I’ve listened to your podcast since 2014. I’ve laughed, cringed, and stuck around through the messy moments because I used to believe you were willing to say the hard things most people wouldn’t. But your recent discussions around pedophilia have taken a turn that I can no longer ignore and it’s not provocative or boundary-pushing. It’s cowardly, dangerous, and manipulative.
The way you’ve echoed NPR’s framing, brought up “minor-attracted persons,” and made pedophilia a recurring subject under the guise of “taboo conversations” makes it clear: you’ve lost the plot. You are not creating space for necessary conversations you’re offering cover for predators by helping sanitize the language of abuse.
Let me be extremely clear:
“MAP” is not a neutral term. It is a public relations spin. And every time you repeat it even to mock it, you reinforce it.
I’ve worked inside a domestic violence shelter. I’ve seen the long-term psychological fallout in survivors, children and adults alike. I’ve watched victims slip through cracks because the systems in place are underfunded, dismissive, and stretched thin. Most communities have no real infrastructure to support victims long-term, especially those who experience childhood sexual trauma.
Meanwhile, people like you are giving air time to “understanding” predators and repeating the newest euphemisms cooked up to make child abuse more digestible for the public. There’s nothing academic about that. It’s not edgy it’s complicit.
What you’re feeding into is already happening worldwide:
• In Germany, programs like the Prevention Project Dunkelfeld have been criticized for offering free treatment to pedophiles while survivors receive nothing close to equivalent support.
• In Canada, experts like Hubert Van Gijseghem have warned that media normalization of pedophilia is leading to desensitization—and public grooming on a mass scale.
• Studies from the UK and Australia have drawn direct links between softened public language and increased distribution of child sexual abuse materials online.
This is what happens when society decides predators are more interesting than the people they destroy.
People who push sympathy for pedophiles often follow the same disturbing patterns:
• They’re dating people significantly younger and need to blur boundaries.
• They work with children or around vulnerable populations and want cover.
• They use faux-intellectualism to make abuse seem like a “gray area.”
If you don’t see that or worse, if you see it and don’t care, you’ve already chosen a side. And it’s not the one you think.
I’m done listening to a show that wastes more breath analyzing the “struggles” of predators than acknowledging the black hole of silence, pain, and neglect surrounding survivors.
Complex PTSD still isn’t in the DSM-5. Trauma resources are scarce. And here you are, using your platform to discuss a rebranded slur for child abusers as though it’s just the next topic in your “fearless” content plan.
If you have any integrity left, start centering victims.
Otherwise, own the fact that you’re no longer provocative you’re just part of the problem.
