Do we like John Green?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Years of fundraising for maternal health and TB, plus public fights against book bans, with one old regret about a slur in a novel.
John Green grew up in Orlando and went to school there, which is why it stung when a Florida school board candidate campaigned in 2022 to ban his first novel, Looking for Alaska, from the district's schools and libraries. He answered with a TikTok video, calling it weird and poking at the ironic name of the group backing the push, Moms for Liberty. That's the shape of his public life: a writer who keeps ending up defending other people's right to read.
The big scandal story is a short one. In June 2015 a Tumblr user implied he sexually abused children, an accusation Refinery29 said it couldn't confirm and couldn't tell what prompted. Green denied it flat out, writing “I do not sexually abuse children,” and called it sick and libelous. Nothing further has turned up in the reporting we read, so it sits as an unproven, denied claim from a single anonymous-style post.
On the harm test he comes out clean, with one fair mark. He told Twitter in 2015 that he regretted using the r-word in Paper Towns, and said he wouldn't use it again in a book or elsewhere. We found no later reporting of him using it, which is what an apology has to look like to count. Beyond that, his public record is on the other side: he is a named plaintiff in the suit against Florida's school library law.
That Florida suit, filed in August 2024 alongside five major publishers, argues the law violates the First Amendment rights of publishers, authors, teachers and students. Green wrote that he was suing to end the state's “unconstitutional and deeply un-American banning of books.” The state's education department called the case a stunt, so where you land on it depends on whether you see it as censorship or as parents getting a say in school libraries. We couldn't confirm the case's current status.
The good stuff is the real stuff. He and brother Hank have driven a six-year campaign that Green says raised $50 million for the Paul E. Farmer Maternal Center of Excellence in Sierra Leone, which opened in February 2026 with the country's first neonatal intensive care unit. This year's Project for Awesome livestream raised over $4.1 million, with all of Partners in Health's share going to ending tuberculosis.
He has also turned an obsession into a book and a campaign: Everything Is Tuberculosis came out in 2025, and he has pressed the companies behind TB tests and drugs on price. Johnson & Johnson and Danaher later made moves on a key patent and test prices, though neither credited his videos. That's a bloke using a big audience to make strangers care about a disease, and it's hard to knock.