the concept of 'fawning' as an explanation for why some people deceive others, and even themselves, in interpersonal interactions. It can be a useful distinction for understanding one's own PTSD. The popular use of the diagnosis, however, excuses fawners from the damage they often cause. I would argue that the worst forms of violence are all perpetrated by people with past trauma. We hold them responsible for their own actions nonetheless.

False Accusations Are a Real and Growing Problem

I have, in the years since being falsely accused, spoken to many men in similar situations to mine. I personally know men who, due to false accusations, have been arrested, jailed for months, gotten badly beaten up - even receiving permanent injuries, received death threats, lost their jobs, had their reputations destroyed, been forced to spend hundreds of thousands on legal defense, and had to live in terror of further consequences for years. Those are all high prices to pay for something you never actually did.

If you are one of these men, or someone of any gender who has been falsely accused, I see you.

I'm sorry that so few people are able to understand what you're going through. I'm sorry that no one has known how to stand up for you. I'm sorry that everyone in the legal system, from police officers to judges, has been biased against you, rather than offering you the protection they're meant to.

If your experience is anything like mine, I'm sure you've found out who your real friends are. I'm equally sure that you've spent some time feeling completely alone. If you have considered killing yourself, I understand. I almost did. I am glad you're still here. If you made it this far, I promise it gets better.

You have been a victim of real violence, in a form our society does not yet know how to address.

Physical attacks and physical domination are obvious forms of violence. We're well aware of how much damage physical aggression can do, so we're afraid of it.

Social aggression can be equally violent, but may not appear to be at first glance. You can see such violence at play, for example, in malicious gossip, spreading false rumors, online bullying, shunning, social exclusion, and, of course, cancelling that knows no limits. Deliberately false accusations are a form of social aggression.

Obviously, false accusations can do tremendous harm to the person who has been falsely accused. But they do something even worse.

It has historically been difficult for women to get help when they've been sexually assaulted. This is in large part because, in a sexist society, people don't believe their reports. Not being believed, or being blamed for your victimization, adds insult to injury. It can be a big component of what makes sexual assault so traumatic and shame-inducing. The shift in our culture to believing women's stories by default has been a much-needed improvement. Unfortunately, the only practical way to make this change seems to have been to believe all accusers.

In our current environment, women who make false accusations erode social trust. They help validate all the people who have failed to believe women in the past. When false accusations are prevalent, it sheds doubt on all claims of sexual assault. This makes it less likely that actual victims of sexual assault in the future will be believed. Future victims of rape will suffer because women now are abusing hard-won social trust.

Women have all the same motivations as men to sometimes lie or distort the truth. Women may lie about their experiences in order to save face, to get out of trouble, to get revenge, out of malice, due to social pressure, in order to belong, due to mental illness, and, sometimes, to receive the significant payoff of a lawsuit.

You may not want to believe that you live in a world where women lie about sexual assault. It certainly does make things more complicated. Unfortunately, it is our world, especially in a litigation-happy country like the United States, where lying can be profitable. As much as I personally wish I could automatically believe women who claim to have been hurt, I am much less likely now to do so.

You Can't Retroactively Revoke Consent

In the story we tell in consent education classes, you have only gotten consent if it's in the form of an enthusiastic, unambiguous verbal yes at each moment of escalation to greater physical intimacy. In practice, however, that's rare, in no small part because the vast majority of people on Earth would never consider having sex that way. It takes a strong cultural and stylistic preference to intermittently break up sexual activity with verbal questioning and reporting.

Some women, in particular, want no such thing. Many women have told me they can't stand when men ask questions like, "can I touch you here?" They explicitly want the men to do the initiating and want them to do it assertively. That's what turns their heads and turns them on. That's not my style personally, and it may not be yours. But don't go telling those women they never granted consent.

If you ask someone if they'd like to have sex with you, and they say yes, and then you have sex, and at no point along the way do they stop or state they don't want to be doing it, that's consent. Even if they regret it later. Even if they said yes for the wrong reasons. Even if they thought it was going to mean one thing and it wound up meaning another.

Two people decide, while sober, that they'd like to have sex in an altered state. If they then alter their state and have sex, and at no point in the process does either person express a desire to stop, there was consent. Even if one person has a challenging trip. Even if afterwards one person wishes they hadn't drunk alcohol or taken drugs.

Some people have sex for reasons you might think are invalid.

Rather than being driven by attraction or lust, they have sex because they want someone to like them, or because they want access to status and power, or because they want to feel special, or they want to be dominated, or they wish to give the other person something the other person wants, or they're maintaining a relationship, or they just want to feel close with someone and it's the only way they know how. The list could go on and on.

Those are all perfectly valid reasons to have sex, unless your attitude about sex is puritanical. It's just sex. Why should you decide whose reasons are or aren't legitimate?

If someone isn't interested in sexual contact with me, all they need to do is say so. You wouldn't believe the number of people I haven't had sex with.

The lawsuit pretended consent was the issue, because consent violations are legally actionable. Inadvertently emotionally injuring someone is not, or we'd all be in prison.

Stop Treating Women Like Children

Power differences in relationships often have a predictable effect. The person with less power may outsource their judgment to the person with more power. Does this compromise their ability to make smart decisions in relationships? Sometimes. That said, power differentials exist in most relationships.

Previously traumatized people sometimes confuse the present with the past. Does this compromise their ability to make smart decisions in relationships? Sometimes. That said, I have rarely, if ever, met a wholly untraumatized person.

Love is risky. Lots of people regret all kinds of sexual and romantic choices they've made. Were those masses of people all therefore compromised in their decision-making? Probably. Most of us, most of the time, are compromised in our decision-making. It just so happens that's as good as it gets, so we make decisions anyway. Some people take responsibility for their decisions. Some people don't. But it's on them that they made the decision. It just can't work any other way.

Did these six women know what they were getting into, choosing to get involved with me? I'd say they knew about as well as adults know what they're getting into when they choose to be romantically involved with another adult. We make the best guesses we can, which are always imperfect. Did they have agency when they were making those choices? I'd say they had as much agency as any of us do. Our own motivations are in part obvious to us, and in part hidden. We just do the best we can with what we've got.

Many people are genuinely victimized in our world. Things are done to them and happen to them about which they have no choice. That's just not what was happening here. If you equate the two, you treat the women in question as if they made no choices, have no responsibility for their actions, have no agency.

Manufacturing Non-Consent

Because of our incredible capacity for meaning making, a non-traumatic experience can later become a traumatic memory. If someone is induced to make traumatic interpretations of the experience, then the memory starts to live for them as trauma. Many well-meaning therapists induce trauma in their clients.

Let's say you're a counselor. One of these women comes to you and says, "Something happened. It's left me feeling disturbed and confused. I'm not sure how to make sense of it. Can you help me?"

One option you have is to try to convince her that what happened was something that happened to her. He did something to you. You had no choice. The consent you gave was not valid consent. If you're not angry about it, you should become angry. If you're not blaming anyone, you should blame someone. You could invite her to construct a narrative about her experience in which she occupies the role of victim, because someone else occupies the role of perpetrator. In such a narrative, she was traumatized, and so you would encourage her to categorize her experience as a trauma. You, as the therapist in this scenario, fancy yourself the heroic rescuer, helping her to heal the trauma you are determined to convince her that she experienced.

Another option would be to open up an honest inquiry about what choices she made and why she made them. This is very much like what I was describing can happen in a good aftercare conversation.

You could ask her what she had been hoping for from the experience. You could look to see whether she in fact got some of what she was seeking from the relationship. To the extent that she didn't, you could look at what expectations she had going in, and which ones turned out to be unrealistic. In doing so, you might come to identify many shortcomings on the part of the man in question. It would have been better if he had taken better care of you, or if he had moved more slowly, or if he had set a boundary, or if he had been better attuned to what you really needed. You could identify everything you wish he would have done differently. And then you could look at how she behaved when things didn't in fact go as she wished.

In short, you could help her develop a narrative in which she was an active participant, in which she participated in some ways she would not want to in the future, in which she was at choice every step of the way about how and whether to continue, even if those choices were constrained by some degree of immaturity. The point would be to become more mature now by recognizing her agency. In this narrative, a complex relationship happened between two people who had asymmetrical roles, but both played a role nonetheless.

If it's not already glaringly obvious, I would never inflict option one on a client, or on a friend, and I hope you wouldn't either. Why would you create trauma where so far there is primarily just disorientation? Why would you encourage someone's self-portrayal as a victim, when you could help your client to step into a space of greater responsibility for her own choices? Why would you manufacture non-consent when your client was an adult doing her best to act upon her own desires, however confused some of those desires might have been?

If someone was hurt, acknowledge the hurt. That's real. But if you want to help them not be hurt in the future, don't leave out how they set themselves up to be.

In the story we're telling, there have been some very irresponsible counselors, but there has been something far worse. There were many supposed "allies" who projected their own agendas onto the experiences of women they were ostensibly helping. The people who organized the women in this lawsuit unwittingly traumatized them in order to get something they needed for themselves: revenge, money, purpose, power, notoriety, or self-congratulatory self-esteem.

The worst culprits here are the self-appointed rescuers. They are men who need to prove to themselves they're the good men and not the bad ones. They are people who care less about the complexity of a woman's actual experience, and more about whether they can adopt a victim as their personal cause.

Uncancelling Myself

I really did mess things up. I left quite a few women in my wake regretting their relationships with me, finding themselves confused about their own behavior, disappointed or heartbroken. While these things can happen in any relationship, those negative outcomes were all amplified by the power differential between us.

People were right to confront me, and I was right to step down from leadership to go clean up my act.

But none of that needed to lead to such violence. No one needed to lie.

It's a lot easier to burn down a house than to build one. It's a lot easier to take a life than to bear and raise a child. It's a lot easier to dismantle someone else's creation, or cancel them, than it is to make something yourself, or make something of yourself.

Burning, killing, and cancelling, however, are all powerful acts. If you want to feel the most powerful, with the least effort, destructive power is what you want.

Creating takes vision, intelligence, and hard work. Cancelling takes only the pent up desire to destroy. But fire is hard to control. The people who decided to burn me at the stake burned down their own village in the process.

If you've never been burned at the stake, let me tell you, it hurts.

Before that article was published, things were already incredibly bad, but I naively believed the article would be about what actually happened. I had no idea yet about the inhuman extent of the lies these women would tell.

When the article came out, I came within inches of throwing myself in front of a bus. Everyone I had ever known was now going to associate me with the loathsome villain depicted in that article. I have learned a lot, these last few years, about how people treat someone they think is below them.

I will need to tell that story elsewhere, of what felt like my death and resurrection, of the new life I created and the unwavering friends who kept me from actually dying. It felt impossible, at the time, to fight back against something so monstrous.

Nonetheless, I have been complicit in my own cancellation. I have allowed it. I will no longer. I am uncancelling myself.

Fighting Back Against False Accusations

When the group organizing against me first came on the scene, my friends and allies were not able to stand up for me. Many put themselves in harm's way trying. Some of them were threatened with their own lawsuits. Most were simply attacked by the kind of social violence that we still allow online. I quickly asked them to protect themselves rather than try to defend me. The mob had become far too dangerous.

Now I am asking for something different. Please stand up for me. I could really use your help.

Please speak in my defense when you can. Speak up about what you believe to be true, so that the most extreme voices cannot dominate public discourse. Please take a stand for civility, and seek mutual understanding. If you see anyone preparing to retaliate against me for writing this, please help them to see the folly in that.

I am not suggesting anyone attack the women who were swept up in this lawsuit, and in the social moment that permitted it. Please hold them accountable to come clean. Whatever legitimate complaints they may have had about me do not justify the violence of making false accusations. But please offer them compassion for their role in this. They were used by others.

Finally, please remember I am far from the only man to face false accusations without recourse. It is an impossible situation, one for which there is yet no solution. That needs to change. Thank you for helping me to change it.