> But this is not the case at all, unless you intended "these kinds of accusations" to mean both making formal charges and writing accusatory blog posts -- but the whole reason for this article is to point out the massive amount of damage that the latter can do at almost no cost to the accuser. Absent further evidence, it's clear that in this particular case, the two accusers' lives were not at all "torn apart" by making these life-destroying accusations -- do you agree?
Absolutely not! Assume the alleged victims are telling the truth, and read their statements again, carefully. Do they sound to you like people whose lives weren't torn apart by the experience? They needed counselling, therapy, time off work. These sound to me like traumatised people. You can argue that what they had to deal with wasn't "as bad" as what the accused had to deal with, but I don't accept that women make public accusations of sexual exploitation casually without any personal consequences, and certainly not in this case.
The "1 in 100" statistic is to remind people of a few things: firstly, knowing that you will have to expose your sex life to the police and there is only a very small probability that anything will actually be done about it, some women are still brave enough to try, and secondly, that underneath these 1 in 100 accusations are many others who just cannot bring themselves to the point of talking to the police about what they have experienced.
I think we should give women who make these accusations the benefit of the doubt while establishing the facts, acknowledging that coming forward to raise your voice about these things is extremely difficult. If men can by and large rape women - commit a crime against them - with relatively little risk of successful prosecution, then I think it's pretty obvious that non-criminal sexual exploitation is even less likely to have any consequences for the perpetrator.
I'm afraid I don't accept that you can split this into "experiencing something traumatic" and "making the accusation that you have experienced something traumatic".
The claim that "almost the entire community immediately sided with them" is accepting the accused's account of what happened in favour of the accusers. At least one of the victims started to raise concerns in the community several years beforehand and their concerns were not taken seriously:
"I have reported all of my experience to the ScalaCenter in 2019. I was hoping to see concrete actions, such as building a reporting mechanism, to protect minorities in the community. Unfortunately, I am not aware of such actions taken."
I'd also be very, very deeply skeptical that two public claims were the only claims made. We should bear that in mind. If the accusations are true, the public ones are usually the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
I doubt the Scala open source community had an HR department or lawyers on hand to investigate and take action on behalf of the community as a whole.
And I'm not sure some random software engineers contributing to open source projects have the proper expertise to build a sexual harassment reporting mechanism and a mechanism for fairly enforcing consequences.
Do we need to make sure there all those kinds of structures are in place for every permutation of human interaction?
> I'm afraid I don't accept that you can split this
I don't see how else to interpret your original remark:
> To make these kinds of accusations as a woman tears your life apart in unimaginable ways
> At least one of the victims started to raise concerns in the community several years beforehand and their concerns were not taken seriously
That's fair I think, though I don't share the conviction that it's the responsibility of a convention to prosecute criminal allegations (and especially not if the allegations are "sub-criminal" -- any behaviour that is sufficiently damaging to warrant any kind of formal punishment deserves to be a crime).
> I'd also be very, very deeply skeptical that two public claims were the only claims made. We should bear that in mind.
OK, but this is pure speculation. I prefer not to bear such in mind.
> OK, but this is pure speculation. I prefer not to bear such in mind.
Quote from the second accuser:
Because of similarities in our stories as well as the stories Jon Pretty told us himself, we have reasons to believe that other people in the community have had experiences with him that are similar to ours.
I think either you aren’t reading the accusers’ statements closely enough or you are choosing to discount them - but if they suggest that this is more widespread than just the two of them, I think this moves beyond “pure speculation” and into “quite likely”.
I read both statements, I'm just not as willing as you apparently are to take their claims at face value.
In a dispute between two parties, one side's claims about the other are not to be taken as gospel. This applies to both sides.
Whether or not or other people have made similar complaints about JP is actually one of the few independently verifiable claims that can be made in a case like this, so I would argue that speculating about this aspect is especially egregious.
This is not one person complaining about another’s behaviour - these are two people who are alleging the same thing about the same person. Either a) they are colluding or b) this is a pattern of behaviour by the accused person that needed to be addressed.
Whether the way it was addressed was appropriate or not I don’t know. The person may have been warned about it and what we are reading about may have been the end of a lengthy process. Maybe, as the accused person alleges, this was an enormous unexpected surprise and they had no warning of it.
You’re entitled to your opinion about what has taken place in this situation.
I agree with you that there being two complaints rather than one strengthens the accusers' case, and that there's either collusion, or not. (Collusion is something I don't discount as a possibility -- it happens all the time.)
In the no-collusion case, I think how much the accused's behaviour needs to be addressed depends on details that have been left vague in the accusers' posts. I certainly think that continuing to contact someone after they have asked you not to do so is a violation. Regarding what I take as Yifan's main claim:
> There was another time that he insisted on having intercourse regardless of me didn’t want to.
If she expressed her unwillingness, then this is straightforward rape and JP belongs behind bars. Explicit consent is rightly the gold standard, but in practice I think many people, men and women, prefer to proceed on (fallible) intuition. If she did not express consent because she felt she was under duress, the situation is murkier. Immediate physical threat? This would still be rape, but her later actions contradict this. Fearing loss of her future career? I don't buy that JP has that much power over her. Merely fearing loss of the "treats" JP provided her through his high status (Twitter highlighting, introducing her to others in the community, etc.)? I don't know what the law says, but in my opinion, that would be an implicit quid pro quo that she chose to accept, and not rape.
But what makes me suspect that it was none of those things was this:
> During those horrifying days, I felt that he was treating me as an object. For instance, he distanced me at conferences but wanted to be intimate in Airbnb.
Sexual harassment is not conditional on whether the accused smiles at you and and makes you feel valued the next day. I think this excerpt shows that she was likely initially romantically interested in JP, and had sex with him willingly under the belief that they would become an item, but later felt hurt when she realised that he was interested in her only for sex. If so, then JP manipulated her emotions callously, but his crime is ultimately no worse than the crime of a beautiful woman who dangles the possibility of sex before a hopeful male "friend" in order to secure his attention, without any intention of having sex with him. In the latter case, we might feel sympathy for the man, but we do not expect a convention they are both attending, let alone the police, to take seriously his complaint of manipulation.
We might also think that the "friendzoned" man has to some degree brought this suffering on himself, by not being upfront about his intentions -- and that as an adult, he should have known better.
Absolutely not! Assume the alleged victims are telling the truth, and read their statements again, carefully. Do they sound to you like people whose lives weren't torn apart by the experience? They needed counselling, therapy, time off work. These sound to me like traumatised people. You can argue that what they had to deal with wasn't "as bad" as what the accused had to deal with, but I don't accept that women make public accusations of sexual exploitation casually without any personal consequences, and certainly not in this case.
The "1 in 100" statistic is to remind people of a few things: firstly, knowing that you will have to expose your sex life to the police and there is only a very small probability that anything will actually be done about it, some women are still brave enough to try, and secondly, that underneath these 1 in 100 accusations are many others who just cannot bring themselves to the point of talking to the police about what they have experienced.
I think we should give women who make these accusations the benefit of the doubt while establishing the facts, acknowledging that coming forward to raise your voice about these things is extremely difficult. If men can by and large rape women - commit a crime against them - with relatively little risk of successful prosecution, then I think it's pretty obvious that non-criminal sexual exploitation is even less likely to have any consequences for the perpetrator.