‘Are We Really Friends? Or Are You Just Using Me?’
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For many, the premiere of FX’s English Teacher in September marked the long-awaited arrival of Brian Jordan Alvarez, the comedy series’ creator and star. For the better part of the past decade, Alvarez has been making things on the internet — first YouTube sketches, followed by a beloved web series called The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo and, most recently, a menagerie of characters on TikTok, the most famous of which, TJ Mack, has gone viral multiple times over. “I’ve had enough amateur practice rounds of this to know what I’m doing,” he told the New York Times ahead of the premiere. On English Teacher, he plays Evan Marquez, a beleaguered high-school teacher in Austin, Texas, trying to separate the colliding streams of his personal life as a gay man and his work life in conservative environs. The show received universally good reviews for its topicality and wit: It was “a deft, brutal trench comedy,” “radically playful,” simply “the best new sitcom.”
L.A. comedy nerds may recognize many members of Alvarez’s old crew on English Teacher. Stephanie Koenig, his longtime collaborator, writes on the show and plays Gwen Sanders, Evan’s fellow teacher and, in a replication of their real-life dynamic, his best friend. Her husband, Chris Riggi, plays her boyfriend, Nick. Populating the smaller roles are Ken Kirby and Michael Strassner — both of whom came up through the Groundlings, the 50-year-old L.A. improv institution. They were part of a friend group formed about nine years ago, during a time when they were struggling actors, going to one another’s shows and starring in one another’s sketches with the hopes of making it. Alvarez was at the center. “Everybody was attracted to Brian because when he wanted to do something, he would do it,” remembers a former friend. “He was the go-getter and then hired all his friends.”
There has been one notable absence amid their recent breakthrough: Jon Ebeling, an actor who was once a core member of the friend group. Alongside Alvarez and Koenig, Ebeling had been one of the central characters in Caleb Gallo. When the series debuted in 2016, its pitter-patter dialogue and loose sexuality made it a cult favorite — the writer Jude Dry described it as “Will & Grace on speed.” Caleb Gallo was a télévision à clef in which the actors played versions of themselves: Alvarez was Caleb, Koenig was Karen, and Ebeling was Billy. The plot of the first few episodes drew from the romantic triad that existed among them in real life; Ebeling had a crush on Koenig, and she liked him back, while Alvarez had a crush on Ebeling. Their characters’ apartments were their real apartments, and their lives became material for the show. A major plot point is a sexual encounter between Caleb and Billy that occurs after Billy and Karen have sex for the first time. It is a nearly beat-for-beat reenactment of what transpired among the three actors off set. In the show, it’s played as a romp — the sexual experimentation of 20-somethings. Ebeling says in reality, he felt pressured by Alvarez. Then, Ebeling alleges, Alvarez sexually assaulted him while shooting that very scene.
For the past few years, Ebeling has been telling a version of this story to anyone who will listen. On his Instagram Stories about a month before English Teacher premiered, he dashed off a message over the promotional poster, writing, “My personal experience with the Cre*tor of this show was much closer to the plot of B*by Reind**r than whatever this is,” referring to Richard Gadd’s Netflix series about his own experience being groomed and raped by a successful TV creator. “Gonna skip this one.” Watching Baby Reindeer, he could see Alvarez in both the character of Martha, who love-bombs and stalks Gadd’s character, Donny, as well as the TV writer Darrien, who repeatedly assaults Donny while dangling the carrot of success. Those on Alvarez’s side see Ebeling as the Martha and argue that he isn’t giving the full context of the relationship. (Alvarez declined to be interviewed but responded to some questions through a representative.)
On September 1, the day before the English Teacher premiere and more than eight years after the occurrence, Ebeling filed a police report with the LAPD and later reported Alvarez to the Screen Actors Guild (California law allows civil claims of sexual assault to be filed up to ten years after the fact). By then, his Instagram post had traveled far in comedy circles. “So many people are championing English Teacher online, going, ‘This is the funniest show on TV,’” says one L.A.-based comic. “And everyone at the bars is going, ‘Oh my God, when is the story going to break about Brian?’”
Alvarez grew up in “the sticks of Tennessee,” as he has put it — specifically Winchester — where he endured his share of homophobia. “He was never allowed to be his true self,” says a former college friend. He attended the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts. The conservatory-style program cultivated a “say ‘yes’” ethos that encouraged risk-taking. One student remembers doing impulse exercises in voice class, in which those in the group were supposed to do whatever came to them. Another student pinned him to the floor, dry-humped him, and licked his face. “Afterward, I was shaken up,” the student says. “Everyone was telling him how brave he was. I thought if I acted like it was bad, I’d look homophobic.” Alvarez took to this culture of free-spiritedness. He arrived with a long mop of curly hair and a contagious creativity that drew people to him. He’d invite students over to get drunk and make music videos to songs like “Wagon Wheel” late into the night. “He would pick the hottest people to come over and get fucked up and do Adderall and make these little American Apparel videos,” remembers one classmate.
Alvarez graduated and settled in L.A. for good in 2010. Unlike so many aspiring actors in the city who talked about doing things, Alvarez had follow-through. He booked a recurring part on Jane the Virgin and found success on YouTube with BuzzFeed-esque sketches like “What actually happens when gay guys see other gay guys and straight people aren’t around.” His ambition was palpable to anyone who met him. He decorated the walls of his room with photos of celebrities like Tom Cruise. “He would sit below them in worship. He was big on manifesting,” says a former friend. (Alvarez does not recall this.) When he and Koenig met in 2013 shooting a short film, it was kismet. They became a package deal, finishing each other’s sentences and making videos with a distinctive chatterbox cadence for Alvarez’s YouTube channel.
Ebeling met Alvarez through their mutual friend Ken Kirby after a Groundlings show in May 2015. Ebeling had spent the past few years grinding his way through the improv circuit. He was working the graveyard shift at a local diner when he got a break, booking a Mountain Dew commercial that aired during the Super Bowl that year. Alvarez invited Ebeling to shoot a sketch in which Alvarez would play a southern kid named Timmy interviewing him about his commercial as though he were a Hollywood star. Ebeling was in a depressive funk — he had gotten out of a difficult relationship and felt stuck — and Alvarez jolted him out of it. “There is something magnetic about somebody who’s so confident that they’re going to make it. And he kept getting results with everything he did,” says Ebeling. “I was like, God, this guy’s fucking awesome. I want to be more like this guy.”
Ebeling had developed a parasocial crush on Koenig from watching her videos with Alvarez. When he met her that October, he was smitten: She was funny, beautiful, smart, his “dream girl.” Alvarez introduced Ebeling to Koenig as “the straight guy I’m in love with.” Ebeling says he wasn’t attracted to Alvarez, but some friends felt he gave mixed signals, recalling him saying things like “If I hooked up with a guy, it would be Brian.” The three of them became inseparable. Their love language was effusive adoration, touch, and shirtless dance parties during which they took pictures and posed. (A version of these parties appears in Caleb Gallo.) Alvarez and Ebeling regularly said “I love you” to each other. “I was outside of the flirty romantic banter,” says a former friend. “I was just like, Why is everybody holding hands?” In this context, Ebeling and Koenig started dating. The first time they made out, they were on the couch next to Alvarez, who was making out with someone else. “Brian reached over and started touching my thigh,” Ebeling says. “I didn’t feel like I could do anything about it because they’re best friends, and I didn’t want to make it weird.” (Alvarez denies this.)
After four years in L.A., Ebeling felt that he had finally found his tribe — a trial for anyone looking for a foothold in Hollywood. Along with Kirby and Michael Strassner, they became a group, going to shows and hanging out at Kirby’s house in West Hollywood afterward. At 27, Ebeling had a wide-eyed, high-energy way about him. Former friends remember him as “accommodating” and maybe a touch naïve. “Jon was always down to do anything, anywhere, anytime,” says a former friend. “It was hard to know whether or not he wanted something. I think of him as a sweet Texas boy that would do anything to make anyone happy.” A friend of Koenig’s describes Ebeling as “a glommeronner,” but others apply this descriptor to the broader group. Underlying their relationships was a sense that Alvarez was going to be their ticket to success. He had savvy and built the worlds they would come to inhabit, writing, directing, producing, editing. His projects at this time skewed toward the exhibitionist — nudity, sex, shower scenes — and challenged conventions around monogamy and sexuality. “Part of me felt like Brian was intending to create something that was a fantasy of his,” a former friend says.
Friends of Alvarez say he historically had “other Stephs” — that is, right-hand women by his side, socially and creatively. “He preferred a queen bee–sidekick dynamic,” one says. A lot of people became yes-men in his presence. “You could see them forsaking themselves to make sure they were in his good graces,” says a former collaborator. “There was a sense of Are we really friends? Or are you just using me for something? Are we using each other for something? That was the energy around those people. I don’t know where the integrity in the relationship lies.”
Shortly after Ebeling and Koenig met, Alvarez landed funding for The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo. He asked if Ebeling would play Billy, the straight guy whom Caleb has a crush on. “I was over the moon,” says Ebeling. “I was just so excited for the exposure.”
In the world of Caleb Gallo, there’s a sense that anyone could have sex with anyone. Sexual labels are fungible — part of what Alvarez would call a “queer utopia.” “My mental and sexual desires are polyamorous,” he said in an interview about the show. “So I can get into trouble, and I wanted to make that one of the things in the show.” In the pilot, Caleb’s friend Len (Kirby) announces he’s “going bi” — only to discard the identity in the next episode and move on to things like Catholicism and rapping. Caleb is the calm, happy conduit for everyone’s relationships. He sets Len up with his gender-fluid friend Freckle (Jason Greene) and Karen with Billy, while also fantasizing about making out with Billy. During his date with Karen, Billy tells Caleb it isn’t going so well. Later, when he asks them why, Billy replies, “Maybe because you weren’t there, buddy.”
After wrapping the pilot on Halloween, Ebeling and Koenig had sex for the first time. Two days later, Alvarez asked to hang out at Ebeling’s apartment. Ebeling lived in a barely furnished studio on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz: There was a bed and a chair. Alvarez was a block over in a tiny studio on Vermont Avenue. They watched The Wolf of Wall Street and went over to a neighbor’s place to smoke some weed before going back to Ebeling’s apartment. That’s when Ebeling remembers “the insane pressure started” for them to hook up.
It began with Alvarez asking Ebeling if he was using him. “He got stone-cold quiet like he was really troubled,” Ebeling says. Then Alvarez began asking, “ Are you manipulating me to get to Steph? Are you manipulating me to be on the show?’ And so it became this game of like, ‘No, no, not at all.’” Once Ebeling had convinced him he wasn’t up to anything, Alvarez suggested they hook up. He wanted to compare penises. He wanted to smell his balls. He asked Ebeling what the last porn he watched was and pulled it up on the TV to get him hard. He said that Koenig would want them to experiment together and that she would be into it. After saying “no” multiple times, Ebeling says, he allowed Alvarez to perform oral sex on him until he went flaccid and then pretended to fall asleep. (Alvarez says Ebeling “enthusiastically gave consent” and “encouraged it throughout.”) “I thought this is what I needed to do to keep the peace, to keep seeing Steph, to stay on the show,” says Ebeling.
Koenig came over the next morning when Alvarez was still there. Alvarez suggested they keep it a secret, which Ebeling didn’t understand — hadn’t he said Koenig would have wanted this? — and Ebeling insisted that they tell her. Alvarez says it was the opposite: that he wanted to tell Steph and “felt it was important that they do so — as depicted in episode three.” In that scene, Caleb tells Billy, “I’m happy to be as confidential about everything as you want,” to which Billy replies, “No, I mean, we should tell her, right?” When they told her in real life, Koenig was devastated, according to a friend whom she confided in at the time. (Representatives for Koenig declined to respond on the record for this story.)
Koenig left to go to therapy and called Alvarez immediately. He went up to the roof to take the call. When Alvarez came back, he told Ebeling she was weirded out by what had happened and didn’t want to be romantic with him anymore. “I broke down sobbing,” says Ebeling. “I felt like my world had shrunk so much because they were the only people I had been hanging out with. This big thing had happened where I had had this gay experience and nobody else knew.”
A few days later, Ebeling had his first session with Johnny O’Callaghan, a former actor turned spiritual guru better known as “Johnny O.” Alvarez and Koenig had recommended him as someone who had helped them get auditions and think more positively. They considered him a therapist although he wasn’t licensed (he studied spiritual psychology at the University of Santa Monica). Ebeling sent him an “intentions email,” which included statements like “I’d like to be at peace with myself and better understand the relationships I have with people,” “I’m in love with my friend Stephanie and want to be with her,” and “My friend Brian is in love with me and I want to keep him as a friend with no romantic entanglements.” Later, he texted Koenig that he was “in a dark place” and “still trying to wrap my head around what happened and why I allowed it to happen.” He told her he was feeling better, though, because he had been up front “about not wanting to go there anymore” with Alvarez, who had agreed it wouldn’t happen again. Their conversation continued:
Koenig: I mean it’s not all bad. It all felt good and happy. I hope you get to a happy place about it, it’s beautiful and cool and realize you guys are best friends and really close and nothing wrong with any of it.
Ebeling: What felt good and happy? Oh, you and me?
Koenig: I dunno everything.
Ebeling: I just wish Brian and I could be like we were before you know?
Koenig: You guys totally can be. You will be. He’s totally fine with that. He’s your good friend.
Ebeling: None of that stuff felt right and it kind of hurts me that he didn’t take into account the fragile place I was in. Also I’m an adult though and make my own decisions. So I’ll get over it. Just a raw feeling right now.
Koenig: Sure. I mean I know you don’t seem fragile. So maybe he didn’t think of that. He would never have done anything to hurt you. I think it all just felt right. And free.
Ebeling: Yeah. It just would have made me feel better if it had felt more right you know? Like it was for something. I just can’t stop seeing it as being only destructive.
In the months that followed, the trio became locked into a dynamic in which each felt the other was gaslighting them. Alvarez believed Ebeling reciprocated his feelings, and said as much to Koenig. Ebeling felt Alvarez was projecting a desire from him that wasn’t there — which became even clearer to Ebeling after their hookup. Koenig suspected Ebeling was lying about his feelings for Alvarez, telling him one thing and her another. As she saw it, he had cheated on her and became upset only after it became clear he might lose her.
But they still had a show to make, and Alvarez saw an opportunity to use the incident as material. In late November, he sent over the shooting script for the second episode of Caleb Gallo with the note, “I think they are very funny; if anything is too much let me know and we can adjust. I say we fuckin go for it.” The episode ends with a retelling of their hookup through Alvarez’s lens. Billy reveals to Caleb that he had sex with Karen. Caleb tells Billy he read an article “that says that straight people don’t exist,” which makes him realize that “gay people don’t exist.” According to the stage directions, Caleb asks to see Billy’s penis, and they both pull theirs out. Caleb tells him to “make it big,” and the directions say, “He is trying.” In one of several moments that didn’t make the final edit, Billy asks Caleb if he’d like to sniff his genitals. The stage directions read, “Caleb goes in and smells them. A DEEP, DEEP and long inhale.”
“Ken was like, ‘Are you sure you want to do that?’” says Ebeling. “At that point, I’m like, Yeah, I want to go for it. Brian’s a genius. If he knows what people like, at least I can take my painful experience and turn it into some good content. Maybe be in a show that gets sold. We can all have jobs.” He texted Koenig afterward, “this is me getting over it.”
Around Thanksgiving 2015, Ebeling and Koenig began seeing each other again. She had invited him to visit her on set while she was shooting Kirby’s sketch series Made in China, and they fell back into a texting banter. But Koenig was still insecure about what had happened, and she grew concerned Ebeling was using Caleb Gallo as a way to covertly hook up with Alvarez. By then, they had shot episode two, during which Ebeling had gotten naked. She warned him not to take his clothes off anymore around Alvarez so as to not lead him on. He agreed.
There were moments when everyone seemed simpatico. In early December, Alvarez texted Ebeling after his own session with Johnny O. “He [Johnny O.] was clear about how you felt about the sexual aspect of things,” he wrote. “He said Jon loves you but doesn’t want to have a sexual relationship with you. Which was obvious but i needed to hear clearly.” But Alvarez seemed to fall back into what became a pattern, growing needy and fixated on the ways he felt excluded by Koenig and Ebeling’s relationship. Ebeling recalls Alvarez saying, “I’m up here trying to make us all famous, and who’s loving me?” (Alvarez does not remember saying this.) Whenever Alvarez had these crises of confidence, Koenig was there to reassure him. As Ebeling remembers her putting it, “We’ve got to make sure that he’s happy and he feels good and loved.”
Early in January 2016, Alvarez told Koenig he wanted her to stop seeing Ebeling. She talked him down. “He knows he can’t ask us not to see each other,” she wrote to Ebeling in an email. “He’s aware and was just being cranky.” That day, Ebeling went to hang out at Alvarez’s apartment, where he says Alvarez once again tried to turn the situation sexual. “All of a sudden,” says Ebeling, “he put straight porn on his laptop.” Then, Alvarez undressed and proceeded to take a shower with the door and shower curtain open. “I felt walled in,” Ebeling says. He waited for Alvarez to dry off to say good-bye. Alvarez gave him a hug and then Ebeling says he put his hand down the back of his pants and squeezed his butt. “I said, ‘All right, buddy. Love you, man,’” remembers Ebeling. “I’ll see you tomorrow on set.” (Alvarez says this interaction was “not only consensual but actively encouraged” by Ebeling.)
Filming on the third episode would pick up where the last one had left off. In the script, Caleb and Billy are back at Billy’s apartment, which is Ebeling’s apartment, watching The Wolf of Wall Street on his bed with the lights dimmed. Only here the encounter is pure flirtation; they play footsie before cuddling and taking their clothes off. Caleb asks Billy, “Can I suck it?” Billy says, “Yeah.” The stage directions read, “Caleb goes to do so, under the covers.”
According to Ebeling, when Alvarez went under the covers, he pulled down Ebeling’s underwear and began sucking his penis. “I am assuming nobody on set knows what’s going on under the comforter, and I’m just frozen,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do. I’m on set with my director, who is assaulting me. It was a horrible feeling.”
Ebeling’s first reaction was guilt — that he had let this happen; that it somehow constituted cheating on Koenig. His next was rage: “I was like, Wait a second. I didn’t consent to this. We didn’t talk about this. I was raped.” He texted Koenig immediately. “We were shooting and Brian took a huge goddamn liberty,” he writes. “I’m so fucking upset. I feel like I was raped. Literally I was raped.” She writes, “How were you not able to stop this I’m so confused,” and tells him to call her. He stepped outside to do so. “Her response is like, ‘Why didn’t you push his head down? You’re a man,’” he recalls her saying on the phone. He told her to go fuck herself. She told him to “go sit in a quiet place and calm yourself.” To Koenig, this was another example of Ebeling failing to set boundaries with Alvarez.
Alvarez, speaking through his lawyer, Michael J. Kump, says Ebeling’s reaction was overblown and that he was “pretending to be upset,” writing, “This was the performative Kabuki theater of a self-described manipulator, who was distorting the situation to ingratiate himself to [Koenig].” He does not dispute the act but argues that because their previous sexual encounters were consensual, Alvarez assumed the same would be the case here. He is referring to both the hookup at Ebeling’s apartment and the episode-two scene, during which he says both actors masturbated and Alvarez smelled Ebeling’s genitals. (Ebeling says he did not masturbate and that shooting the scene didn’t amount to a sex act: “Nudity on set I’m okay with. I never would have stroked my penis in front of a camera.”) Kump adds that “Brian briefly made contact with Mr. Ebeling’s penis under the covers, believing (correctly and justifiably in light of Brian’s then-current sexual relationship with Mr. Ebeling) that Mr. Ebeling was fine with it.” Ebeling says the oral sex occurred for “a whole take.” In a follow-up, Alvarez’s representatives say Ebeling “consented verbally” to doing it “for real” beforehand. (“Produce the evidence,” Ebeling says. “No way in hell would I have ever consented to that.”)
Ebeling woke up upset early the next morning and sent Koenig a stream of texts saying his relationship with Alvarez was irreparably broken. “I’ll never look at him the same,” he wrote. “He can’t know he can get away with this.”
Ebeling: God, my heart been pounding out of my chest since 6
This sucks
It’s starting to throb
I’d take a Xanax but was drinking all night
Don’t want to mix
Koenig: Cause you’re making it huge. Make it small. Rationalize it instead of internally letting your emotions interpret it.
You’re choosing to hate someone which is a hard emotion to feel. Instead of rationalizing it, seeing it from his shoes and changing your tactics with him. That simple.
Ebeling: He was so wrong honey.
If he doesn’t know now.
He’ll do it again to someone else.
Koenig: You weren’t physically hurt. Yes it was confusing. And he was wrong and he knows it now.
Ebeling: He’s a deviant.
Koenig: He’s not like a rapist jon.
In a later conversation, Ebeling recalls Koenig telling him the penis was just another part of the body and it might as well have been his pinkie. She told him to make himself “accountable” by setting stronger boundaries, to which he replied that his “past indiscretions didn’t warrant last night’s behavior.” She explained Alvarez’s behavior by saying, “you guys have done it before so I bet he thought maybe this was the only way you’d allow yourself.” “The weird thing about Brian was that he was insanely toxic, but he didn’t shy away from his toxic traits,” says Ebeling. “Steph was almost worse. She was always trying to make me feel like I was crazy or I was seeing it wrong.”
According to those familiar with Koenig’s thinking, she maintains that what happened was not sexual assault. She views it as the result of loose boundaries in an amateur set environment and believes Ebeling responded the way he did because he’d anticipated she would be angry with him. Moreover, she often felt like she had to placate him because he was prone to emotional meltdowns and self-victimizing to gain sympathy. As she saw it, Ebeling wasn’t particularly good about boundaries either. He could be pushy, too, when it came to sex.
After the shoot, Ebeling spent the night at Kirby’s because he didn’t want to be at his apartment, where everything had transpired. When he told Kirby what had happened on set, he was supportive at first. “We’re not shooting porn,” Ebeling recalled him saying. Then Kirby spoke to Alvarez and “his whole attitude on what happened completely changed.” Alvarez told Kirby about the night before at his apartment, where they watched porn and Alvarez took a shower. “He was like, ‘No wonder he thought he could do that to you on set,’” says Ebeling. “It was like Brian was laying the groundwork to discredit me.” (Kirby declined to be interviewed.)
“The fact is there was no consent in that experience,” says a former collaborator who worked with the group. “And his friends were like, ‘Well, everyone’s doing great because of the work that’s coming out. If you create this rift, it’s going to ruin it for everyone.’”
At USC, classmates say Alvarez fixated on unattainable people. They recall Alvarez growing jealous when a close female friend got a boyfriend. One night during a drinking game in which everyone had to tell a secret, he said jokingly that he wanted to gouge the boyfriend’s eyes out with his thumbs. (Alvarez does not recall this.) Soon Alvarez began to follow him around, showing up to parties uninvited and banging on the window of his house to be let inside in the middle of the night. During their senior showcase, he heckled him and tried to throw him off his game. Eventually, the boyfriend filed a no-contact order against Alvarez with campus security.
“Brian felt a permission to be a bit more extroverted and to potentially cross some boundaries with straight guys,” says a former college friend. “It was like, ‘This is who I am, and I’m going to express my own sexuality, and you can’t tell me not to because that would be oppressive.’”
The behavior coincided with a period when Alvarez was drinking heavily and using Adderall. It became enough of a problem that he had to leave school and go home to Tennessee to get sober. When he returned to USC in the spring of 2010, some students had been cast in a production of a musical written by Parmer Fuller, one of their professors. Among them was Alvarez, whom another student had been assigned to drive to rehearsals. The classmate says that when he picked Alvarez up, he seemed intoxicated or high and that Alvarez began groping his groin while he was driving. “He kept making passes at me, and there was nothing I could do about it,” says the former classmate. “It got to the point where I was so uncomfortable I didn’t want to be in the same room with him, and I didn’t want to pick him up.”
Alvarez says he has “no recollection” of groping anyone in college but acknowledges harassing another student. He says he has been sober since May 1, 2010, and “recognizes that, when under the influence, his behavior could often be insensitive and damaging” and that he has “apologized often to those he might have hurt and has always been deeply grateful for their apparent understanding and forgiveness.”
Alvarez’s fantasies of reciprocation recur throughout his work. In 2017, he wrote a feature script, Everything Is Free, based on his feelings toward another straight male student at USC. In that film, Alvarez’s character, Ivan, falls in love with a presumably straight guy named Cole. Cole keeps sending Ivan mixed messages — hooking up with him while maintaining his heterosexuality. Cole’s older brother, Christian, is a homophobe who forcibly keeps them apart. Ivan shows up to Cole’s house at night, trying to win him back, only for Christian to punch him in the face. In a years-later coda, Cole returns to Ivan to say he was, indeed, always in love with him.
The day after filming the sex scene, Ebeling went to Alvarez’s house and told him he felt he’d crossed a line. But in the weeks that followed, the surety he felt in the immediate aftermath began to erode. “None of my friends were seeing me as a victim and this guy as an abuser,” Ebeling says. “It was too hard to look at it as if I had been raped. I convinced myself this was a miscommunication.”
“He wasn’t processing it. He kept doing that damn show,” says Ebeling’s friend Tony Soto, who first met him at Soto’s monthly lip-syncing competition at the L.A. gay bar Akbar. Within days of the set incident, Soto came over to hang out at Ebeling’s place — they lived down the hall from each other — and Ebeling told him what had occurred. “I said he was raped. Immediately,” says Soto. “He didn’t want to hear that. A heterosexual person doesn’t want to admit they were sexually assaulted by a gay guy.”
To make matters more complicated, the incident occurred a week after the pilot of Caleb Gallo had been released online, where it was already gaining traction. Queer media outlets heralded its arrival; Tyler Oakley said it was “officially my new favorite thing.” They wrapped the five-episode season in late March 2016, and the show was programmed as part of the New Online Work section at the Tribeca Film Festival for April. Alvarez’s agents started pitching it to studios and networks, and he told them he was firm about the cast remaining the same for any television deal.
For a while, Ebeling felt it was in his best interest to forgive and forget. “My work on Brian’s stuff was the only thing creatively I was doing,” says Ebeling. “I let the fear of losing my whole network of people win.” Koenig and Ebeling continued to see each other on and off until the relationship petered out toward the end of 2016. Over the next four years, the group largely remained intact, only it now included Koenig’s new boyfriend and now-husband, Chris Riggi. To outsiders, they seemed as close as ever, hanging out and making things.
Like Alvarez, Ebeling began making work about his romantic fixations. After Koenig, he dated an actor and model, Bailey Kai, for some ten months before she broke up with him. He turned his attempt to win her back — during a car ride to the airport — into the 2018 short We Shouldn’t Be Here. In it, he’s a clingy and chaotic character, quick to anger when he feels things aren’t going his way. Ebeling and Kai play themselves, and the short was written and directed by Riggi. In a conversation recorded by Riggi during a brainstorm, Ebeling analyzes his own behavior, pointing to the way he used sympathy to get attention, like asking Kai to give him a head rub before starting to cry. “I was like, ‘You think I’m so fucking pathetic,’” he says. “Part of me is really showing her what I really feel like — I really did feel pathetic. And then there’s also a little bit of a manipulative factor. I know that if I really shit on myself in that moment and really lose it that she’s going to finally give me that warmth that I wanted. It’s so gross.”
Koenig, he tells Riggi, was always the best at seeing through his tactics. Sometimes, though, he thought she was wrong. “She saw shit that wasn’t there with Brian,” he says. “She used to think I was checking out Brian … That’s the only area where she was a little bit clouded.” Riggi asks if anything had ever happened between him and Alvarez. “Brian sucked my dick,” Ebeling replies. “You know that. But I was never into Brian’s body. I was never sexually charged by Brian.” Riggi replies, “You probably never really shut him down.” Ebeling agrees that he “played into it.”
Ebeling and Alvarez continued to shoot projects together and frequently sent each other mutually fawning messages. Ebeling would call him “my brotha” and say he was “one of the best men I’ve ever met.” In January 2018, when Alvarez booked a part on the Will & Grace revival as Estefan, the boyfriend of Sean Hayes’s Jack, Ebeling texted him, “No one deserves success more than you,” before adding, “Means a lot you put me in your projects!”
That fall, Alvarez’s Will & Grace character became a recurring one. Around that time, he cut himself off from the friend group. He told those close to him he was specifically trying to get away from Ebeling because he didn’t like the control he felt Ebeling had over his life. He feared that if he wronged him, Ebeling would weaponize the set incident.
Ebeling says the break allowed him to reassess what had happened. He went on a date and hooked up with another man so he could have a positive gay experience. (Ebeling identifies as straight, saying the exploration helped him settle this for himself.) By March 2019, Ebeling was living with Kirby, and Alvarez had returned to the group; he was living in an apartment building next to them. Ebeling told Koenig while he would like to keep the peace, he had “a problem with Brian.” “It’s just very deep and I don’t see it ever going away,” he texted her. “Our time apart made me reevaluate him a lot and even more importantly myself.” She texted him saying she’d be outside his apartment in a couple of minutes so they could go get frozen yogurt. When he walked outside, he saw that she had brought Alvarez with her. “I felt ambushed,” he says.
Alvarez asked if they could go to his place and talk things out. Ebeling said his piece — that Alvarez’s behavior on set had been wrong. Ebeling recalls Koenig saying, “We could talk about it on a podcast,” which both Ebeling and Alvarez thought was a bad idea. Alvarez felt that Ebeling was vindictively holding the incident over his head. He began to talk about how far he’d come in his career and how many big things were around the corner. That’s when Ebeling remembers Alvarez falling to the floor and crying. At first, Ebeling thought he was doing a comedic bit. “Brian was begging me not to end his career,” says Ebeling. “It was like him turning himself into the victim. I just stood there.”
In 2019, Ebeling began seeing his now-fiancée, Michaela Myers, a fellow actor and Groundlings alum. He had been oblique about what had happened between himself and Alvarez at first, but the more he shared with her, the more clarity he felt. She affirmed his initial feelings — that it was wrong, that his friends’ responses were wrong. It became increasingly difficult to justify working with Alvarez. The last thing he did with them was Riggi’s film Good Luck With Everything in 2020. Ebeling told them he would do it as long as Alvarez wasn’t involved. (He wasn’t.) “I knew by drawing a line in the sand I might end up over here on this side all by myself,” he says.
The pandemic forced the final break. “There were many nights where he would sob like a little kid,” says Myers. “It was like he’d finally accepted what had happened to him.” His nighttime breakdowns were so intense they looked into EMDR therapy — eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing. In EMDR, the patient focuses on a single point of trauma and the negative associations accompanying it. For the memory, he focused on the phone call with Koenig after the assault.
The rift has only grown since Ebeling began telling friends, colleagues, and acquaintances his story. He wanted to plant a stake and for people to choose sides, an attitude some have found aggressive and off-putting. Meanwhile, Alvarez’s profile has continued to grow. He appeared in M3GAN and 80 for Brady, and on TikTok he has amassed almost 900,000 followers. Lately, he’s been doing a daily dance trend with captions urging viewers to stream English Teacher, which just saw another surge of critical adoration, landing on the New York Times’ “Best of 2024” list and earning a slew of Indie Spirit Award nominations. (FX is aware of the allegations and has yet to renew it for a second season.) The success gap between them prompted some to see Ebeling’s Instagram post as sour grapes. “The instant thought I had was, Oh, he’s mad they’re having some success and he’s not a part of it,” says one of Koenig’s friends.
As a day job, Ebeling has been leading hiking tours to the Hollywood sign, but he hasn’t given up on his dreams. He and Myers made a short together in 2021 called Jeff Can’t Swim and are writing a pilot. Still, Caleb Gallo remains the project Ebeling is best known for. People yell “Billy!” at him on the street all the time, particularly when he’s in West Hollywood. “It’s funny: This one job that I only made a couple hundred bucks on is the thing people know me from,” Ebeling says.
Alvarez had envisioned a different ending for his characters. In the Caleb Gallo version of events, after Karen discovers Billy and Caleb together, they all pile into a car to drive Billy to an audition. They yell, they cry. Billy and Karen kiss while Billy holds Caleb’s hand. “I’m a 21st-century man!” Billy declares. That night, Caleb invites them to go back to his place. In a sequence set to the ’80s song “Hungry Eyes,” Caleb begins to take a shower with the door and curtain open while Billy and Karen hook up. The episode ends with all of them spooning in bed together.