On Writing About Harm

Why I’m Here and How I’m Trying to Do It

There have been a few significant pieces published in the last few days—one from Scott Mills on Deepak Chopra and the Epstein files, comprehensive and damning, and another from Lissa Rankin on the wellness and spirituality community writ large. The conversation is happening, and it’s overdue. I want to be clear about why I’m part of it and how I’m trying to approach this, because accountability without an ethical framework can become its own form of harm.

I’m not writing these pieces from a distance. I spent years inside the machinery of wellness and spirituality publishing. I ran publicity for some of the largest names in the industry. I helped mainstream The Secret. I worked with dharma teachers and bestselling authors and people who built empires on the promise of transformation. Some of that work I’m proud of. Some of it I’m not. And some of it I’m still reckoning with, because I platformed people who went on to cause real harm. I’m trying to do it in a “clean” way, in new agey language.

I've talked privately with other people doing accountability work in this space about the psychic weight of being the person who platformed someone who has caused harm. Philosophically, I know that's not mine to carry—I was doing my job, I didn't know what I didn't know, the harm wasn't visible yet. But my heart doesn't care about philosophy. My heart still feels responsible. I put myself in therapy over it, and that work continues. That's something I contend with each and every day when I sit down to write. I'm not outside it looking in. I was part of the machinery that elevated some of these people, and now I'm watching the consequences unfold. And I’m not totally out of it, still.

So I care a lot about how we do accountability work. It’s not enough to just expose harm—we have to think about what we’re building in its place. Takedown culture, callout culture, the viral pile-on—none of that truly creates conditions for actual change. It just creates fear and defensiveness, and it doesn’t leave room for people to grow, apologize, make people whole, or find a different way forward.

I believe in redemption. Most people who cause harm in these spaces aren’t malicious—they’re caught in systems that reward charisma over integrity and conflate spiritual insight with moral authority. They’ve fallen out of integrity, usually due to ego. Those people can change if they’re given a pathway back that doesn’t require them to be destroyed first. Accountability doesn’t mean annihilation. It means naming what happened, creating space for repair, and building structures that make the harm less likely to happen again.

But redemption requires willingness. It requires the person who caused harm to actually reckon with what they’ve done, to stop defending and start listening, to prioritize the people they’ve hurt over their own reputation. Not everyone is willing to do that work. In fact, very few are.

So where do I draw the line? When does accountability stop offering a pathway to redemption and start looking more like necessary boundaries? For me, it’s when the harm is systematic, when it’s defended rather than reckoned with, when the person with power uses that power to silence the people they’ve hurt. Deepak Chopra’s case feels like that line. This isn’t about one mistake or one lapse in judgment. It’s about a pattern of behavior, about associations that were never adequately addressed, about using spiritual authority to deflect accountability. Some people forfeit the redemption pathway by refusing to walk it.

I don’t take any pleasure in saying that. I don’t think cancellation is something to celebrate. But sometimes naming what someone has chosen—to prioritize their brand over truth—is just accuracy. It’s not punitive. It’s just true.

I need to say something else, because it matters given my janteloven* upbringing: this isn’t about building a platform or becoming known as “the takedown person.” The idea of promoting this work makes me deeply uncomfortable. There’s no strategy here, no plan for leveraging accountability writing into some kind of brand, or to monetize it. I don’t even really promote these pieces when I publish them, which probably seems counterproductive, but the truth is that it’s difficult. This work costs me something every time I do it, and the last thing I want is for it to become my identity or my claim to relevance.

I’m doing this because it needs to be done and I have knowledge that’s useful. Not because I want to be the person who does it. If someone else with similar experience wanted to take this on, I’d be relieved. But staying silent feels worse than the discomfort of speaking up. So I write, even though I don’t want the attention that comes with it. Even though I’d rather be working quietly behind the scenes like I always have. Sometimes the cost of staying quiet is higher than the cost of being seen.

I keep doing this work because people who know have a responsibility. I know how it works, how harm gets laundered through beautiful language and aspirational imagery, how power protects itself by calling accountability “negative energy” or “low vibe.” Staying silent about that feels like a betrayal of everyone who got hurt by the systems I helped build. So I write. Even when it costs me. Even when my heart still carries weight my head knows isn’t mine. The alternative—letting the harm continue unchallenged—costs more.

Thanks for listening.

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*Janteloven (the Law of Jante) is a Scandinavian cultural code emphasizing humility, collective well-being over individual achievement, and the belief that no one should think themselves better than others. It discourages self-promotion and drawing attention to oneself and it’s a pretty good explainer to how I operate.