Users
The Most Controversial Hotline in America
They’re designed for people who fear they might harm others. Advocates say they’re helping prevent abuse before it happens.
June 15, 2026 5:40 AM
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by stacey_newman/iStock/Getty Images Plus.
In April, one of the internet’s favorite therapists asked his followers a provoking question. “Is there no dedicated national helpline for men who are scared they might sexually assault their partner? Or for anyone, for that matter?”
The question was posted on Threads by @TherapyJeff, a creator who has more than 320,000 followers on the platform, and millions more across Instagram and TikTok. “Like, if they’re experiencing an urge and are worried their fantasies are turning into plans, who can they call immediately?”
The backlash was nearly instantaneous, and spread like wildfire across subreddits , Instagram, Facebook , even LinkedIn . Thousands of comments laid out for Jeff Guenther, as he’s known in real life, his perceived error.
“The idea that there should be a help line for men supports the narrative that sexual violence is innate in men. It’s not,” read the most liked comment on the thread. “TherapyJeff, or TheRapyJeff. Which is it,” another person wrote . And : “Men who think they might sexually assault their partners shouldn’t have partners. Period. End of story.”
His comment had some thoughtless timing. Just a few weeks prior, CNN released a bombshell investigation exposing an online “rape academy” where men shared images of their unconscious wives and girlfriends. So it irked and angered many of Guenther’s followers when he asked them, essentially, how men could get help before they commit atrocities against women.
What many people commenting did not seem to realize is that these spaces actually do exist, and men who cause harm are engaging with them. More than that, we’ve never needed them as much as we do right now.
JAC Patrissi is the founder of one of these helplines. A Call for Change is one of the only helplines in the U.S. that was created to answer calls exclusively from people who think they are abusive. “We don’t even say it’s for men, and the majority of people calling are men,” Patrissi told me. She was already monitoring online sentiment about the helpline when Guenther’s post made it onto her radar. She wasn’t surprised by the reaction: “I think I have said most of these things myself.”
Patrissi worked with survivors of abuse for more than a decade before she realized that, again and again, women were asked to completely uproot their lives when their relationships took a turn for the worse. These women were responsible for surviving their partners, which meant leaving their homes to find shelter, or getting a restraining order in place. (Even though violence is not gendered, I’m referring to “women” as survivors because they are the predominant group experiencing relationship violence.) The men who initiated the abuse weren’t being asked to change their behavior, so why did the women she worked with have to completely change their lives? So the helpline was born.
In the five years she’s run the helpline, Patrissi still finds herself surprised by the men who choose to call in, like the well-resourced, white heterosexual guy who says he’s destroying his decades-long marriage and wants to change. After dominating their relationships for so long, men come looking for a genuine connection—something dominance promises but fails to deliver, she told me. In an instance where a caller has brought up a specific situation where abuse occurred, Patrissi might question their assumptions of the situation—was there anything you noticed that suggested she wasn’t comfortable? She’ll challenge their ideas of consent and push them to reframe their thinking.
Lately, the helpline has been gaining more traction. From May 2025 through April 2026, Patrissi and her team received 550 calls, a 57 percent increase from the year before.
Jenny Coleman, the founder of Stop It Now!, a nonprofit that works to end child abuse, has also seen a rise in calls for help over the years. Stop It Now! was named in a community note posted below Guenther’s original post because their helpline takes confidential calls from people who are abusing others—in this case, children. “I was really mixed on the feedback I saw about TherapyJeff,” Coleman told me. “I don’t know his whole story, but it’s kind of like everybody was right, they just weren’t all on the same page.”
Coleman has heard all the criticism: that Stop It Now! pulls resources from people who are experiencing abuse, that the people they help are monsters who can’t change. And she gets it. At the same time, “if we’re going to create an environment where kids grow up safe from harm, we need to include all of the people that impact that, and that includes the people who are at risk or who are already abusing.”
Last year, Coleman’s team responded to 2,500 calls about child sexual abuse, 61…
Read the full article at Slate →
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