"On Cancelling and Repair Revisited": An essay by Mary Peterson (Keywords: Restorative Justice;Sexual Harassment;Gender Violence; Accountability;Collective Healing)

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In 2024, I published an essay in The Philosopher titled, 'On Cancelling and Repair'. In the essay, I argue that for restorative justice frameworks to effectively address sexual misconduct in academia, the perpetrators must give something of themselves to the process*. They must be willing to ensure victims are restored to a better place than they were before the incident, rather than merely restore themselves to their previous leadership roles.

The essay claims that men in philosophy accused of sexual misconduct tend to ‘double down on their innocence, besmirch their accusers and, in extreme cases, even take to men’s rights forums to air their grievances.’ I was referring to a number of men currently or formerly employed as philosophy professors, who have challenged accusations of sexual misconduct made against them. As an example of this phenomenon, I used a blog post by Colin McGinn musing on his ‘cancellation’.

McGinn has since commented on that essay, both in private correspondence with me and on his blog. In his comments, McGinn does not address the substance of the essay, rather doubling down on his innocence while personally insulting me. He neglects to give something of himself by way of attending to the argument, while goading me to respond (writing in an e-mail: ‘It’s really quite contemptible of you to fail to reply to my comments on your wretched essay. You bring feminism into disrepute.’). Acrimonious exchanges about topics as serious as sexual harassment and assault are destructive—to individual persons, to relationships, and to wider political and social dialogues.

McGinn’s critique is less structural than cultural. The problem, he thinks, is that people are far too ready to demonize the accused rather than assessing the facts. It is ironic, then, that on his blog he will demonize others and stoke a comments section filled with angry men jumping on the bandwagon.

For restorative justice frameworks to effectively address sexual misconduct in academia, the perpetrators must give something of themselves to the process.

I will not respond at a level of personal insult. Instead, I will address an objection that someone like McGinn, who cares very much about the rights of the accused, might make to my previous essay. Someone like McGinn might object that restorative justice does not adequately handle the threat of false accusations. Only the legal system, with its rigorous evidential standards, can protect men from spurious accusations of sexual misconduct. While I do not argue that restorative justice should replace legal proceedings, I do maintain that it can address forms of retaliatory harm incentivized by the legal system. A collective emphasis on healing shifts the focus of justice away from the defensive, disembodied parrying of accusations and counteraccusations.

The man who will stop at nothing to clear his name has become a recognizable trope since #MeToo. The drive of men such as Johnny Depp and Alan Dershowitz to discredit their accusers has led to costly and harmful consequences for the women who came forward. Aggressive litigation and appeals to base misogyny in the court of public opinion work to silence accusers and produce a chilling effect on other victims coming forward.

Despite a legal defeat over the same case in the United Kingdom, Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard for defamation in a United States court. Depp could afford a larger legal team than Heard, and he won the case by leaning on his support in the public sphere, especially from female fans. In the wake of the trial, the media’s treatment of Amber Heard was so vicious that she moved out of the country and temporarily adopted a pseudonym. Depp, meanwhile, has signed the most lucrative men’s fragrance advertising deal in history.

Another case where legal aggression led to a chilling effect is that of Alan Dershowitz and Virginia Giuffre. Dershowitz wrote an entire book vigorously discrediting Virginia Giuffre over allegations that he was one of the men to whom she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein for abuse. Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo is slim, and published by the imprint Hot Books, arguably a step down in prestige from Dershowitz’s other works. Nevertheless, Dershowitz gives the impression that, however great the supposed challenge of proving innocence these days, he has the strength of will to meet it head-on. He also countersued Giuffre for defamation, which was settled after three years of litigation when both parties dropped their allegations.

In Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, published posthumously following her suicide in the spring of 2025, Giuffre mentions Dershowitz only briefly by name, acknowledging their shared legal agreement to stop speaking publicly about the other (354). In a joint statement with Dershowitz, she claimed she ‘may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz’ (354) as one of her abusers. A few pages later, Giuffre gives a cautionary note about naming abusers, especially those who threaten endless and expensive litigation: ‘I’ve written a lot about bravery because I admire people who do what is right, even when that comes at a cost, but I want to be clear: while we need to be brave about naming our abusers, we also must protect ourselves’ (360).

A collective emphasis on healing shifts the focus of justice away from the defensive, disembodied parrying of accusations and counteraccusations.

Elsewhere in the book, responding to attacks on her credibility, Giuffre insists that she never forgets the face of a man who abused her: ‘When a man has been on top of you, his face just inches from your own, you remember him. You may not remember the exact day, date, or time that the man abused you, but his face stays in your mind, even when you wish it wouldn’t’ (237). One could read this as Giuffre maintaining her accusations against Dershowitz while staying within the realm of legality.

In those lines, Giuffre also captures the experience of living with traumatic memories. Though traumatic memory is a heavily debated topic, researchers such as Richard McNally argue that traumatic experience facilitates too much remembering rather than too little. That is, traumatic memories like the abuse Giuffre describes tend to remain in the mind in the form of intrusive thoughts and rumination, rather than being repressed. Navigating the legal agreement, Giuffre stands up for herself, suggesting to the reader how unlikely it is that she would claim repeatedly, over many years, that someone abused her when he didn’t. Even though Giuffre attempted to blot her memory using drugs and alcohol, she couldn’t help but remember the faces of the men who abused her.

Dershowitz has been involved in some of the biggest legal trials of #MeToo, standing on the side of accused men. It is unsurprising that Dershowitz, the so-called ‘devil’s advocate’ who made a name for himself defending clients like Harvey Weinstein, O.J. Simpson and Donald Trump, would lean on his strength—extreme litigiousness—to clear his name. Yet if we look past the chaos he creates with language both in and out of the courtroom, there is an evident disparity in outcome, just as in the Depp v. Heard case: Dershowitz remains a Harvard professor emeritus and a powerful public voice, while Giuffre is dead.

I am a humble evidentialist. Of course, no one should jump to conclusions based on rumors, without knowledge of the facts (and in my opinion, rigorously fact-checked articles in reputable news sources count towards knowledge). It is also clear that what gets recorded as fact should not be determined solely by the vigor and resources of aggrieved men.

 Amidst this culture-wide war of words, what can proponents of restorative justice say about accusations of sexual misconduct? Restorative justice, with its emphasis on accountability and healing rather than punishment, precisely aims to lift conflict out of the disembodied space of accusation and counteraccusation, where words fly and become progressively less meaningful, progressively more violent. Discussing non-carceral forms of accountability, the Black queer abolitionist writer Stevie Wilson, in After Accountability, says, “Accountability, to me, connotes responsibility and healing in a communal context… Everyone has a part to play in the healing” (171-172). While accused men focus on the legal system as a site of vindication, they create the conditions for further harm, not healing.

Aggressive litigation and appeals to base misogyny in the court of public opinion work to silence accusers and produce a chilling effect on other victims coming forward.

Granted, the notion of healing should be concretized in context-specific practices. In 2006, the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective formed to develop a framework which supported community-based, non-carceral, anti-racist health and wellness practices. Kindred members aimed ‘to imagine and create collective models of wellness that connect principles and practices of organizing to uses of body and energy work (yoga, meditation, nutrition, reiki, acupuncture, sound healing, etc.) and the healing arts for balance.’ This collective provides an example of concrete healing practices grounded in a community’s needs. Restorative justice offers embodied solutions, while the legal system, as it is weaponized by men like Depp and Dershowitz, enables toxic, destructive speech.

The internet hardly helps. As Naomi Klein points out in her book on right-wing radicalization Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, online men’s rights spaces are filled with finger-pointing and psychological projection (McGinn’s blog, and its comments section, functions as a men’s rights forum of sorts). Sometimes counteraccusations are simply a way of ‘not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others)’ (322).

Manon Garcia makes a similar point in Living With Men, her book-length analysis of the trial of Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot. Garcia claims that digital platforms encourage a ‘derealization’ and ‘fantasized projection’ of female archetypes such as the mother, the whore, and the divine feminine (147). Importantly, Dominique Pelicot used the controversial unmoderated chat website coco.fr to recruit other men in the abuse of his wife Gisèle. The internet was also central to Depp’s public relations victory in the Depp v. Heard trial. The decision to allow cameras in the courtroom, which Heard’s legal team fought against, made the trial social media fodder. Websites like X were swarmed with misogynistic memes and trolling of Heard.

An equitable dialogue between men and women will remain impossible, Garcia thinks, so long as men fail to attend to women’s humanity as particular individuals, and so long as men use the internet to further entrench dehumanizing views of women. Klein and Garcia both emphasize how online spaces can inhibit constructive dialogue. For the conversation to move forward, men need to stop projecting, and to start seeing and hearing women.

Accusation and counter-accusation—or DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender), the tactic of abusers to shirk responsibility and flip the script on their accusers—puts all parties at a conversational impasse. The more powerful party retains his voice; no dialogue takes place. For the victim, who is likely already weakened by the events that precipitated the discussion, the words fall as an avalanche of stress.

An equitable dialogue between men and women will remain impossible so long as men fail to attend to women’s humanity as particular individuals, and so long as men use the internet to further entrench dehumanizing views of women

Is there a way forward through collective healing? The perpetrator must start by interrogating his retributive emotions, ensuring that his pride and defensiveness do not run the show. As Mariame Kaba says, in a nuanced conversation with Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown about the relationship between accountability and healing, accountability ‘has to be a voluntary process[…] You can never actually make anybody accountable.’ For Kaba, accountability is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for collective healing. In the cases I have described, the legal system blocks the process of accountability and healing with expensive, humiliating cases that drag on for years. At the end, as the standard anti-carceral critique underscores, no verdict can ensure the perpetrator makes himself accountable.

Though the aggressive public tactics of Depp and Dershowitz are severe, increasingly I see their behaviors aped by less powerful men. Themes of projection and counteraccusation even came up in my personal life recently. A teacher at my yoga studio asked me out, and when I told him I don’t date older men (he was 57 to my 29), he bulldozed over me, first with his insistence that I was putting up artificial boundaries against a deep connection, and finally with insults. Once the situation escalated, I tried to salvage my involvement in the community by explaining to him how tense and unsafe I felt practicing at the studio as a result of his behavior. I even sustained an injury from the stress. Unwilling to hear me, he said he would flip my words back on me, and that I was endangering him because of my feminist views of men. He made a false equivalence: I felt unsafe because of a real risk of sexual assault—sexual violence is not just a war of words. He felt unsafe because of a risk to his reputation if I told the truth about his behavior. There is no use arguing or pleading with these types; they are intractable. I blocked his number, reported the incident to the owner, and switched yoga studios.

We all have healing to do.

Mary Peterson is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Hamburg. Her research on sexual misconduct in academia has been published in venues such as Times Higher Ed and Hypatia. This is her second piece for The Philosopher.

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*I use the term restorative justice to stay consistent with my previous argument, where I criticized Judith Herman’s discussion of RJ. Some organizers prefer the term transformative justice, which focuses less on repairing interpersonal relationships, and more on the background structural conditions, like racism and class-based oppression, that lead to interpersonal harm.

Further Reading

• Garcia, Manon. Living With Men: Reflections on the Pelicot Trial Cambridge: Polity, 2025.

• Kaba, Mariame “The Practices We Need: #MeToo and Transformative Justice. Interview by Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown.” We Do This ‚Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021. 139-147.

• Klein, Naomi Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

• McNally, RJ. Remembering Trauma. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

• Pinko collective “Stevie Wilson” After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023. 169-173.

First published online 15th March 2026 

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