There is a lot about the sexual events in this post that, to me, highlights something I feel is important which is: we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex.
This girl was feeling uncomfortable and crying but at the same time "didn't think those behaviors were problematic". I can't help but wonder if her parents never sat her down and discussed situations like this and, I get it. That's a really uncomfortable conversation to have with your child. It is, however, an important one.
This doesn't just apply to girls by the way. We parents need to be telling our sons what kind of behavior is and isn't acceptable. It's not enough to expect them to figure it out. Who are they figuring it out from if not us? Probably other inexperienced boys.
Please don't rush to put words in my mouth by thinking I am suggesting the guy in the article is innocent of the accusations. I'm making no commentary on either party from this article. That's for the courts to decide should one or both parties choose to take that course of action.
I'm simply saying it is important that parents overcome their discomfort around discussions of sex with their children so that the children can make informed decisions.
we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex.
I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I thought long and hard about this and decided that talking to my children about the existence of sexual predators would rob them of their innocence.
I've studied how this works. Sexual predation almost never starts with rape. It starts with myriad instances of boundary violation and disrespect and culminates in rape.
Rape hinges on the detail of consent. As a society trying to combat this issue, we seem to overlook that for the most part.
I taught my children that hugs and kisses required consent. I taught that from birth. Even a baby too young to talk can turn their face away because they don't want a kiss or hold their arms up enthusiastically to receive affection.
When they were older, I told them if they told someone "no" and their decision was not respected, come get me.
I only had one of them come get me once. The person who felt entitled to get "sugar" from my child was utterly shocked that I told them they were wrong.
This was an elderly female relative. My children are both boys.
Most likely, she wasn't actually a child molester, but this practice of adults demanding hugs and kisses from children who have no right to say "no" is commonplace and gets treated as something funny in movies. I treated it as no laughing matter.
If you want children to understand consent and respect, the best thing to do is let them experience it firsthand from birth. And make sure they know that rule is a two-way street, not a one-sided privilege.
My wife told me something a while back about how girls are often taught from a young age to be "sweet" and to defer to adults who demand their affection. I can't remember if it's something she read or came to herself upon examination of her youth. I can see the way that this idea on boundaries can grow to adulthood to having difficulty strongly advocating for oneself. The philosophies you laid out resonate strongly with me, and as a first-time parent expecting a daughter soon, I hope I can correctly instill them in her.
Did you ever deal with an instance where your kids started telling you "no" in response to demands you felt were reasonable, twisting your original explanations to use against you, for things like eating, cleaning up or hygiene? How did you reconcile the difference?
Totally agree. As a boy I played chess at the book store. This one man would always have long conversations with me and tell me about all sorts of books. (This was great, I loved reading.) After a number of weeks, he wanted me to go have lunch with him down the street. I felt like this was weird, and said no. The following weekend one of the other men, a math professor at the college, took me aside and said flat out not to hang out with that man, or go anywhere with him. Long story short, predators start by forming a friendship and building trust. If, for whatever reason, your kids don't feel like they can come to you first for things, then they're at a higher risk for predators.
We've also taught a similar one in "your body, your choice." I can confirm some folks look at us sideways when we agree with our kids choice to not hug or kiss.
If there is one thing I'd want my kids to know it is how to establish and confidently hold a boundary.
Thanks for this. I haven’t actually drawn a line between this kind of semi-forced physical affection and the blurring of consent as an adult, but it makes perfect sense. We even encourage/force kids to reciprocate gifts with physical affection. Surely this also inculcates a subconscious notion that you “owe” someone in this way.
Both genders should be taught both sides of the situation
This isn’t to play down the experiences of women at all, but it can be easy to forget that this happens to men too
Given the current culture, it can be even harder for men to come forward with their stories, and even less likely for them to be believed
As a plus, I think making sure to teach boys what is and isn’t acceptable to happen to them could help to teach them how to treat others
I think that otherwise, if it’s “don’t rape” for boys, and “don’t let people rape you” for girls, then it’s almost like marking each gender out solely as potential abusers and potential victims, which surely couldn’t be a good thing
These events are just as much about alcohol, misplaced trust in strangers, personally unsafe arrangements (sharing an AirBnb with an unfamiliar person), grossly disproportionate social influence etc. etc. as they are about "sex". In fact, even the sex the OP talks about was clearly coerced.
We should stop treating "tell folks not to have 'unacceptable' sex" as if it's a foolproof solution to all social problems. It just isn't.
+1 but especially our boys. Girls and women already learn so much about how to avoid being harmed by men. It’s time for our boys to learn how to become kind men - and for those of us who are men to model that for them.
If two adults get together, fly together, get a room together, drink wine together, have relations... Then we're supposed to say that consent can't be given because the woman is drunk. But they're both drunk. Isn't it essentially the patriarchy to say that a woman can't make that choice? Like if they're equals and they're both drunk, why do we blame the men?
Because they aren't really equals? Isn't that what we're fighting against? We blame the men for not ignoring the wishes of the woman while drunk. It's a little bit chauvinistic to think the men know better isn't it?
Boys and men are constantly taught to be kind and protective toward women and even deferential to their wants. Just because there might be a small percent of men who have psychological disorders or otherwise don't behave properly doesn't mean that 95%+ of men don't have GOOD character, whether or not that comes from education.
But I think we should also be teaching boys and men how not to be victims. Both sexes can be abusers, and we spend almost no time teaching boys and men how to recognize and escape abusive situations.
Are you implying that rape occurs because someone’s parents didn’t tell them not to or that they would not rape if their parents HAD told them not to do it?
I also think we can build better communities by ensuring people are in safe situations, especially when traveling or when they are in an unfamiliar environment. This is especially true of young adults who have yet to experience predators.
Agreed. I can't believe a woman would be naïve enough to share a room with a man. For crying out loud, if a man invites you to a room with him alone he wants to have sex. It's that simple.
I think boys already are told what is acceptable and what isn't. We got taught, in no uncertain terms, what would be considered rape or sexual assault. But I think people are afraid to mention the obvious when it comes to things like putting yourself in uncomfortable situations.
I predict this comment will be downvoted, so let me anticipate your objections. I had my bike stolen last week. I left it somewhere unlocked. This is considered my fault. Now you could say, no, it's not my fault, it's the bastard who stole it. And, sure, you'd be right. But the fact is I don't have a bike right now. Lock up your bike.
I'm not sure if I'm different or not, but I've shared a room alone with female friends on multiple occasions (when younger) with literally nothing happening even when we shared a bed.
Obviously, we were long time friends and this would be different if I was meeting a conference speaker, but as usual, nothing is as black or white as "men only want sex".
However, I do agree with your point. Boys need to be taught what could be considered rape, and girls need to realise that sadly some men will abuse them sexually if given half a chance.
> I think boys already are told what is acceptable and what isn't.
Maybe things have changed since I was young but, that may be overly generous. The kind of discussion I'm suggesting never happened with me, or, if it did, it happened only once. My parents left me to figure that out on my own. I don't want this to sound like I'm attacking my parents because I'm not. I had great parents, but the topic of sexual behavior was obviously something they weren't comfortable having with me at the time.
Thinking back on conversations I've had with pretty much all of my male friends, they had the same experience.
I know it's probably not your intention, but you are shifting the blame from Jon to Yifan's parents. I hope this doesn't stay as the first comment in this thread.
It wasn't my intention nor do I believe that's what I'm doing. I'm simply using this event to highlight to other current and future parents like myself that we need to overcome our discomfort with discussing sex with our children so that we can provide them with tools should they ever find themselves in similar situations. I posit that her parents hadn't had those conversations, but I'm also not blaming them in any way if they hadn't, nor am I try to shift blame away from or to anyone.
That is why I was explicit in my request that people not put words in my mouth or read between the lines.
This is not about blame, it's about protecting people.
There will always be Jon's and worse than Jon's out there in the world. They are to blame indeed. But what are you going to do about it? How are you going to protect yourself and others?
Taking measures for protection does not mean you are to blame.
I think this comment is saying "here is something that some of us can do that might help prevent these kinds of situations in the future". In my opinion, that's a productive contribution to the conversation, and does not imply that Jon is any less guilty.
> we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex.
Exactly. The conclusion is simple, yet challenging to implement: don't have sex outside of marriage. For girls and women: don't have casual relationships with men. Problem solved.
Marriage has nothing to do with it. It's just legal binding to unite the possessions and caretaking of the children. Abuse still happens, more often than not, in marriages, including rape. Unless you comment was sarcastic, your point is clearly proven wrong by and large.
General PSA from someone who has studied such things:
1. Alcohol is the number one date rape drug and it's problematic in part because men tend to have a much higher tolerance than women.
2. Date rape frequently involves two people from different cultures with different social expectations. This often fosters terrible misunderstandings.
3. It's always problematic to "try a case" in the court of public opinion. Probably better to try to use a piece like this as a jumping off point for general discussion of the problem space and not an attempt to determine what "really" happened in this instance.
4. It's good to think about what women can do differently to try to protect themselves. Trying to talk about that is not, per se, blaming the victim anymore than it is blaming the victim to say "It's a bad neighborhood. Make sure you lock your car."
5. When someone is a habitual offender and genuinely a predator, their victim can do all the right things and still get assaulted.
6. Whether a woman did or did not do all the right things, a man choosing to assault her is still on him, just like you are still a thief even if someone failed to lock their car.
I continue to appreciate your appraisals and summaries, thank you.
Your comments on tricky topics tend to lean more toward actionables, rather than the perpetual rehashing same arguments the rest of this comment section is filled with.
A fairly obvious one: If you are from a culture where sex before marriage is permissible and you are a woman, men from cultures where women are expected to remain virgins until the wedding night may see you as "a loose woman."
In such cases, they may even feel entitled to have you and get very mad if you try to tell them no.
People from very conservative cultures tend to wildly misinterpret the actions of women from more liberated and empowered cultures. Her behavior may be viewed as promiscuous or as leading him on when she's doing no such thing.
Some cultures expect a man to have to pursue a woman pretty hard before she says "yes." I read one article where a man from such a culture was sort of frustrated or disappointed when his lady from another culture gave it up too easily in his view. He wasn't happy at not having to "work for it."
I wonder when is something is legally considered rape. Like what you read in the article, when there was a lot of manipulation, but not really a "no", and a bad feeling during an afterwards.
> I wonder when is something is legally considered rape.
Its kind of weird that this hairsplitting curiosity about consent always comes up exclusively in the context of rape and not other crimes with the same “without consent” rule, like battery (particularly since rape is, ina sense, just battery where the “harmful or offensive touching” element involves specific configurations of genital contact.)
But its actually pretty simple: if the other party didn’t actively intend for the specific interaction to occur, there was no consent. All the other things people ask about (except to the extent that they involve factors that legally either negate consent if known to or caused by the other party or which create a legal incapacity to consent independent of knowledge of the other party, which can include intoxication , youth, threats of violence, and other factors) tend to be things that play more of a role in the practical ability to convince a jury one way or the other than the ground truth of whether the offense occurred.
It seems more complex than even what the law says, as in the end it is up to a judge/jury to make the call.
I don't know about Germany or the US, but Poland has (a) fairly strict anti-rape laws, and (b) a number of cases presented in media, where the court's final opinion was something along the lines of "meh, what's the big deal?".
I'm not sure that this is a general characterisation (might be) but certainly illustrates the law vs. decision maker split.
From what I can gather in the instances of other crimes, the same is true in e.g. US. You cannot shoot unarmed people running away from you, but then courts let people get away with it.
At the end of the day, the main sniff test, only somewhat moderated by law, seems to be "does this look like rape to me".
"It's good to think about what women can do differently to try to protect themselves."
Okay, here are some suggestions. I'm expressing them strongly, because some women don't seem to have understood these things.
1. Don't fuck people that you don't want to fuck.
2. Don't spend time alone with a man that you don't want to fuck, because that man very probably does want to fuck you.
3. Don't share a bedroom or sleep with with a man that you don't want to fuck.
4. Don't go on a "date" with a man if you already know that you don't want to fuck him.
5. Don't get drunk alone with a man that you don't want to fuck.
6. Don't continue fucking a man that you regret fucking the first time.
7. Don't go out of your house by yourself, if you are not an educated adult woman who understands that most male creatures by nature want to have as much sex as possible with as many different attractive young females as possible, and men will attempt to do so by various means ranging from courtship to rape depending on their moral standards.
8. Don't communicate with people that you don't want to communicate with. Tell them loud and clear to stop, block them, or report repeated unwanted communication which is harassment.
9. Don't allow someone to harass you (repeatedly after being told not to). Tell them not to, loud and clear.
10. Don't ignore all of the above, which is very widely known to almost every adult, then publicly complain that a bad man took advantage of you, a helpless and vulnerable victim, and also expect to be respected as an equal.
Yes, I feel sorry for the woman who had a bad and traumatic experience with this man. I have had bad experiences too. But I don't understand how a woman could grow up in this world, with access to caring parents, news, internet, and education, and yet still fall into a trap like this.
It beggars belief, to the point that I would suggest that this was possibly not "date rape", but rather a consensual sexual encounter that the woman did not enjoy and/or regretted. At least I think there is some reasonable doubt. There is a far far way from a regretted relationship or one night stand, to date rape. If in fact this was more of a regretted relationship, I think it is not acceptable to destroy a man's reputation and career by broadcasting the whole experience to the public and judging him guilty of unclear accusations without trial.
Men are not perfect, we are not always nice, we can be manipulative, and we might go to great lengths to get what we want. Women are also like that.
first, a small rant:
tbf. I dislike the title.
the real title is sexual harassment from Jon Pretty a leader of certain Scala Community standups.
because the current title actually sounds like it's the whole commnity, but the blog is about a specific guy.
---
second I really do not understand, how other people can be so horrible. he basically abused her in a moment where she was really really desperate and I think such a thing is really really bad.
> In June, Heather noticed that I was upset at a dinner after ScalaDays. I shared with her about what happened. She warned me to stay away from Jon Pretty. And she wasn’t the only person who told me that. Even though my experience in Berlin was awful, it was difficult for me to accept that someone, who seemed like a good friend, mentor, and ally, could be so selfish, manipulative, and cruel.
It sounds like people knew about him and didn't do anything. If the community is allowing it to happen, then the community is as much at fault as the sick individual doing the abuse.
> It sounds like people knew about him and didn't do anything. If the community is allowing it to happen, then the community is as much at fault as the sick individual doing the abuse.
well around 2017-2019 I was active in scala aswell (more on the playframework side tough) and I dind't even knew about him until I read the blog.
you know just because there are members from scalacenter and lightbend does not mean that the community as a whole wanted to have something to do with somebody like him.
You know there are thousands of people going to ScalaDays every year, it's highly unlikely that the majority of the scala community would be happy about the guys behavior and it's also highly unlikely that the majority of people in the scala community knew about the guys behavior.
It's a bit vague. I'm not involved in the Scala community and if someone told me a story like that about someone in it I would also tell them to stay away from them.
Well I think the only problem with the title is that "harassment" is not a strong enough word.
About using the word "community", the first paragraph of the open letter explains why it's relevant:
"We, the undersigned, have become aware that, for some time, Jon Pretty has abused his position of privilege and stature within the Scala community to sexually harass and victimize women. He has used the community’s conferences to target women who are new to the Scala community, offering mentorship, access, and other forms of support, and then abusing the trust that he has established."
> In June, Heather noticed that I was upset at a dinner after ScalaDays. I shared with her about what happened. She warned me to stay away from Jon Pretty. And she wasn’t the only person who told me that.
> 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 had the pleasure to get to know the author for a brief time in the period her article describes. Some of the surrounding events she describes were public knowledge via Twitter posts and such, for instance getting stranded in Berlin.
From my outsider's vantage point I remember thinking something felt off about Jon's interactions/role in those stories. It was gut wrenching reading the article this AM realizing what was really going on.
Jon Pretty sounds like a complete creep and yes, based on this account, a predator.
That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason. While I empathize with the author, and utterly despise the archetype of high-status men who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women, I find the nature of these kinds of posts to be counterproductive. Therapeutic to the author? Likely. A way to mobilize support? Certainly. But the method can be abused. Imagine a letter like this targeted at you one day, except unlike Mr. Pretty, you are innocent. Ask yourself if that's a possibility, and if you think that there is a zero probability of anyone maliciously weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.
My brother was a victim of a vicious smear by a female colleague, who falsely accused him of stalking her as a result of him calling her out one day for stealing his project and presenting it while he was traveling to the funeral of his wife's grandfather. He was able to show video footage of him picking up his son and daughter at a daycare the very moment the woman claimed he was at her house, but by then, the HR department couldn't turn back, and he was fired. (He was later sent a large gift basket by several of his coworkers who had heard from someone in HR that the charges were false, but "optics" were the reason they had to move forward with his termination.)
In this case a Chinese woman living in the USA apparently got raped in Germany 3 years ago. To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an accusation for which she has no evidence but her word, against a man who lives in another city.
What, exactly, do you imagine that the police are likely to do with her report?
I hate the court of public opinion as much or more as the next guy. But if this is a real pattern and he is as practiced as it sounds, after 10-20 women come forth then I'll be very confident that the crime is real. And there is also a chance that we can hit a critical mass where law enforcement somewhere may take an interest after all.
I agree with you that ideally this would go to the police first and they would actually act. But in the real world, she picked one of the best of the bad options available to her.
>>To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an accusation for which she has no evidence but her word, against a man who lives in another city.
Well, that's not strictly true. At least the official advice in the UK is that even if the crime happened elsewhere you should still report it locally, then the case should be forwarded to the authorities in the country where it allegedly happened.
If she got robbed, on the other hand, or she reported something like this ten years ago, they'd probably say "meh we are busy, here's your crime reference number now go away".
I agree with everything else in your post except for the description of events as "rape". According to the story she wrote, they had sex when she was drunk, and she thought for months after the fact that the sex had been consensual. To me it sounds like sexual abuse / exploitation, not rape. (Unless you're making the pedantic argument that having sex with an intoxicated person is always rape, in which case 2 intoxicated persons having sex would mean that both persons rape each other.)
>To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an accusation for which she has no evidence but her word, against a man who lives in another city.
That's what an embassy is for... they help deal with these situation.
>And there is also a chance that we can hit a critical mass where law enforcement somewhere may take an interest after all.
Don't complain that a law enforcement agency doesn't do anything if they're never made aware of the problem.
I wonder if Pretty specifically chose this modus operandi (taking a woman to a third country before moving on her) to get himself a layer of legal protection. It’s a well-established practice in abuse communities after all (e.g. people traveling to Asia).
It’s also interesting that this scenario would have probably been more unlikely in the past. Before the “sexual revolution”, an educated woman would never sleep alone in the same house as an unmarried man, for fear of her “honour” being maligned. That set of cultural values had its (massive) problems, but in some scenarios it actually worked better than the current one, effectively forcing women to avoid dangerous situations.
Not all criminal investigations are solved or competently followed. However this doesn't mean you should take justice in your own hands, which is what mob justice is. This is plain disrespect for official authority and the principal of "innocent until proven otherwise". Even murderers with clear and shut cases are afforded legal council and ways to defend themselves.
Also, this could have been resolved if this was reported in timely manner, not years after. She is a victim, however her followup actions are neither correct nor proper.
The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted. The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming.
You're concerned that this is stacked against you, but the courts are stacked against the victims. So it doesn't really suffice to decry the one problem without addressing the other.
So perhaps you can see what it looks like to many women when you say, "Hey, I'm sorry this happened to you, but this bad thing happened to my brother, so _shrug_". Did your brother go to the courts and police to address these issues? It may been unlawful termination.
There is a large domain of behavior that is either nebulously legal or difficult to prosecute but which makes our communities much, much worse. It's counterproductive to tell the people victimized by that to stop talking about it. The solution is to go forward and find ways to set up our communities to protect people. And that can't mean just asking victims to accept that.
> The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction
Rape convictions are so abysmally low that there's been a lot of rethinking in feminist circles as to whether the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard -- or even the presumption of innocence -- is fair or just. Some countries have been looking for ways to ameliorate this. For example, in thr USA, college date rape is such a problem that universities are required to investigate accusations of sexual harassment or assault and discipline offenders based on the looser preponderance standard, or be found in violation of Title IX by the federal Department of Education.
> The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming.
Huh? Have you ever heard of the Central Park Five? Google "Central Park Five" and you'll have a more enlightened view!
> That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason.
The alleged crimes are difficult to prove in general, but in this case the victim seems to have been only visiting the country where the crime occurred. And didn't fully understand what had happened contemporaneously. I would hope she approaches the appropriate criminal authorities to report, and I would hope something is done, but without local knowledge of how these reports are handled in Berlin, I would expect it to mostly be written down somewhere and no further action taken.
Speaking out in a public way like this helps others who experienced the same pattern of behavior to recognize it, and possibly share similar experiences to the point where a criminal investigation may be started, if relevant. It also may help put people who might be exposed to similar behavior in the future on notice, so they can attempt to avoid it, or report it as it happens, if it happens in the future.
> Imagine a letter like this targeted at you one day, except unlike Mr. Pretty, you are innocent.
“Imagine that you were convicted of murder but, unlike John Wayne Gacy, you were innocent.”
Seriously what is the point of comments like this? False convictions are real and very very bad, but I know very few social justice advocates who are opposed to locking up serial killers. Likewise, the existence of unscrupulous people who make false accusations of sexual assault/etc is a real problem. But that’s a very shitty excuse to trash every public accusation - especially when in practice it is the public accusation that leads to more victims speaking out.
More to the point: Jon Pretty is a notable public figure who has been credibly accused of extremely toxic and disgusting behavior towards large portions of the Scala community. At least some of this behavior is clearly not illegal, merely dangerous and profoundly unethical[1]. Therefore the court of public opinion is the only court that has solid jurisdiction, so to speak.
[1] That said: some of the accusations and the large number of alleged victims merit a criminal investigation.
OP points out that we have criminal courts for a reason - he's not comparing this scenario with an actual conviction after a trial with presumed innocence. In your analogy, it would have to be common for people to be fired from their jobs (and blackballed from entire industries) on the strength of a murder accusation that hasn't even been presented to the police, much less been through a trial.
> Therefore the court of public opinion is the only court that has solid jurisdiction, so to speak.
based on what his public info shows about his location this medium post (and the ensuing public outrage) cops in that country will have to press charges (in case they haven't been pressed already).
There is a high chance he is a flight risk so they will book him, _unless_:
- he is actually a passport holder of that country (doesn't seem the case), and
- has a proper address registered as is law, (many Brits don't care since British law doesn't require it)
- has a strong social family network in that country, (unlikely)
- has a job in that country (contracting/freelancing doesn't count here)
... then he is looking forward to spending 6 months minimum in "Untersuchungshaft" (hard time) or for whatever length of time investigations are ongoing (until trial).
What I'm getting at is that this is a very serious allegation that _will_ result in hard time if convicted but also until he actually gets his day in court! But for that to happen she needs to do more than a Medium post (make a statement with the cops which can be scary but shouldn't be if she actually brings a lawyer). In case she doesn't then it needs to be considered a character assassination which itself is a felony. In any case posting such a piece is legally risky for her and if she would have bothered getting a lawyer, they most certainly would have advised her against it. The best option for her would be to go through the court system of where he is currently located.
Most other options have a high risk of this going nowhere (cost + extradition etc) and even give more room for speculation and he-said-she-said which shouldn't (imho) be the goal of the metoo movement and indeed it should be called out for mob-justice.
You are conflating conviction with mere, non-legal accusation.
Conviction means someone made an accusation at a legal level, then it was considered worthy by police, then by a country's prosecution service, then by a jury, and then (probably) by an appeals court too. Under normal circumstances, that's a bar infinitely higher than, "I'm claiming to have a story about someone."
“...there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason”
John Wayne Gacy was convicted in a court via the criminal justice system. As a society, we have chosen this as our mechanism for adjudicating these types of accusations, and that mechanism has evolved certain safeguards over time. It’s not perfect, but it is a far fairer venue to be tried in than the “court of public opinion”. That’s not an insignificant point, and you’re glossing over it entirely.
I'd never heard of that guy, so to save others the trouble, in 1980 he was found "guilty of 33 charges of murder; he was also found guilty of sexual assault and taking indecent liberties with a child" and was executed by the USA in 1994.
Someone should coin a law for this phenomenon: Every single time a ~~woman~~ victim makes a public statement like this, in the comment sections a man must be discussing false accusations or the court of public opinion. I don't think I've ever not seen this.
People who are abused are damned if they do, damned if they don't.
edit: removed specific gender
edit2: I'm not trying to be inflammatory here. This is a phenomenon that I've noticed over the years.
A massive company that makes overpriced, low-quality athletic products that double as status symbols, which they manufacture overseas (often using child labor) but then sell for massive markups in the US, Europe, etc. They have an extremely aggressive "woke" presence in their advertising, because as long as you care about social justice for your targeted customers, who cares that "people of color" in the developing world are being paid slave wages to create your products. You probably know who I'm talking about now, but I'm not going to name them.
I think that's a pretty cynical POV. False accusations happen, but aren't the norm. Far more abusers get away with their bad behavior than good people are wrongly punished. Yifan already has a second woman coming forward describing similar behavior as well some witnesses to some of the public parts. It's probably unlikely she'd be able to prove a criminal case in whatever country this happened, but we don't need bad behavior to be criminal to declare it unacceptable and stop rewarding it. It's likely we'll see a few more pretty soon, hear Pretty's side and then the court of public opinion can render a decision. Right now, her story is pretty plausible and she has seemingly no motive to fabricate. He won't go to jail, but he will stop being invited to conferences and likely lose his livelihood.
> there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason
Having supported a few friends trying to push these kinds of complaints through the courts, I think the precise reason this kind of naming and shaming has become so common place is the criminal justice system isn't working well.
Even for fairly straightforward sexual assault case in a liberal jurisdiction with witnesses I've watched a friend struggle with members of the justice system verbally insulting and degrading them as they try to obtain justice for themselves.
Having seen all that when I see a post like this I understand why the author did not go to court, and don't question it. If we took the time to actually fix the courts I'd be much more skeptical of claims that had not been presented to law enforcement.
I feel for people like your brother who are victims of people abusing the trend, but as long as our justice system fails victims so horribly I think this is the least bad solution available.
Can you please provide proof that our justice system is failing victims? Do you just mean that the conviction rate is anything less than 100% for accusations?
Also, can you clarify what you mean by "verbally insulting and degrading them"? It's possible you just mean the lawyer is accusing them of lying... which is what you do when you think a person is lying. The accused does have a presumption of innocence, and the accuser may need to be cross examined under some reasonable amount of emotional stress to see if their behavior under stress reveals that they are lying. There's not really any way around this other than "well, we'll just assume they're telling the truth and anyone they accuse is guilty" which is a far worse solution in my opinion.
We have a criminal justice system so that, when the standard of proof can be met, the state can punish and deter wrongdoers through fines, forcible incarceration and other limitations on freedom.
No-one is entitled to maintain a positive reputation just because they've yet to be convicted in a criminal court. One can be a creepy sex-pest without that behavior rising the level of criminality, and one should not be surprised if rumors of such behavior get around.
For those who feel they are being slandered, there is a law of defamation and a civil courts system for a reason. At least there, the burden of proof is only balance of probabilities.
When a woman is sexually assaulted, you tell them to use the justice system. You stick to this despite other folks telling you the chances of conviction are low. You don’t want people to make public accusations.
And yet you, in this thread, have no problem making accusations against Nike for wrongful termination. Why not use the legal system to pursue this? You answer that too - low chance of success apparently.
Within a few minutes you’ve done exactly what you’re asking OP not to do.
I agree with you about the accusations. He sounds creepy; but one blog-entry is not exactly hard evidence. An internet mob may assume its all true anyway.
> men who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women
Wouldn't "programming communities" be one of the worst places for a true predator? There are so few women compared to men here. I would think most predators would choose the modeling or acting industry; where this type of behavior is almost expected...
I would presume that many predators have followed that exact line of thinking, and there may be population pressure pushing them towards other fields. Any ecological model will show that a certain population of prey can support only so many predators, if you'll pardon the pun, so some must naturally migrate to fill other niches that, while not as abundant, are less crowded with competition. You'll probably find less sophisticated predators in these sparser environments, as they were outcompeted by "stronger" (read, more careful, charismatic, and effective) predators in the richer ecologies.
An interesting thought. Under this model, (and I realize that this is a post-facto realization, but what can we do?) we would expect to see significantly more reports of predator behavior in these less competitive niches than the objective number of predators would imply, because the predators in them are less skilled at hiding their predation than predators in the more prey-rich environments.
> Ask yourself if that's a possibility, and if you think that there is a zero probability of anyone maliciously weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.
As a straight, white man: False accusations of sexual assault are extremely rare, but they do happen. It's not a zero probability event.
I guess my response is, right now there's a nonzero chance of someone assaulting someone else, and then a nonzero chance they'll away with it. And there's a nonzero chance of someone making a false accusation and another nonzero chance of them getting away with it. We as a society have to weigh the likelihood of each of these four things occurring.
All experience (and you can look this up) is that sexual assault is perpetrated relatively frequently, and people frequently aren't held accountable in the criminal justice system, for a variety of reasons. OTOH the evidence is that false accusations are vanishingly rare in comparison.
So we should just...keep this in mind, is all, before saying that this kind of public statement is counterproductive. Maybe it protects someone from him, or maybe it protects someone from someone like him. Sure, I'd like him to be in jail, but maybe in the flawed system we live with today, the best we can hope for is he's kicked out of the Scala community. Maybe that would be productive?
It’s the modern day equivalent of being accused of witchcraft. You get a trial but good luck getting your reputation back. People are trained not to doubt this sort of thing end assume guilt, then when confronted they rattle off some supposed statistical fact that it’s virtually impossible for the accuser to be lying.
What are people supposed to do then. If your friend sees somebody at the store and says “that guy is an asshole, he used to beat me up in middle school” do you respond “wait I can’t develop any opinion of that person without a trial”?
Ok, my sister was raped by her boss, was found in her appartment three days later my father, who immediately called a lawyer (female, specialized in criminal law). She told my sister that since they were only two in the kitchen with no surveillance camera, she couldn't sue but only report (its called "main courante" in my country) and "hope" that another girl is raped before 2039 and report it. The policeman concurred, nothing to be done.
I still shout "rapist owned" each time i pass his business, as do my brother and my father, my sister privately shared her story with his daughter on facebook last year (his daughter is one year younger than my sister, the creep), basically destroying their relationship, and the cooking school my sister went to directly called all female student and ex-student to tell them to avoid his restaurant. I also scraped social networks (only public data, nothing illegal) for his activities two years ago but only found business contacts. Each of them still received a nice email though.
I will move back next month, so i will continue my shouting campaign harder after the pandemic end and hope his business can't survive covid. Since his restaurant will be between my place and the place i keep my boat, i'm pretty sure i can be successful.
-----------
Honestly i can't say i will ever stop stalking him even if he had to sell his business. I'm thinking of sending him accusing emails on temp email accounts (scripted of course, my sister got herself back in one piece after a year and a half, and i even think she is now way stronger than she used to, i won't waste that much time for him).
The redress for a false accusation that results in serious harm to your career is a slander lawsuit. Sounds like all the ducks are in a row, evidence wise, so just figure out how much damage she caused, and sue her for it.
I know it's not quite the same, and an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure- but there's this narrative that a person who is falsely accused is utterly powerless before the power of any angry woman willing to yell "perv", and that's just false.
My brother was suicidal at one time due to the accusations, and more importantly, the fact that everyone immediately believed them. When his wife got the idea to call the daycare and ask if they had video footage, he thought for sure he'd be saved. (His employer also had his company cell phone location data which further corroborated his alibi). He literally proved himself innocent to his HR department. But if you've ever been involved on the inside in one of these situations, once HR has initiated a termination, they end up introducing additional liability if they halt the termination (effectively admitting they were in the wrong).
He certainly COULD have sued for slander, but the cost of the lawsuit and retaining a lawyer, and for him, the emotional toll, was too high.
And I completely understand that there is a huge toll for accusers as well.
I think, depending on the venue, that the process can be very traumatic for accusers with real claims, and also accused who are targeted by false accusations. The colleague who accused him was a woman who his coworkers had warned him "not to cross" because she was "a total sociopath" according to his other team members. One of them even told him "you should have listened to me" after he was terminated.
It's interesting how poorly most coders understand the realities of human nature. People aren't devils, but they aren't angels either.
I just really resent the fact that any attempt at injecting nuance into these kinds of conversations brings out attacks from the un-nuanced, tribalists who reduce everything down to bumper sticker slogans and identity groups. It's disgusting and reminds me of the sectarian conflicts I've witnessed in other nations.
What's doubly ironic is that the bar for convicting an actual predator in a criminal court of law is incredibly high, but the bar for winning a libel case against a false accuser in a civil court is... A lot lower.
It's far easier to obtain justice when you are falsely accused, then when you have been assaulted - but HN threads on the subject are predominantly full of arguments about how awful the falsely accused have it.
Arguably the problem in your brother’s case is more his organization being willing to ignore evidence in favor of “optics”, and less the ability of women to make their experiences with predators public.
When accusations like this come out, organizations with a stake in the outcome should act with integrity to find the truth and respond to it. Witch hunts are never a good idea. But the fact that some men may be falsely accused doesn’t mean women shouldn’t speak up when they have experiences like this. Ironically, many (if not most) women who don’t speak up publicly end up being gaslighted and marginalized by the very same kinds of corporate entities who were willing to throw your brother under the bus for optics. By the same token, it’s often a last ditch attempt to get some help after all other avenues have failed.
>That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason.
If you come to my home and act in a way that my family and other guests find offensive, we're not going to invite you back. We're also not going to try to prosecute you.
There is a huge set of behaviors that are not criminal nor civil offenses, but still things that if experienced would likely lead people to want to avoid you, not hire you, not work with you etc.
The author did not claim that Mr. Pretty broke any laws. She doesn't call for any legal consequences. There's no basis for suggesting that the story needs to be judged by a legal system.
We have criminal and civil justice systems that have different levels of burden of proof, and correspondingly differ in the severity of their outcomes.
It makes sense to also have social justice systems that are lower burden of proof and have lesser consequences. Especially for crimes that are difficult to prosecute and have low visibility.
I can empathize with your brother's situation. That kind of thing is horrifying for anyone to imagine.
With that said, creeps like this continue to proliferate because the courts only do anything in very rare cases (Cosby or other serial abusers). It typically only hurts people who were abused, not helps - it can take years to go through court, and in this situation because it's across borders there's likely no court to file with.
People come forward in blog posts because it's often their only reasonable way to try to hold someone accountable and warn other potential victims.
It's a bit strange that you claim that the proper venue for this sort of thing is the justice system, but then relate a story where your brother for some reason did not avail himself of the justice system to right a wrong against him.
And that just rams the point home: often the justice system doesn't help, and actively hurts. If he'd brought suit against his former employer for terminating him, even if he won, he would have gained a reputation in his field for being litigious toward employers, and that would have greatly hurt his future employment prospects.
So maybe, just maybe, there are reasons the justice system isn't going to work so well in this situation either.
Being a manipulative jerk and creep is not a crime.
I think it's very brave of this woman to write such an article, and warn future victims about this person. So in that sense, such articles NEED to be written. Who knows how many young girls she saved from the same experience.
HR should have fired the female colleague upon discovering the allegations were proven false, not left it up to the courts and criminal justice system.
What happened to free speech? If you think this is slander, don't the same rules apply; mustn't we presume the innocence of Yifan until she's proven guilty?
You know the reason people started leaning into social justice is because the cops and the courts weren't doing a very good job? That's why we are where we are. Also the fact that a lot of dudes just can't imagine a world where they just keep to themselves doesn't really help the problem. But again, this is where we find ourselves and it is going to keep continuing.
And frankly the idea that there are people that believe "smear campaigns" are as normal as every day sexual harassment is extremely laughable.
Behavior like this should be punished within the framework of the civil and criminal court system. The court of public opinion has no rules as to the validity of evidence introduced, and relies on informal enforcement mechanisms as well, which are prone to abuse.
The court of public opinion still thinks that the riots in Kenosha were justified (the actual courts heard and saw real evidence that determined that Mr. Blake was indeed sexually assualting his ex and was indeed reaching for a knife when he was shot). The court of public opinion thought that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified because they thought Saddam helped OBL. The recent case of the teenage girl shot in Columbus featured the Court of Public Opinion weighing in that the girl should have been allowed to stab the other girl pinned against that car, and the cop should have "shot her in the leg", which any expert on use of force would immediately explain would not have worked. Why? Because the public as a whole is filled with smart individuals, but an an aggregate level are a bunch of moronic lemmings, like all large groups of people are.
its a reminder that mob justice is really terrible when it is wrong. we dont have all the facts. we should absolutely take precautions from this guy causing further harm, but the rape accusation needs to go thru the legal process including allowing the accused to defend themselves.
I don't like this court-of-public-opinion stuff much either and the abuse potential is real. At the same time: what else are people going to do? There seems to be no other recourse.
Most people let bullies get away with it because even stepping in as a third party means standing up to a bully. It can be scary, but even if there's no real risk it's still a fucking pain in the ass. Who wants to get into a mud slinging competition with a predator? Or get a harassment lawsuit? If someone is willing to harass other people this way, they will certainly harass you this way.
I don't blame the people who go public - I just wish that the rest of us would be a bit more hesitant to immediately signal boost them. (For example, I might avoid upvoting a story like this to the top of a tech news aggregation platform when the accused hasn't had time to respond.)
> I find the nature of these kinds of posts to be counterproductive. Therapeutic to the author? Likely. A way to mobilize support? Certainly. But the method can be abused.
I feel like you made your own point with the story about your brother. Everyone below is ready to boycott the company which you basically named already.
> who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women
In general I don't like it as well because it could lead to abuse as we just read - but that's also not always black or white. In some cases it could be real romance or attraction between two adults, even if one has a higher status than the other (that's of course not what happened in this story! I'm just saying it could be consensual, even if the "high status" person uses his status just to get sex. Movie stars and rock stars do the same thing.
Lots of comments obviously focus on the issue whether this is truth or slander. There is another angle to this:
A word of advice for new people in OSS. You do not need to go to conferences to be successful in the field. Many of the developers who actually write code do not attend conferences.
On the other hand, people who want to associate themselves with the work of others, narcissists, activists of all kinds, parasites and a lot more are to be found in the conference circuits. There are some legit people as well but you'll also find them online where the work happens.
>How are people still getting away with this kind of abuse? How?
It's quite simple, really.
You know that phenomenon you see here on HN with big names like Steve Jobs or RMS, or Elon Musk? The phenomenon where people give them a pass for being disgusting, abusive assholes because "he's a genius/luminary/visionary" or because "his contributions to $thing are so great"?
It's the same phenomenon with people like Jon Pretty.
Being quite involved in the Scala community myself, I can tell you that the impact of his technical contributions is basically zero.
None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase).
He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow, presenting himself as some kind of grand architect pursuing grand ideas, while his effective impact was close to zero.
I think he was tolerated just because he's been around since basically the language was created, and thus was friend with many people, and could tell stories about the early days of Scala.
With him (hopefully) going away, this will have no impact at all on the development of Scala or related projects, apart from saving slots at upcoming Scala conferences.
So it's definitely not the same phenomenon as RMS or Elon.
Alternatively: people diluting the signal, where people bring up serious accusations of rape, and then others show up and compare it to people who are considered assholes by some.
Because people don't believe victims. They insist that somehow they gave consent, or that somehow the assaulter just couldn't have known. Or they blame the victim, saying that "they deserved it" or "they shouldn't have been in that situation in the first place."
I guarantee you that someone will post in this thread, if they haven't already, that she should know better than to get an airbnb with a man she doesn't know well. No, this isn't her fault. The dude should not have abused her.
It would be easier to judge if she said that she did not give consent.
You may be right, but you also have to agree that some people will pause before judging definite rape for described situation where girl accepts invitation to sleep in the same airbnb, without anybody else, with single guy, bringing bottle of wine, not mentioning she did not give consent, feeling bad afterwards. From that description it's really difficult to pass rape judgement - maybe it was, maybe not, what we know is that it was creepy at least for her.
It takes a critical mass of accusers to break past the inherent power differential and take down an influential figure without getting blacklisted. There are various reasons this often doesn’t happen. For one, it’s a coordination problem and second e.g. this post describes his clever choice in targeting immigrant women who don’t have much knowledge of western sexual norms and can be gaslit more easily.
This is also the community that brought us, for example, the Fantasyland Code of "Professionalism," a code of conduct that rivals the GPL in how unpleasant I have found it to read and piece together what is going on...
I think I know what you are trying to say and I agree but I’m also on the camp that Richard Stallman didn’t say anything necessarily wrong, just awkward.
On the one hand I want people to be able to to speak their minds but on the other hand this guy might be a sexual predator at best and a serial rapist at worst. and he is getting away with it!
I for one am glad there is someone to stand up for him - it makes it very easy to tell who wants to cherrypick and debate semantics due to their own biases.
The top comment discusses the fate of an accused in the court of public opinion, and the limitations of that court. The fact you conflate that with saying "what about the MEN?" is more an indictment of your world view than anything they actually wrote.
This may be a tone-deaf sidetrack but also perhaps an important piece of advice for some. There should be an impenetrable barrier between ones love life and ones professional life. While there are certainly people who have met their significant other in a professional setting, there are much better ways of doing that, especially nowadays. By striving to keep this separation water tight we can avoid both unwanted advances and false allegations.
The above is not comment on the allegations in the post, any more than if everyone followed the above basic principle we would not have to deal with disturbing stories such as this one. It is important that stories such as this one are told but perhaps with the names left out.
This is probably good advice but if people are spending more and more of their time at work and work starts becoming half of their life, with outings with coworkers, bosses being your friend and not just your boss, then where can you meet people exactly?
You can't honestly demand both that people be disconnected from their coworkers and that they make work be 90% of their life. One part has to give (preferably the latter part).
Perhaps `professional` is too narrow then. I think the power differential is an enabling factor for behaviour like this. While there certainly are creeps in normal dating situations, they are often easier to avoid. This story is very much about how this power differential allows one person to abuse another like this.
Being aware of how this affects human relationships is neither unrealistic nor unhelpful. It is something to take seriously and talk about in groups where it could arise.
To expound on this because apparently it needs to be done:
> if everyone followed the above basic principle we would not have to deal with disturbing stories such as this one
This guy would still be a predator and a rapist, and he would still be doing similar things to people. Wishing that people were robots and were able to completely separate themselves emotionally from people they meet in situations in which they share a common interest is an exercise in futility. It's simply not how people work.
This sidetrack is basically victim blaming with extra steps.
"seems" doesn't mean "is", we have law systems to deal with those kind of issues. Judges are for determining where the line between "shitty partner" vs "rapist" lies.
The author doesn't appear to want to make the claim that Mr. Pretty raped her. She suggests, strongly, that he's a shitty person. She wants other people to know this. Courts don't adjudicate such matters, unless they have further consequences.
In particular, if true, the part where he first encouraged her to invite other people and then when she expressed interest in that, accused her of trying to bring a “chaperone” sounds very much like premeditation. The initial invitation was designed to make her think it wasn’t just the two of them, but then he shamed her into acquiescing to that exact situation.
My experience with conferences is in a different field, but a senior participant proposing to share an AirBnB with a junior participant like a student would be extremely weird.
If you want to support the student, you either organize another student for them to share accomodations, or connect them to one of the travel grants for that conference.
It creates a power imbalance, or increases the power imbalance that already existed between the two.
If you have a boss/employee relationship, or a mentor/mentee relationship, or a professor/student relationship, you need to tread extra carefully around consent. One party in those relationships holds incredible power over the other, and can coerce the weaker party into things they may not be comfortable doing.
Likewise, enabling someone to attend a conference they would not otherwise be able to financially afford creates a possibility of coercion . It's not always coercive, but it needs to be handled delicately and appropriately. In the author's situation, if she refused, there was a chance she was thrown out onto the streets of Berlin at who knows what hour, with no money/luggage, and maybe no ability to speak the local language.
Do you think that accomplished, intelligent rapists like to drag helpless women down dark alleys by their hair after punching them out, or do you think they would prefer a situation where a naive response might be "That sounds generous and possibly completely harmless"? I am going to assume that you are an innocent, not a troll, and ask you that you think like a rapist. What situations would benefit a serial rapist, both in terms of creating a power disadvantage for the victim, a physical opportunity, and a plausible alternative explanation for the public? Bingo.
Let's turn it around. You are a respected figure in a community. You are aware, and have read on HN threads like this, how there are terrible women who smear men with baseless, yet career-ending allegations of sexual advances or worse. In what situation are you comfortable with that risk to your career? There is only one such situation: where you are the predator, and you have groomed a naive victim.
As a professional, you have no business sharing accommodation, of any kind, with a person of the opposite gender (or the same gender if that is your sexual preference). Frankly unless you are very good friends, not anyone at all.
The girl had sex with a creepy manipulative dude and regrets it. I get it. She's obviously super naive. "Yup we can share an Airbnb, i'll bring the wine!". There's obvious sexual overtones there if you are in your 20's, no matter what any of you say. And having spoken at a conference does not put you in a position of power.
He's just a creep, they are pretty common, confident outgoing girls will turn down a creep every weekend. Does not warrant public shaming. I'd be pissed if some girl i texted "Wanna get it ;-8" on tinder, in a blizzard of hormones, three years back, decides to public and destroy my career. I'd be pissed and it wouldn't be fair. That said i'm glad she did, because he sounds like a complete tool. The perpetual conference go'er crowd is full of weirdos.
What world are you living in? Sexual predators even when there has been proof (and sometimes they‘ve admitted) it often get away with to little to no punishment.
If a bunch of people who once had close, perhaps even loving relationships with you all come forward and risk their own reputation to say you're bad enough to warrant criminal action, I'd say it's on you to prove them wrong.
Or maybe it's all a grand conspiracy, in which case let's follow the money and see that it leads... nowhere.
If a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together to assassinate your character, then between all of those separate relationship, there was only one common factor, you.
A coordinated release in my opinion reinforces the statement.
I'm seriously curious to know what kind of proof you would accept that would make you believe these accusations.
I hear your sort of response a lot, but it's mostly from people who won't change their mind no matter what (and will continue to move the goalposts as more evidence comes to light), or set the bar so high that it's basically impossible to provide the proof they want.
Seriously? How often does this happen? Unless you are a terrible person, I doubt anyone would try to ruin someone's life like this.
This lady seems to have her head screwed on. Her post doesn't seem to me like she's trying to cause a witch hunt and it seems like she's sharing her story in a logical and sensible manner.
I'll gladly read the post from another woman defending John Pretty, but I doubt that's going to be forthcoming.
I don't want to stir the pot, but as a comment below links, Pretty responded with a statement[0]. He doesn't say this is what happened at all but that's a conclusion one can draw if you just read his statement. He doesn't insinuate it directly but he says they were consensual relationships and the two people are upset about how they ended.
I for one, while having a mountain of ex-girlfriends/boyfriends, haven't left them vindicate enough to do something like coordinate a character assassination against me.
I mean, I've been a giant asshole to a couple ex-partners (read: I cheated), and they never got together to coordinate an attack "to ruin my life."
I could maybe, maybe believe a well-known political figure might be the target of that kind of coordinated attack. But basically a thousandth of a percent of the population has even heard of Jon Pretty. What benefit exists for the group of accusers? An extra spot for a presentation at a Scala conference?
> Sometimes character assassination is coordinated.
People make this claim like it's common sense but I so rarely see even anecdotes backing it up. (Let alone data)
I've seen a variant of it once. This is my anecdote for false coordinated character assassination. There's a community called Get Off My Internet, which I believe is mostly women, who will do coordinated character assassinations, usually of other women. I've run into them by employing people they target. What happens is a lot of them post in a message board about how their target is a pedophile and fraud and embezzler. Then a few others will email me, the employer, helpfully noting how they've respected me for years, want to protect me and just happened to google my new employee. It's bullshit and so, so gross.
But... there's also this other pattern where victims of real abusers will form a whisper network ahead of time. As I understand it, the whisper network is partly for safety and partly for sanity. The sanity is "am I overreacting to an honest mistake?" Seeing it as a pattern makes it more clear that it's intentional. And then for safety, there's a lot of perceived and probably real reputational downside to speaking up. And since it's hard to prove a lot of the accusations, having multiple reports makes the case more compelling, i.e. safer from a reputation standpoint.
So that's why a report like this might feel coordinated. Of course it is. It's just too hard to make this sort of report without talking to people first and then by talking to people you end up discovering a lot of other victims.
I was close to one of these whisper networks, that Lightspeed VC. I'd heard from one victim two years beforehand. She didn't want to say anything because all she really wanted was to avoid him and complete her next fundraise. She took that company public. A lot of this "women are making this stuff up" fear is based on the idea that they get something out of it. This founder was afraid of the opposite, that doing something would botch her raise.
I'm close to another emerging whisper network right now and it's the same thing. "Is this safe? Will people believe me? He's done it to other people and will probably doing it to more people right now. But if I speak up will I put my career and business in jeopardy?"
Sure, in some theoretical perfect world it would be great to have a legal system that could easily and fairly render verdicts. But since we don't have this, what other choice do victims have than to band together to at least warn other people away from dangerous people?
My anecdotal evidence is that the one time I’ve seen this happen in real life, a former friend of mine had a group of ex-girlfriends talk to each other after their relationships with him about how he beat the shit out of them, which he did, which is why he is a former friend. He admitted the abuse to me. They did not try to character assassinate him.
Bummed I had to scroll this far into the thread to see some reason.
This is horrifying if it did happen but I don't know Yifan and I don't know Jon Pretty nor the trustworthiness of either.
It's disturbing to see HN readers jump to conclusions so quickly without proper evidence. If we continue to reduce our capacity for assessment of a situation to individual anecdotal accounts what kind of world will we live in 5 years from now?
> ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together and decided to ruin your life with accusations
If all of your exes and close associates hate you enough to coordinate a life ruining operation, then it's quite probable that you were abusive in some capacity.
> Sometimes character assassination is coordinated.
Yes, you are right. But look at the other side too. How else do a group of people with no proof retaliate against an abuser but through character assassination ?
If a bunch of my ex-girlfriends coordinated a character assassination campaign against me I would probably be forced to consider that maybe I’m an asshole.
I have no interest in Scala and never heard of Jon Pretty nor his accuser but the accusations are of a criminal nature (either rape or slander) and it feels like as a society we've long developed more reliable tools and systems to deal with such matters.
> 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.
That sounds like a community failure, not just One Bad Guy.
For those claiming this should be handled in courts:
1) you know it won’t be… especially internationally at the expense of the accuser that has to go through an extradition process.
2) it is still valuable to warn others that a predator is on the loose.
3) it’s already been publicly corroborated by someone else who had a similar experience and you can expect others to follow.
Yes, of course she should have contacted law enforcement, but she was in a foreign country, intimated and young. And law enforcement still fails women:
So this is why we see women continue to post these stories. Her story is backed up by other women.
I believe her.
Meta: I don't know how to make the justice system work better in a case like this. The presumption of innocence is critical and I don't want a system easily abused by false accusers, but it's also clear that predators can take advantage of the presumption of innocence. Even if she had gone to police at the time, ultimately she would have to convince them it wasn't consensual.
Edit 2: found this paper from 2012 written by a police organization that talks about the complexities of dealing with sexual assault in the criminal justice system:
A quote from the conclusion: Rape is the most underreported of crime, because rape victims find it so difficult under the best of circumstances to report it to the police. But it’s made worse when victims say they were interrogated by the police as though they were criminals. Or they are disbelieved and threatened with lie detector tests, or essentially are blamed for the conduct of perpetrators.
Reading the paper, false accusations are barely discussed. The paper spends a lot more time talking about police not believing victims ("unfounding").
She should have agency to have her complaint heard, not an obligation to deal with police.
Aside, she has claimed that he took advantage of her and that he harassed her - not that he assaulted her.
In the United States, sexual assault includes coercion:
Sexual assault covers a wide range of unwanted behaviors—up to but not including penetration—that are attempted or completed against a victim's will or when a victim cannot consent because of age, disability, or the influence of alcohol or drugs. Sexual assault may involve actual or threatened physical force, use of weapons, coercion, intimidation, or pressure and may include: ...
Sexual coercion is unwanted sexual activity that happens when you are pressured, tricked, threatened, or forced in a nonphysical way. Coercion can make you think you owe sex to someone. It might be from someone who has power over you, like a teacher, landlord, or a boss. No person is ever required to have sex with someone else.
It's not that I don't believe her. It's just such a slippery slope.
This is vigilantism -- the same as if you went out and shot a guy who stole your wallet.
We don't trust victims of crimes to dole out punishments. Justice is tempered by due process, checks and balances, proportional response, all that.
So I believe her, but I don't think the world is a better place when people use this approach to conflict resolution. I'd much rather see her go to court and get a conviction.
> This is vigilantism -- the same as if you went out and shot a guy who stole your wallet.
Nobody has shot John Pretty.
I don't understand how "justice" says that Yifan has to lie or pretend that she hasn't gone through a traumatic experience. Writing a blog post is not equivalent to shooting someone. Someone truthfully and honestly describing their own life experience is not violence.
And if nothing else, surely she has the right to warn other women and let them make their own decisions about how to calibrate their risk around John.
> I don't think the world is a better place when people use this approach to conflict resolution.
I'm not always thrilled with public shaming, but to argue that people shouldn't be able to speak about their experiences, or that people shouldn't be able to choose who they associate with, or that people shouldn't be able to warn each other about abusers -- that is also a very slippery slope. Especially in a world where the vast majority of rape cases are never reported or prosecuted.
It's just such an extreme position to say that people even just talking about abusers is "revenge". It's like arguing that because courts sometimes convict innocent people that we should abolish all laws. There is a middle ground between attacking someone for a poorly phrased 10-year-old tweet, and arguing that people shouldn't be talking about personal experiences they've had with sexual harassment/rape.
> Justice is tempered by due process, checks and balances, proportional response, all that.
That's the ideal, but in the real world justice is pretty lacking.
What other action would you suggest she take, right now? What authorities should she go to? Does she need to get on a plane back to Germany and file a police report three years after the fact? Another commenter noted that this specific thing might not even have been illegal in Germany when it happened (but is now).
Even if there is no legal remedy, is this the sort of thing that we want to continue to happen in our technical communities? If not (and I seriously hope not), then what do we do to neutralize these sorts of people?
So what's the alternative? She just shuts up, gets no closure, and we allow a serial manipulator and probably rapist to keep trolling the Scala community for new, vulnerable victims?
There has been a common theme in this thread that the justice system should just sort it all out. Leaving aside all the issues of jurisdiction and citizenship that make a prosecution vanishingly unlikely here, the criminal justice system is just not cut out for dealing with cases of rape.
To prove it beyond reasonable doubt would require a level of evidence that is simply not present here. And in the UK, a suspect is only charged with a crime in 1.4% of reported cases[0]. This is why its so sickening when people gloat that some defendant in a sexual abuse case was found not guilty; it really doesn't mean they didn't commit the crime.
But even though the criminal justice system is not cut out for this kind of thing, that doesn't mean we have no other recourse. The reason the standard for evidence is so high is because the system would otherwise be vulnerable to abuse, and the consequences of wrongful conviction (loss of liberty or even execution) are so grave. Whether or not you agree that this very high standard is justified (I don't), it is clear that the consequences of publicly calling out this behaviour are less serious. Social ostracisation within a very specific community isn't such a big deal, but the direct benefits (protecting women through awareness) may be almost as good.
Whether or not you agree with the above, it's definitely an issue we need to think about. All it takes is someone close to you going through this to realise that the pre-MeToo system is inadequate. This new one isn't ideal, but it's a million times better. If you can think of a way to make things better then I want to hear it.
The allegations are serious. If the author believes she was drunk and did not consent to unprotected sex and taken advantage of that should be reported to the police and the courts due to the seriousness, it’s rape.
The title is damaging “in the Scala community” it tarnishes a programming language and individuals who use the language due to the act of one person. The language is dieing with dramas among 1-2 specific people out of thousands.
No one in the right mind would condone the allegations or the perpetrator and sounds like at least one incident a matter for the police.
The allegations are against an individual and the ScalaCenter handling, not the community. The blog post lists individual people in the community who supported the author. I do wish the title wasn’t as click bait or more specific to the perpetrators as it is damaging, killing a really interesting industry and technology.
I hope the author finds the peace and justice they deserve from sharing this. The public naming and shaming will have serious repercussions for the accused.
I'd like to give a Scala community "insider perspective" on Jon Pretty.
Something always felt off about him.
Being quite involved in the Scala community myself, I can tell you that the impact of his technical contributions is basically zero. None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase).
He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow, presenting himself as some kind of grand architect pursuing grand ideas, while his effective impact was close to zero. He wanted to be perceived as someone influential, but simply didn't have the technical level for it, nor put the effort in.
I think he was tolerated just because he's been around since basically the language was created, and thus was friend with many people, and could tell stories about the early days of Scala.
With him (hopefully) going away, this will have no impact at all on the development of Scala or related projects, apart from saving slots at upcoming Scala conferences.
This is just downright disgusting, does somebody know if there have been consequences? I usually go to general or Go conferences and wonder if there is similiar stuff happening, but i have a good feeling since at least the go conferences alway emphasize inclusion. Lets hope this is true.
This has very little to do with Scala and everything to do with the darkside of the conference scene. Getting involved with conferences at the level she did introduces travel - drugs - drinking - partying with somewhat like minded young people. The culture at the top can be about money, stars and groupies but it revolves around power. Those in charge decide who speak. Those who speak can get opportunity and money. Money buys speaker slots.
I have been going to conferences regularly for the past 9 years (eycept covid of course) and find them to be rather tame actually. Drinking is widely spread, but most other stuff i have not noticed. I also gave talks - maybe the community is different here in europe.
I straddle a handful of domains in my professional life. Each of these domains has these stories come up from time to time. Further each domain talks about whisper networks where people alert newcomers who the bad actors are. I have come to view it as more likely that every community has these problems than to view it as a localized concern.
> I've been aware for some time that a short relationship I had with another Scala developer in 2018, which is the subject of a blog post published today, was being discussed increasingly widely within the Scala community. A second post relating to an earlier, two-year relationship has also been published today.
> While I have no desire to discuss my private life in public, both posts contain several falsehoods, and I strongly reject their characterizations of me.
> I have always believed in unbiased kindness towards others, and given the relatively few women using Scala, plus my role as a prominent figure within the Scala community, I have gone out of my way to be as welcoming as possible to newcomers. This kindness extends to everyone in the community. And at the conferences I frequently attend or organize, I always try to make myself approachable and supportive.
> Through this openness, and over the last few years, during which time the Scala community has been the main focus of most of my activities, I have formed many friendships which have developed both at conferences and online. In the last decade, a tiny number of these proceeded, over a period of weeks or months, to become romantic relationships. They did so gradually, and with the full consent and cooperation of all parties.
> I have no doubt that both women who have published posts today were hurt when our relationships ended. So was I. But the nature of relationships is that many of them do end, and that does not always happen amicably. However, I stand by how I behaved during both relationships, and after they ended. The suggestions that I acted improperly are false or, at best, misinterpretations of my intent. I am happy to be independently scrutinised on any of the points raised.
> The nature of the claims that have been made is serious, and I do not discount that. But they are one-sided, retrospective revisions of the history of those relationships, which have evolved over the last three years.
> Nevertheless, given the open letter against me, I feel that regardless of the baselessness of these claims, it would not be appropriate for me to continue to participate at Scala conferences, so I shall no longer do so.
> I do not intend to discuss this matter further in public.
That's what makes me wonder if this kind of abuser can't help but do these things. But on the other hand, maybe anyone would, if conditions were right.
These public callouts which occupy the area between keeping silent and taking legal action are like antibodies marking a potentially dangerous cell.
> I maintained friendship with him for a few months after May, because I was convinced that it was all consensual and I didn’t want to “make a big scene” like he accused me of.
So for months, the victim herself was convinced it was consensual, but I, the reader, in the space of a few paragraphs, am supposed be convinced that it wasn't?
If I imagine this sentence prefixed with "Your Honor", I can see it not going very well for the plaintiff.
> As an inexperienced young woman from a patriarchal culture, I was running away from the stereotype of being thought of as someone “traditional”. I should, like he implied, and wanted to be “cool about everything that happened”.
“Just be cool” is such an abusive and manipulative behavior I’m flummoxed at how it’s lasted this long as socially acceptable.
Eveybody's talking about the "woke culture", "cancel culture" and all that and how it is bad for the society. The "cool culture" and associated social pressure is probably the single worst "culture" that happened in the last forty years, killed at least thousands and pushed even more to accept unacceptable things.
I turned off the flags on the post when I first saw it (before it made the front page) but it has gone through a couple of different phases since then.
It's time these women came forward and reported the person to the police. As with #metoo, justice does indeed gets handed out, it just takes time. The only thing I'm sad about is the considerable amount of pain and suffering these women have to endure. Hugs all.
The part where people are saying they've become aware of several independent, substantiated accusations against Pretty?
The part where they state that sexual assault is unacceptable?
The part where they demand that Pretty stop this behavior, and that communities put stronger code of conducts in place to specifically call out preying on/sexually assaulting members of that community as unacceptable?
Refusing to associate with Pretty, who they believe is an sexual abuser?
Which part of that is 'a bit like a public lynching'? I want you to be specific, because waving your hand loosely at a document and being like, "Well I dunno, but this seems like an execution designed to drive fear into a community" is not only wildly inappropriate but also rhetorically hollow.
I have lurked here for a long time, but felt compelled to create an account to respond to comments in this thread because of how disappointed I was. This community is part of the problem.
On a human level, how can you be so concerned that there's an outside chance that the accused is completely innocent, and at the same time, ignore the fact that in all likelihood, another human was exploited and raped?
Yes, there is a criminal justice system, and yes "innocent until proven guilty" is an important part of it, but it's clearly unable to handle cases such as these. If that's not obvious, you must not be paying close enough attention.
yes but what happens now is "guilty with no chance of being proven innocent", which is much worse. This will have a massive impact on the accused persons life. Keep in mind, it might not be true and it's only one side of the story.
we shouldn't be cancelling people on one sided stories when people reflect back on life and wish they made different choices.
Is the open source community harder to escape from, if you are a victim? If it's just one company, maybe you can switch. If it's open source, you probably need to switch jobs and discard a lot of your expertise.
The public doesn't have the tools to properly investigate the accusations.
It is impossible for anyone but the parties involved (and maybe not even them) to know what really happened.
This woman could have gone to the police.
She could have gone to one of the many support organisations for rape victims here in Berlin or in the US.
She could have gone to the police even years later, which would have opened the possiblity of an official investigation.
Instead she chooses to publicly write about it, without first even trying to take the legal route.
First world problems. There is no such thing as "harrasment". Someone f... with someone. It was not blackmail or physical coercion, so it's just your free will, period.
I remember the first clue that Reddit was going downhill FAST was when I needed to "sort by controversial" on nearly every thread within every single mainstream sub because the hivemind had become both so ridiculously uniform and because the algorithms had become so blatantly biased against anyone with a differing point of view, that even if many others agreed, it would be almost impossible to see these comments organically using the defaults.
I don’t give two damns about Scala and its community, and I neither believe nor disbelieve the linked post, but boy oh boy does it remind me of the academia in some (many?) countries, where educational/academic advancement per vaginam has been practically an unwritten norm for decades, to the joy of many a creepy professor!
Definitely someone I would consider a creep and I would advise introvert women to stay away from. Because his manners seem to be quite predatory, and he tried to keep in touch with her while she asked him to back off.
But I can't really consider him a rapist, I read her statement, I read his.
She repeatedly shows she was unsure about her feeling, she doubted herself, she even remained friends for several months. Having sex with a drunk stranger is pretty lame, but all of these things make me believe she did not explicitly refused, she probably went along, internally horrified but externally somewhat willing.
I don't know what I would do if many years after, someone called me out publicly by claiming they did not consent, I would certainly feel sorry I hurt someone, but I would not consider myself a rapist and would treat myself like one.
Yes. It's important that as a society we come to terms with the fact that historically, and now, a lot of people use whatever little power and fame they have to abuse others. We can't sit by and let this happen.
things like this always make me shake my head and his "statement" on twitter doesn't do anything to help his case, twitter mob be damned. so generic (imo).
he was in a high position of power and used that to set up situations that were dubious at best. if he even did like 25% of what was claimed he deserves whatever is coming. it's like the boss having questionable relationships w/ his employees then turning around and hiding behind the "it was consensual so that's that!" without understanding the fucking power dynamics.
> "There was another time that he insisted on having intercourse regardless of me saying I didn’t want to"
This is rape is it not? Whoever this guy is, in my opinion this case should get in front of the judges. I can't imagine what the author of the story have gone through.
> "I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I remember panicking and crying."
After reading above and then seeing the part about "insisting" I feel there was more behind this statement. The author's circumstances was also very easy to be taken advantage of. I'm not woman but my guess is there probably is shock involved in situations like this. People are not acting in reasonable ways when in shock..
Not to discount her story or what happened to her, but I’d be interested to hear his side of the story.
I know nothing about this other than this one article, but I do know someone who committed suicide after a false rape accusation that stuck even after the accuser admitted to making it all up.
I think what's possibly needed is a return to a more traditional relationship and dating culture.
In the past, if a man had a dalliance with with a woman and she got pregnant, he was expected to marry her.
Now we expect women to have to be responsible for their own decisions the way men are, but women are generally more emotionally vulnerable than men, due to their more compassionate and less aggressive personalities, and are more easily manipulated as a result.
Therefore it may be up to men to not abuse that.
This was the assumption in place in the past, which is why young women often had chaperones present during close interactions with men, and why the 'marriage if pregnancy' responsibility was placed on men.
We've tried the 'rawr girl power, women can do everything men can do' culture, and the result is scores of women being used and taken advantage of because they were not capable, emotionally/temperamentally, to be their own advocate in sex and dating interactions.
Women are not more compassionate than men, that's false. Women have an instinct to take care of children (as do men), but this does not extend to society at large.
I base it on the prevalence of stories like this, where a woman ostensibly consents to sexual advances and later regrets it and feels she had be abused.
The issue is not consent. The issue is vulnerability. Women are generally more vulnerable to advances from men and more likely to consent to an interaction when it's not in their best interest, than men would be, due to well documented physiological and psychological differences between the sexes.
It's so hard to talk about something like this objectively because momentum of the mob towards the popular discourse makes it almost impossible to detach.
The woman does not say she was raped or anything happened to her without her consent (unless I missed that in which case I apologize and retract this comment, but I couldn't find it).
The person currently being cancelled was a "community leader" (apparently) but was not her boss, teacher, or in official power over her. It sounds like he is a creep who manipulates women to be with him. What specifically did he do differently from any other guy who tries to "woo" a woman?
These women consented to be with him at the time for the perceived benefits of being close to the community leader and what comes with it. They are adult women who made decisions. Now they want to retrospectively apply alternative morals to their actions at the time because they wish they didn't do that.
> I don’t remember how much I drank. I don’t remember him drinking. But I remember feeling uncomfortable when he made advances on me. I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I remember panicking and crying.
I don't want to victim blame here because this guy sounds like a grade A creep and predator. But does a person not have some responsibility here to not get so intoxicated when alone with a member of the opposite sex in a private space? Because sometimes the person is consenting at the time and then regrets it later - and then proceeds to ruin the other person's life by accusing them of taking advantage of an intoxicated individual. I just find this whole area very slippery about when consent means consent and when it doesn't - especially the way sex, alcohol, and drugs are so intertwined in our society. I rightly or wrongly think you have to have some responsibility for putting yourself in such a vulnerable place where you are not in the right frame of mind to resist advances or make sensible decisions. Am I wrong about that?
I don't know if she gave consent, and again, I'm inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, based on her story, age, etc. I just want to discuss this whole business of consent while intoxicated on which I do not have a clear opinion.
Yes, you are victim blaming. Men aren’t wild bears, they’re human beings who should be held accountable for their actions. How drunk someone is around another human being has nothing to do with the perpetrator’s culpability.
If someone is intoxicated, I agree that it seems weird to disregard their consent when drugs+alcohols are the social lubricant of society (and very interwined with sex).
Also, of course you are responsible for your actions even when under the influence (drive and kill someone? no excuse because you were intoxicated - it's your fault). It's crazy to me that people call that "victim blaming". Although I understand how someone can take advantage of others, I don't think the distinction is intoxicated = taken advantage of.
> Yes, you are victim blaming. Men aren’t wild bears.
They're also not harmless. And I chose the word person for a reason - this could happen between a straight man and a gay man, or a woman could take advantage of a drunk man (although he's not likely to regret it, unless maybe he's married or something - or she gets pregnant)
The thing is I think you have some responsibility for your own decisions, drunk or not.
I don't think it's right to take advantage of someone who's drunk - but it's tough to prove that after the fact and many a young man has had their lives ruined by a woman who they thought consented and then later accused them of rape.
On the other hand I can really empathize with the woman's POV here, and think that it's terrible that there are men out there who take advantage of them when they're under the influence - and I'm sure that's more common.
Victim blaming or not, I think most parents wisely caution their children about alcohol, intoxication, and making good decisions about their own personal safety, when they reach the appropriate age. What parent doesn’t have that conversation with their teenage kid?
Without being too flippant, I'd like to point out that we do actually hold wild bears accountable for their actions. There was a news report last week about a bear shot somewhere in the US because it had attacked someone (it seemed to have been trying to guard a particularly valuable food stash).
Some men decide to behave like wild bears, it seems. So while it indeed doesn't change anything about the responsibility, it is still a good idea to take steps that could prevent becoming a victim in the first place.
Speak up HN, don't let voices like this dominate and represent you. Of course what the OP said was not victim blaming. How ridiculous! Several times the commenter expressed doubt and kept asking if he/she is wrong and how would like to be corrected if that is the case.
You come in here with the high moral ground and make such wild indignant proclamation that "men are not bears." Please take this to another community.
> How drunk someone is around another human being has nothing to do with the perpetrator’s culpability.
This is just stupid on its face. DUI exists for a reason and DUI tests are given not because police assumes the drivers, of course would, "take responsibility" and not drink, but because the police exercises common sense if an idiot driver is unable to walk a straight line.
>I don't want to victim blame here because this guy sounds like a grade A creep and predator. But does a person not have some responsibility here to not get so intoxicated when alone with a member of the opposite sex in a private space?
No. The idea that being around a member of the opposite sex (and does this apply to members of the same sex? e.g. men raping men, and women raping women?) in a private space while being intoxicated levies some kind of 'responsibility' to be on the lookout for rape is absolutely victim blaming. It's insisting that her non-sexual actions of literally just being around someone confers a responsibility of any kind pertaining to a sexual act on her.
> No. The idea that being around a member of the opposite sex (and does this apply to members of the same sex? e.g. men raping men, and women raping women?)
I specifically used the word person because I think this could happen between any two people of any sex. I'm certain it even happens to men, by women. Just men are much less likely to regret it the next day.
> levies some kind of 'responsibility' to be on the lookout for rape is absolutely victim blaming
If you gave consent because you were drunk, that's not really rape, it could be poor judgment. The perpetrator might reasonably think you're sober enough to make your own decisions. Especially if they are also inebriated.
Just calling it victim blaming is missing that this is a pretty gray area.
> I don't want to victim blame here ... but does the victim bear some responsibility?
The answer to your question is no. The victim bears no responsibility. The abuser took advantage of someone, who bears no fault for the result. There's no "well, both parties were in the wrong here". The abuser should not have abused the other party, no matter how vulnerable the other party made themselves.
You specifically said you didn't want to victim blame, then immediately blamed the victim.
And what if they were consenting - I'm not saying that's the case here, I don't know obviously, I'm asking in general, just like my comment is a musing about the vagaries of when is consent not consent.
It is... complicated, but if a sober person takes advantage of the apparent willingness of a very intoxicated person, they have done something wrong.
In general regardless of your state of mind, you should be deciding if somebody is actually capable of giving consent in their state of mind regardless of how they act.
A drop of alcohol does not remove all ability to give consent but there is a point where it is no longer possible and so you’re left with a situation where there isn’t right and wrong absolutely but a grey area of many degrees... which as a decent person you should always err on the side of caution.
Responsibility is the wrong word. There is a difference between good advice and victim blaming. Just because the victim was careless doesn't make them in any form responsible for the crime. Nevertheless, I would certainly advise my daughter against getting drunk in such a situation.
>> But does a person not have some responsibility here to not
>> get so intoxicated when alone with a member of the opposite
>> sex in a private space?
>
> Responsibility is the wrong word.
It's not a responsibility in ethical sense yet it is street smart behaviour.
A less amplified example: if you walk into a biker bar, insult that the regulars are assholes whose bikes you just kicked over outside, they have no moral justification to hurt you just as people are ethically bound to not sexually abuse intoxicated persons in our society. But there's some chance the guys in the biker bar won't just call the police and politely retain you until they arrive and, instead, you get beaten into some half-liquid state of matter.
The reason for that is because the regulars likely follow their own rules and not yours or the greater society's. Similarly, predator-type people don't follow the morals that we recognize. If all you can resort to is morals, you will lose with people who don't play by your rules. If someone doesn't see a moral problem in the sexual abuse of a passed out person it won't help to merely remind this person of just that: the abuser simply doesn't give a shit but plays a whole different game.
This is where the society could step in with its justice system and link the abusive behaviour to something the abuser does actually mind, like a harsh enough conviction to make the abusive behaviour less inviting. But society also has to be fair so as to not give harsh convictions to people who have not abused anyone despite being accused of doing that, and then the waters get muddy again. In many cases there's no objective verdict to be reached because no third party can ultimately tell what the heck happened, even if actual abuse did take place.
This leads to the bizarre but common pattern where the potential victims have to become proactive in taking measures to not actually become victims, and in doing so limit their choices and decisions of what to do, where to go and with whom. The onus somehow gets transferred to the person who shouldn't have to use time and energy to prevent these things from happening. The potential victims are the only party in the game who follow the society's rules and they have that losing stance because of that.
They shouldn't have to have -- and they don't have -- a moral responsibility to prepare for the worst: the moral responsibility single-handedly falls on the perpetrator -- the one who doesn't ever consider morals! So, the result is that the potential victims are imposed by purely practical concerns to limit their choices in order to secure themselves against wrongdoings, just in case. It's not right but it's also smart -- that's the big dilemma.
The front door of one's home always seemed a good analogy to me.
Is it good practice to lock your front door, on the assumption that some people are malicious and will take advantage and rob you if you don't? With particular caution suggested in some areas? Yes.
Is someone who is robbed when they did not lock their front door responsible for the crime in some sense? No, not really. A normal human failing to carry out a precaution that shouldn't be necessary in the first place, perhaps. I've forgotten to lock my front door once in a while, haven't you?
A person that is in an incapacitated state is not able to consent, in that situation the burden is entirely on the other person. Just because someone is not able to say no doesn't meant they did consent.
I'm talking about close to blackout drunk, heavily incapacitated, not slightly tipsy.
Since the pattern is so similar, I now recognize this as a form of harmful #metoo activism.
- Attack entire community, not individuals
- Court of Public Social Justice
- The charges amount to unwanted advances being made during a social interaction where that would be acceptable -- not sexual harassment, nor illegal behavior.
Make the problem about an entire industry: Holywood, Scala, MIT, Statistics. Garantuee public shaming and punishment for your target, by calling out criticism or disbelief as "victim shaming", people calling for you to lose your job, because they got angry reading a Medium post, not because you've been proven guilty by someone without a bias. Ending up in an apartment with someone in another country, drinking wine, but not remembering how much you drank, but you do remember that he did not drink anything (to play up him taking advantage over you), then crying and feeling upset, because someone makes an advance towards you, instead of feeling flattered and politely declining. Going skinny dipping at night in the sea with a bunch of clumsy rowdy tipsy researchers, then blaming an advance someone makes, on conference culture.
Go to the police, get your day in court, and let justice prevail. Not going to join a mob, because someone made you cry once. Even giving the experience sympathy would needlessly rile me up. I'd like to think about other negative things when interacting with Scala and its community, preferably technical.
>I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated.
At least read the article before being dismissive.
Imagine being 20, getting raped, and having randoms on the internet completely invalidate how traumatic it was because they think you're just meming. Like damn and we wonder why women struggle in tech.
>advance towards you, instead of feeling flattered and politely declining
Do you know what "advance" means? It's old-timey English for aggression as in
"The enemy advanced on the capital".
No that's not how it's used to today but it still typically has very negative connotations. So I think it's rich irony that due to your own (probable) inarticulateness and (probable) bias you think something that could experienced as violence should be flattering.
> Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.
Sex has always had aggressive and domination elements. Some women even request you slap them during.
She talks like a doll lacking any kind of autonomy. It is not "we had sex", but "he had sex with me".
I don't know any woman who does not want to have unprotected sex, but just let it happen like that. Then come back for seconds, even though she is not in the mood.
Are there naive young women who lack self-authority and self-esteem to say no, to an older man who needs those women to get their fix and wants to make up for their unpopular youth? Yes. And that awkward dance of nature takes two to tango. Panicking and crying during or after sex does not a "rape" make (but the definition depends on jurisdiction anyway, and we haven't even let a court in the right jurisdiction look if it qualifies, so I'd like to avoid that term).
Unless you want to claim openly that a named person is now a serial rapist. I'd like to think it takes more than a Medium post for you to do that.
Right. Just like the justice system would, social media will sentence him to the extremely harsh punishment of... not being invited to conferences anymore.
"Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error."
Except we're seeing its horrendous ideas flourishing.
Another person with a narcissistic personality disorder. I look forward to the day (I'll be long dead, unfortunately) when our society can recognize these people as evil and deal with them in a constructive way while protecting people from them.
what does this have to do with Scala community? she was harassed by many people who use Scala?
Did they all wear Nike?
What mobile phones were they using, iphone, huawei?
Clickbait, trying to ruin a reputation?
To what effect is this article written is the central question.
Woman, use your head and learn from experience.
Unbelievable, the times we are living in. I wouldn't speak to this woman ever, who knows what she might write about it years later. This is insane to go public like this about your private life, and again, to what effect? You don't have to be above average intelligence to understand the whys of this drama.
John Pretty is a troublesome character and as he reads through this comment section to find out how his reputation will be hurt by this... I hope it becomes a barrier for him to participate in the Scala Community with influence over others and the Programming Communities all around. Punish John Pretty IMO
> I felt bad that I made him feel untrusted and stopped asking others to join.
Mistake #1
> Remembering that he had suggested I get milk and wine in our previous conversation, I also bought them. I don’t remember how much I drank.
Mistake #2.
Obviously we're not excusing the behavior of the guy. However, when will we learn that we should not mix genders this way, and especially the many times people have been bitten with alcohol. It's bizarre really. People want to have their cake and eat it. They play with fire then cry when they get burnt.
There is a lot about the sexual events in this post that, to me, highlights something I feel is important which is: we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex.
This girl was feeling uncomfortable and crying but at the same time "didn't think those behaviors were problematic". I can't help but wonder if her parents never sat her down and discussed situations like this and, I get it. That's a really uncomfortable conversation to have with your child. It is, however, an important one.
This doesn't just apply to girls by the way. We parents need to be telling our sons what kind of behavior is and isn't acceptable. It's not enough to expect them to figure it out. Who are they figuring it out from if not us? Probably other inexperienced boys.
Please don't rush to put words in my mouth by thinking I am suggesting the guy in the article is innocent of the accusations. I'm making no commentary on either party from this article. That's for the courts to decide should one or both parties choose to take that course of action.
I'm simply saying it is important that parents overcome their discomfort around discussions of sex with their children so that the children can make informed decisions.
we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex.
I'm a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I thought long and hard about this and decided that talking to my children about the existence of sexual predators would rob them of their innocence.
I've studied how this works. Sexual predation almost never starts with rape. It starts with myriad instances of boundary violation and disrespect and culminates in rape.
Rape hinges on the detail of consent. As a society trying to combat this issue, we seem to overlook that for the most part.
I taught my children that hugs and kisses required consent. I taught that from birth. Even a baby too young to talk can turn their face away because they don't want a kiss or hold their arms up enthusiastically to receive affection.
When they were older, I told them if they told someone "no" and their decision was not respected, come get me.
I only had one of them come get me once. The person who felt entitled to get "sugar" from my child was utterly shocked that I told them they were wrong.
This was an elderly female relative. My children are both boys.
Most likely, she wasn't actually a child molester, but this practice of adults demanding hugs and kisses from children who have no right to say "no" is commonplace and gets treated as something funny in movies. I treated it as no laughing matter.
If you want children to understand consent and respect, the best thing to do is let them experience it firsthand from birth. And make sure they know that rule is a two-way street, not a one-sided privilege.
My wife told me something a while back about how girls are often taught from a young age to be "sweet" and to defer to adults who demand their affection. I can't remember if it's something she read or came to herself upon examination of her youth. I can see the way that this idea on boundaries can grow to adulthood to having difficulty strongly advocating for oneself. The philosophies you laid out resonate strongly with me, and as a first-time parent expecting a daughter soon, I hope I can correctly instill them in her.
Did you ever deal with an instance where your kids started telling you "no" in response to demands you felt were reasonable, twisting your original explanations to use against you, for things like eating, cleaning up or hygiene? How did you reconcile the difference?
9 replies →
Totally agree. As a boy I played chess at the book store. This one man would always have long conversations with me and tell me about all sorts of books. (This was great, I loved reading.) After a number of weeks, he wanted me to go have lunch with him down the street. I felt like this was weird, and said no. The following weekend one of the other men, a math professor at the college, took me aside and said flat out not to hang out with that man, or go anywhere with him. Long story short, predators start by forming a friendship and building trust. If, for whatever reason, your kids don't feel like they can come to you first for things, then they're at a higher risk for predators.
Thank you for sharing this!
We've also taught a similar one in "your body, your choice." I can confirm some folks look at us sideways when we agree with our kids choice to not hug or kiss.
If there is one thing I'd want my kids to know it is how to establish and confidently hold a boundary.
DoreenMichele coming in as a strong contender for Parent of the Year 2021. You rule.
Thanks for this. I haven’t actually drawn a line between this kind of semi-forced physical affection and the blurring of consent as an adult, but it makes perfect sense. We even encourage/force kids to reciprocate gifts with physical affection. Surely this also inculcates a subconscious notion that you “owe” someone in this way.
Both genders should be taught both sides of the situation
This isn’t to play down the experiences of women at all, but it can be easy to forget that this happens to men too
Given the current culture, it can be even harder for men to come forward with their stories, and even less likely for them to be believed
As a plus, I think making sure to teach boys what is and isn’t acceptable to happen to them could help to teach them how to treat others
I think that otherwise, if it’s “don’t rape” for boys, and “don’t let people rape you” for girls, then it’s almost like marking each gender out solely as potential abusers and potential victims, which surely couldn’t be a good thing
These events are just as much about alcohol, misplaced trust in strangers, personally unsafe arrangements (sharing an AirBnb with an unfamiliar person), grossly disproportionate social influence etc. etc. as they are about "sex". In fact, even the sex the OP talks about was clearly coerced.
We should stop treating "tell folks not to have 'unacceptable' sex" as if it's a foolproof solution to all social problems. It just isn't.
+1 but especially our boys. Girls and women already learn so much about how to avoid being harmed by men. It’s time for our boys to learn how to become kind men - and for those of us who are men to model that for them.
Doesn't this remove agency from women?
If two adults get together, fly together, get a room together, drink wine together, have relations... Then we're supposed to say that consent can't be given because the woman is drunk. But they're both drunk. Isn't it essentially the patriarchy to say that a woman can't make that choice? Like if they're equals and they're both drunk, why do we blame the men?
Because they aren't really equals? Isn't that what we're fighting against? We blame the men for not ignoring the wishes of the woman while drunk. It's a little bit chauvinistic to think the men know better isn't it?
22 replies →
Boys and men are constantly taught to be kind and protective toward women and even deferential to their wants. Just because there might be a small percent of men who have psychological disorders or otherwise don't behave properly doesn't mean that 95%+ of men don't have GOOD character, whether or not that comes from education.
But I think we should also be teaching boys and men how not to be victims. Both sexes can be abusers, and we spend almost no time teaching boys and men how to recognize and escape abusive situations.
Not to mention that boys, small boys in particular are frequent targets of abuse. At certain ages even more than girls.
And an abused boy could well become an abuser in the future. Sad but true
4 replies →
Are you implying that rape occurs because someone’s parents didn’t tell them not to or that they would not rape if their parents HAD told them not to do it?
7 replies →
Boys should be educated, but this will still happen.
I cannot believe this guy doesn't know that what he's doing is wrong.
We should identify and mitigate high potential threats by public warning, ostracism or legal action. Overcorrect if necessary.
1 reply →
This is not an education or even an inherently sexual issue.
In case you didn't notice, there is a pattern, very often, the aggressor is in a relative position of power.
People with power feel free to abuse people with less power, simply because they've learned that most of the time they can get away with it.
I also think we can build better communities by ensuring people are in safe situations, especially when traveling or when they are in an unfamiliar environment. This is especially true of young adults who have yet to experience predators.
Agreed. I can't believe a woman would be naïve enough to share a room with a man. For crying out loud, if a man invites you to a room with him alone he wants to have sex. It's that simple.
I think boys already are told what is acceptable and what isn't. We got taught, in no uncertain terms, what would be considered rape or sexual assault. But I think people are afraid to mention the obvious when it comes to things like putting yourself in uncomfortable situations.
I predict this comment will be downvoted, so let me anticipate your objections. I had my bike stolen last week. I left it somewhere unlocked. This is considered my fault. Now you could say, no, it's not my fault, it's the bastard who stole it. And, sure, you'd be right. But the fact is I don't have a bike right now. Lock up your bike.
I'm not sure if I'm different or not, but I've shared a room alone with female friends on multiple occasions (when younger) with literally nothing happening even when we shared a bed.
Obviously, we were long time friends and this would be different if I was meeting a conference speaker, but as usual, nothing is as black or white as "men only want sex".
However, I do agree with your point. Boys need to be taught what could be considered rape, and girls need to realise that sadly some men will abuse them sexually if given half a chance.
2 replies →
> I think boys already are told what is acceptable and what isn't.
Maybe things have changed since I was young but, that may be overly generous. The kind of discussion I'm suggesting never happened with me, or, if it did, it happened only once. My parents left me to figure that out on my own. I don't want this to sound like I'm attacking my parents because I'm not. I had great parents, but the topic of sexual behavior was obviously something they weren't comfortable having with me at the time.
Thinking back on conversations I've had with pretty much all of my male friends, they had the same experience.
1 reply →
I know it's probably not your intention, but you are shifting the blame from Jon to Yifan's parents. I hope this doesn't stay as the first comment in this thread.
It wasn't my intention nor do I believe that's what I'm doing. I'm simply using this event to highlight to other current and future parents like myself that we need to overcome our discomfort with discussing sex with our children so that we can provide them with tools should they ever find themselves in similar situations. I posit that her parents hadn't had those conversations, but I'm also not blaming them in any way if they hadn't, nor am I try to shift blame away from or to anyone.
That is why I was explicit in my request that people not put words in my mouth or read between the lines.
3 replies →
This is not about blame, it's about protecting people.
There will always be Jon's and worse than Jon's out there in the world. They are to blame indeed. But what are you going to do about it? How are you going to protect yourself and others?
Taking measures for protection does not mean you are to blame.
I think this comment is saying "here is something that some of us can do that might help prevent these kinds of situations in the future". In my opinion, that's a productive contribution to the conversation, and does not imply that Jon is any less guilty.
> we parents need to get better had having conversations with our children around sex.
Exactly. The conclusion is simple, yet challenging to implement: don't have sex outside of marriage. For girls and women: don't have casual relationships with men. Problem solved.
Marriage has nothing to do with it. It's just legal binding to unite the possessions and caretaking of the children. Abuse still happens, more often than not, in marriages, including rape. Unless you comment was sarcastic, your point is clearly proven wrong by and large.
2 replies →
General PSA from someone who has studied such things:
1. Alcohol is the number one date rape drug and it's problematic in part because men tend to have a much higher tolerance than women.
2. Date rape frequently involves two people from different cultures with different social expectations. This often fosters terrible misunderstandings.
3. It's always problematic to "try a case" in the court of public opinion. Probably better to try to use a piece like this as a jumping off point for general discussion of the problem space and not an attempt to determine what "really" happened in this instance.
4. It's good to think about what women can do differently to try to protect themselves. Trying to talk about that is not, per se, blaming the victim anymore than it is blaming the victim to say "It's a bad neighborhood. Make sure you lock your car."
5. When someone is a habitual offender and genuinely a predator, their victim can do all the right things and still get assaulted.
6. Whether a woman did or did not do all the right things, a man choosing to assault her is still on him, just like you are still a thief even if someone failed to lock their car.
I continue to appreciate your appraisals and summaries, thank you.
Your comments on tricky topics tend to lean more toward actionables, rather than the perpetual rehashing same arguments the rest of this comment section is filled with.
I'm curious if you or anyone else can share more detail or some examples regarding cross-cultural differences in societal expectations.
I've got some guesses about what this might mean, but I haven't studied this, and don't have any personal experience here.
A fairly obvious one: If you are from a culture where sex before marriage is permissible and you are a woman, men from cultures where women are expected to remain virgins until the wedding night may see you as "a loose woman."
In such cases, they may even feel entitled to have you and get very mad if you try to tell them no.
People from very conservative cultures tend to wildly misinterpret the actions of women from more liberated and empowered cultures. Her behavior may be viewed as promiscuous or as leading him on when she's doing no such thing.
Some cultures expect a man to have to pursue a woman pretty hard before she says "yes." I read one article where a man from such a culture was sort of frustrated or disappointed when his lady from another culture gave it up too easily in his view. He wasn't happy at not having to "work for it."
3 replies →
How about the classic Ask vs Guess from metafilter:
https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...
1 reply →
I wonder when is something is legally considered rape. Like what you read in the article, when there was a lot of manipulation, but not really a "no", and a bad feeling during an afterwards.
> I wonder when is something is legally considered rape.
Its kind of weird that this hairsplitting curiosity about consent always comes up exclusively in the context of rape and not other crimes with the same “without consent” rule, like battery (particularly since rape is, ina sense, just battery where the “harmful or offensive touching” element involves specific configurations of genital contact.)
But its actually pretty simple: if the other party didn’t actively intend for the specific interaction to occur, there was no consent. All the other things people ask about (except to the extent that they involve factors that legally either negate consent if known to or caused by the other party or which create a legal incapacity to consent independent of knowledge of the other party, which can include intoxication , youth, threats of violence, and other factors) tend to be things that play more of a role in the practical ability to convince a jury one way or the other than the ground truth of whether the offense occurred.
6 replies →
It seems more complex than even what the law says, as in the end it is up to a judge/jury to make the call.
I don't know about Germany or the US, but Poland has (a) fairly strict anti-rape laws, and (b) a number of cases presented in media, where the court's final opinion was something along the lines of "meh, what's the big deal?".
I'm not sure that this is a general characterisation (might be) but certainly illustrates the law vs. decision maker split.
From what I can gather in the instances of other crimes, the same is true in e.g. US. You cannot shoot unarmed people running away from you, but then courts let people get away with it.
At the end of the day, the main sniff test, only somewhat moderated by law, seems to be "does this look like rape to me".
"It's good to think about what women can do differently to try to protect themselves."
Okay, here are some suggestions. I'm expressing them strongly, because some women don't seem to have understood these things.
1. Don't fuck people that you don't want to fuck. 2. Don't spend time alone with a man that you don't want to fuck, because that man very probably does want to fuck you. 3. Don't share a bedroom or sleep with with a man that you don't want to fuck. 4. Don't go on a "date" with a man if you already know that you don't want to fuck him. 5. Don't get drunk alone with a man that you don't want to fuck. 6. Don't continue fucking a man that you regret fucking the first time. 7. Don't go out of your house by yourself, if you are not an educated adult woman who understands that most male creatures by nature want to have as much sex as possible with as many different attractive young females as possible, and men will attempt to do so by various means ranging from courtship to rape depending on their moral standards. 8. Don't communicate with people that you don't want to communicate with. Tell them loud and clear to stop, block them, or report repeated unwanted communication which is harassment. 9. Don't allow someone to harass you (repeatedly after being told not to). Tell them not to, loud and clear. 10. Don't ignore all of the above, which is very widely known to almost every adult, then publicly complain that a bad man took advantage of you, a helpless and vulnerable victim, and also expect to be respected as an equal.
Yes, I feel sorry for the woman who had a bad and traumatic experience with this man. I have had bad experiences too. But I don't understand how a woman could grow up in this world, with access to caring parents, news, internet, and education, and yet still fall into a trap like this.
It beggars belief, to the point that I would suggest that this was possibly not "date rape", but rather a consensual sexual encounter that the woman did not enjoy and/or regretted. At least I think there is some reasonable doubt. There is a far far way from a regretted relationship or one night stand, to date rape. If in fact this was more of a regretted relationship, I think it is not acceptable to destroy a man's reputation and career by broadcasting the whole experience to the public and judging him guilty of unclear accusations without trial.
Men are not perfect, we are not always nice, we can be manipulative, and we might go to great lengths to get what we want. Women are also like that.
first, a small rant: tbf. I dislike the title. the real title is sexual harassment from Jon Pretty a leader of certain Scala Community standups.
because the current title actually sounds like it's the whole commnity, but the blog is about a specific guy.
---
second I really do not understand, how other people can be so horrible. he basically abused her in a moment where she was really really desperate and I think such a thing is really really bad.
> In June, Heather noticed that I was upset at a dinner after ScalaDays. I shared with her about what happened. She warned me to stay away from Jon Pretty. And she wasn’t the only person who told me that. Even though my experience in Berlin was awful, it was difficult for me to accept that someone, who seemed like a good friend, mentor, and ally, could be so selfish, manipulative, and cruel.
It sounds like people knew about him and didn't do anything. If the community is allowing it to happen, then the community is as much at fault as the sick individual doing the abuse.
> It sounds like people knew about him and didn't do anything. If the community is allowing it to happen, then the community is as much at fault as the sick individual doing the abuse.
well around 2017-2019 I was active in scala aswell (more on the playframework side tough) and I dind't even knew about him until I read the blog. you know just because there are members from scalacenter and lightbend does not mean that the community as a whole wanted to have something to do with somebody like him. You know there are thousands of people going to ScalaDays every year, it's highly unlikely that the majority of the scala community would be happy about the guys behavior and it's also highly unlikely that the majority of people in the scala community knew about the guys behavior.
2 replies →
It's a bit vague. I'm not involved in the Scala community and if someone told me a story like that about someone in it I would also tell them to stay away from them.
Well I think the only problem with the title is that "harassment" is not a strong enough word.
About using the word "community", the first paragraph of the open letter explains why it's relevant:
"We, the undersigned, have become aware that, for some time, Jon Pretty has abused his position of privilege and stature within the Scala community to sexually harass and victimize women. He has used the community’s conferences to target women who are new to the Scala community, offering mentorship, access, and other forms of support, and then abusing the trust that he has established."
The community has allowed this guy to continue to be influential, so while the perpetrator is just one guy, it’s a community problem.
Relevant passages from the post
> In June, Heather noticed that I was upset at a dinner after ScalaDays. I shared with her about what happened. She warned me to stay away from Jon Pretty. And she wasn’t the only person who told me that.
> 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.
Statement from Jon Pretty https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085
"The standard you walk past is the standard you accept" applies here. When a good community permits bad actors, it is no longer a good community.
I had the pleasure to get to know the author for a brief time in the period her article describes. Some of the surrounding events she describes were public knowledge via Twitter posts and such, for instance getting stranded in Berlin.
From my outsider's vantage point I remember thinking something felt off about Jon's interactions/role in those stories. It was gut wrenching reading the article this AM realizing what was really going on.
Jon Pretty sounds like a complete creep and yes, based on this account, a predator.
That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason. While I empathize with the author, and utterly despise the archetype of high-status men who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women, I find the nature of these kinds of posts to be counterproductive. Therapeutic to the author? Likely. A way to mobilize support? Certainly. But the method can be abused. Imagine a letter like this targeted at you one day, except unlike Mr. Pretty, you are innocent. Ask yourself if that's a possibility, and if you think that there is a zero probability of anyone maliciously weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.
My brother was a victim of a vicious smear by a female colleague, who falsely accused him of stalking her as a result of him calling her out one day for stealing his project and presenting it while he was traveling to the funeral of his wife's grandfather. He was able to show video footage of him picking up his son and daughter at a daycare the very moment the woman claimed he was at her house, but by then, the HR department couldn't turn back, and he was fired. (He was later sent a large gift basket by several of his coworkers who had heard from someone in HR that the charges were false, but "optics" were the reason they had to move forward with his termination.)
I only kind of agree.
In this case a Chinese woman living in the USA apparently got raped in Germany 3 years ago. To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an accusation for which she has no evidence but her word, against a man who lives in another city.
What, exactly, do you imagine that the police are likely to do with her report?
I hate the court of public opinion as much or more as the next guy. But if this is a real pattern and he is as practiced as it sounds, after 10-20 women come forth then I'll be very confident that the crime is real. And there is also a chance that we can hit a critical mass where law enforcement somewhere may take an interest after all.
I agree with you that ideally this would go to the police first and they would actually act. But in the real world, she picked one of the best of the bad options available to her.
>>To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an accusation for which she has no evidence but her word, against a man who lives in another city.
Well, that's not strictly true. At least the official advice in the UK is that even if the crime happened elsewhere you should still report it locally, then the case should be forwarded to the authorities in the country where it allegedly happened.
https://www.helpforvictims.co.uk/content/Q1.htm#:~:text=You%....
No idea how/if that would work in US, but in general you should be able to report it locally.
>What, exactly, do you imagine that the police are likely to do with her report?
If it's anything like the UK (and I suspect it is), they'll likely take it seriously. For example, see the police's reaction here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/mt1kw4/withd...
If she got robbed, on the other hand, or she reported something like this ten years ago, they'd probably say "meh we are busy, here's your crime reference number now go away".
1 reply →
> raped
I agree with everything else in your post except for the description of events as "rape". According to the story she wrote, they had sex when she was drunk, and she thought for months after the fact that the sex had been consensual. To me it sounds like sexual abuse / exploitation, not rape. (Unless you're making the pedantic argument that having sex with an intoxicated person is always rape, in which case 2 intoxicated persons having sex would mean that both persons rape each other.)
2 replies →
Sweden and Uk spent tens of millions dealing with extradition case for just getting a hearing over an accusation with similar amount of evidence.
Technically the legal system could do the same in her case.
5 replies →
>To involve law enforcement she would have to travel to a country where she doesn't speak the language, to make an accusation for which she has no evidence but her word, against a man who lives in another city.
That's what an embassy is for... they help deal with these situation.
>And there is also a chance that we can hit a critical mass where law enforcement somewhere may take an interest after all.
Don't complain that a law enforcement agency doesn't do anything if they're never made aware of the problem.
7 replies →
I wonder if Pretty specifically chose this modus operandi (taking a woman to a third country before moving on her) to get himself a layer of legal protection. It’s a well-established practice in abuse communities after all (e.g. people traveling to Asia).
It’s also interesting that this scenario would have probably been more unlikely in the past. Before the “sexual revolution”, an educated woman would never sleep alone in the same house as an unmarried man, for fear of her “honour” being maligned. That set of cultural values had its (massive) problems, but in some scenarios it actually worked better than the current one, effectively forcing women to avoid dangerous situations.
Not all criminal investigations are solved or competently followed. However this doesn't mean you should take justice in your own hands, which is what mob justice is. This is plain disrespect for official authority and the principal of "innocent until proven otherwise". Even murderers with clear and shut cases are afforded legal council and ways to defend themselves.
Also, this could have been resolved if this was reported in timely manner, not years after. She is a victim, however her followup actions are neither correct nor proper.
The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted. The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming.
You're concerned that this is stacked against you, but the courts are stacked against the victims. So it doesn't really suffice to decry the one problem without addressing the other.
So perhaps you can see what it looks like to many women when you say, "Hey, I'm sorry this happened to you, but this bad thing happened to my brother, so _shrug_". Did your brother go to the courts and police to address these issues? It may been unlawful termination.
There is a large domain of behavior that is either nebulously legal or difficult to prosecute but which makes our communities much, much worse. It's counterproductive to tell the people victimized by that to stop talking about it. The solution is to go forward and find ways to set up our communities to protect people. And that can't mean just asking victims to accept that.
> the courts are stacked against the victims
Ah, that pesky presumption of innocence getting in the way of our 100% conviction rate. /s
3 replies →
"The problem is that only a tiny percentage of harassers and rapists are ever convicted."
How can that be known? Why do you presume that someone is a harasser or rapist if they weren't convicted?
45 replies →
> The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction
Rape convictions are so abysmally low that there's been a lot of rethinking in feminist circles as to whether the "beyond reasonable doubt" standard -- or even the presumption of innocence -- is fair or just. Some countries have been looking for ways to ameliorate this. For example, in thr USA, college date rape is such a problem that universities are required to investigate accusations of sexual harassment or assault and discipline offenders based on the looser preponderance standard, or be found in violation of Title IX by the federal Department of Education.
1 reply →
This problem can only be solved with trial by coin toss
> The court -- rightly -- sets a very high bar to conviction, and police and prosecutors often won't even attempt it unless the evidence is overwhelming.
Huh? Have you ever heard of the Central Park Five? Google "Central Park Five" and you'll have a more enlightened view!
8 replies →
> That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason.
The alleged crimes are difficult to prove in general, but in this case the victim seems to have been only visiting the country where the crime occurred. And didn't fully understand what had happened contemporaneously. I would hope she approaches the appropriate criminal authorities to report, and I would hope something is done, but without local knowledge of how these reports are handled in Berlin, I would expect it to mostly be written down somewhere and no further action taken.
Speaking out in a public way like this helps others who experienced the same pattern of behavior to recognize it, and possibly share similar experiences to the point where a criminal investigation may be started, if relevant. It also may help put people who might be exposed to similar behavior in the future on notice, so they can attempt to avoid it, or report it as it happens, if it happens in the future.
> Imagine a letter like this targeted at you one day, except unlike Mr. Pretty, you are innocent.
“Imagine that you were convicted of murder but, unlike John Wayne Gacy, you were innocent.”
Seriously what is the point of comments like this? False convictions are real and very very bad, but I know very few social justice advocates who are opposed to locking up serial killers. Likewise, the existence of unscrupulous people who make false accusations of sexual assault/etc is a real problem. But that’s a very shitty excuse to trash every public accusation - especially when in practice it is the public accusation that leads to more victims speaking out.
More to the point: Jon Pretty is a notable public figure who has been credibly accused of extremely toxic and disgusting behavior towards large portions of the Scala community. At least some of this behavior is clearly not illegal, merely dangerous and profoundly unethical[1]. Therefore the court of public opinion is the only court that has solid jurisdiction, so to speak.
[1] That said: some of the accusations and the large number of alleged victims merit a criminal investigation.
> Imagine that you were convicted of murder
OP points out that we have criminal courts for a reason - he's not comparing this scenario with an actual conviction after a trial with presumed innocence. In your analogy, it would have to be common for people to be fired from their jobs (and blackballed from entire industries) on the strength of a murder accusation that hasn't even been presented to the police, much less been through a trial.
1 reply →
John Wayne Gacy was convicted in a criminal court of law, with rules, where he was presumed innocent until proven guilty.
You attempt to draw a connection, but it's a false analogy out of the gate.
3 replies →
> Therefore the court of public opinion is the only court that has solid jurisdiction, so to speak.
based on what his public info shows about his location this medium post (and the ensuing public outrage) cops in that country will have to press charges (in case they haven't been pressed already).
There is a high chance he is a flight risk so they will book him, _unless_:
... then he is looking forward to spending 6 months minimum in "Untersuchungshaft" (hard time) or for whatever length of time investigations are ongoing (until trial).
What I'm getting at is that this is a very serious allegation that _will_ result in hard time if convicted but also until he actually gets his day in court! But for that to happen she needs to do more than a Medium post (make a statement with the cops which can be scary but shouldn't be if she actually brings a lawyer). In case she doesn't then it needs to be considered a character assassination which itself is a felony. In any case posting such a piece is legally risky for her and if she would have bothered getting a lawyer, they most certainly would have advised her against it. The best option for her would be to go through the court system of where he is currently located.
Most other options have a high risk of this going nowhere (cost + extradition etc) and even give more room for speculation and he-said-she-said which shouldn't (imho) be the goal of the metoo movement and indeed it should be called out for mob-justice.
2 replies →
You are conflating conviction with mere, non-legal accusation.
Conviction means someone made an accusation at a legal level, then it was considered worthy by police, then by a country's prosecution service, then by a jury, and then (probably) by an appeals court too. Under normal circumstances, that's a bar infinitely higher than, "I'm claiming to have a story about someone."
I think there’s a crucial point that you missed:
“...there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason”
John Wayne Gacy was convicted in a court via the criminal justice system. As a society, we have chosen this as our mechanism for adjudicating these types of accusations, and that mechanism has evolved certain safeguards over time. It’s not perfect, but it is a far fairer venue to be tried in than the “court of public opinion”. That’s not an insignificant point, and you’re glossing over it entirely.
2 replies →
I'd never heard of that guy, so to save others the trouble, in 1980 he was found "guilty of 33 charges of murder; he was also found guilty of sexual assault and taking indecent liberties with a child" and was executed by the USA in 1994.
1 reply →
Someone should coin a law for this phenomenon: Every single time a ~~woman~~ victim makes a public statement like this, in the comment sections a man must be discussing false accusations or the court of public opinion. I don't think I've ever not seen this.
People who are abused are damned if they do, damned if they don't.
edit: removed specific gender
edit2: I'm not trying to be inflammatory here. This is a phenomenon that I've noticed over the years.
19 replies →
> heard from someone in HR that the charges were false, but "optics" were the reason they had to move forward with his termination.
Time to name the company.
A massive company that makes overpriced, low-quality athletic products that double as status symbols, which they manufacture overseas (often using child labor) but then sell for massive markups in the US, Europe, etc. They have an extremely aggressive "woke" presence in their advertising, because as long as you care about social justice for your targeted customers, who cares that "people of color" in the developing world are being paid slave wages to create your products. You probably know who I'm talking about now, but I'm not going to name them.
16 replies →
IANAL, but if the story is true, would it be reasonable to sue that coworker for defamation/slander and for lost wages?
1 reply →
I think that's a pretty cynical POV. False accusations happen, but aren't the norm. Far more abusers get away with their bad behavior than good people are wrongly punished. Yifan already has a second woman coming forward describing similar behavior as well some witnesses to some of the public parts. It's probably unlikely she'd be able to prove a criminal case in whatever country this happened, but we don't need bad behavior to be criminal to declare it unacceptable and stop rewarding it. It's likely we'll see a few more pretty soon, hear Pretty's side and then the court of public opinion can render a decision. Right now, her story is pretty plausible and she has seemingly no motive to fabricate. He won't go to jail, but he will stop being invited to conferences and likely lose his livelihood.
> there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason Having supported a few friends trying to push these kinds of complaints through the courts, I think the precise reason this kind of naming and shaming has become so common place is the criminal justice system isn't working well.
Even for fairly straightforward sexual assault case in a liberal jurisdiction with witnesses I've watched a friend struggle with members of the justice system verbally insulting and degrading them as they try to obtain justice for themselves.
Having seen all that when I see a post like this I understand why the author did not go to court, and don't question it. If we took the time to actually fix the courts I'd be much more skeptical of claims that had not been presented to law enforcement.
I feel for people like your brother who are victims of people abusing the trend, but as long as our justice system fails victims so horribly I think this is the least bad solution available.
Can you please provide proof that our justice system is failing victims? Do you just mean that the conviction rate is anything less than 100% for accusations?
Also, can you clarify what you mean by "verbally insulting and degrading them"? It's possible you just mean the lawyer is accusing them of lying... which is what you do when you think a person is lying. The accused does have a presumption of innocence, and the accuser may need to be cross examined under some reasonable amount of emotional stress to see if their behavior under stress reveals that they are lying. There's not really any way around this other than "well, we'll just assume they're telling the truth and anyone they accuse is guilty" which is a far worse solution in my opinion.
2 replies →
We have a criminal justice system so that, when the standard of proof can be met, the state can punish and deter wrongdoers through fines, forcible incarceration and other limitations on freedom.
No-one is entitled to maintain a positive reputation just because they've yet to be convicted in a criminal court. One can be a creepy sex-pest without that behavior rising the level of criminality, and one should not be surprised if rumors of such behavior get around.
For those who feel they are being slandered, there is a law of defamation and a civil courts system for a reason. At least there, the burden of proof is only balance of probabilities.
You see the double standard you’re preaching?
When a woman is sexually assaulted, you tell them to use the justice system. You stick to this despite other folks telling you the chances of conviction are low. You don’t want people to make public accusations.
And yet you, in this thread, have no problem making accusations against Nike for wrongful termination. Why not use the legal system to pursue this? You answer that too - low chance of success apparently.
Within a few minutes you’ve done exactly what you’re asking OP not to do.
I agree with you about the accusations. He sounds creepy; but one blog-entry is not exactly hard evidence. An internet mob may assume its all true anyway.
> men who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women
Wouldn't "programming communities" be one of the worst places for a true predator? There are so few women compared to men here. I would think most predators would choose the modeling or acting industry; where this type of behavior is almost expected...
I would presume that many predators have followed that exact line of thinking, and there may be population pressure pushing them towards other fields. Any ecological model will show that a certain population of prey can support only so many predators, if you'll pardon the pun, so some must naturally migrate to fill other niches that, while not as abundant, are less crowded with competition. You'll probably find less sophisticated predators in these sparser environments, as they were outcompeted by "stronger" (read, more careful, charismatic, and effective) predators in the richer ecologies.
An interesting thought. Under this model, (and I realize that this is a post-facto realization, but what can we do?) we would expect to see significantly more reports of predator behavior in these less competitive niches than the objective number of predators would imply, because the predators in them are less skilled at hiding their predation than predators in the more prey-rich environments.
Abusers will use the platform they have
> Ask yourself if that's a possibility, and if you think that there is a zero probability of anyone maliciously weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.
As a straight, white man: False accusations of sexual assault are extremely rare, but they do happen. It's not a zero probability event.
I guess my response is, right now there's a nonzero chance of someone assaulting someone else, and then a nonzero chance they'll away with it. And there's a nonzero chance of someone making a false accusation and another nonzero chance of them getting away with it. We as a society have to weigh the likelihood of each of these four things occurring.
All experience (and you can look this up) is that sexual assault is perpetrated relatively frequently, and people frequently aren't held accountable in the criminal justice system, for a variety of reasons. OTOH the evidence is that false accusations are vanishingly rare in comparison.
So we should just...keep this in mind, is all, before saying that this kind of public statement is counterproductive. Maybe it protects someone from him, or maybe it protects someone from someone like him. Sure, I'd like him to be in jail, but maybe in the flawed system we live with today, the best we can hope for is he's kicked out of the Scala community. Maybe that would be productive?
It’s the modern day equivalent of being accused of witchcraft. You get a trial but good luck getting your reputation back. People are trained not to doubt this sort of thing end assume guilt, then when confronted they rattle off some supposed statistical fact that it’s virtually impossible for the accuser to be lying.
What are people supposed to do then. If your friend sees somebody at the store and says “that guy is an asshole, he used to beat me up in middle school” do you respond “wait I can’t develop any opinion of that person without a trial”?
5 replies →
Ok, my sister was raped by her boss, was found in her appartment three days later my father, who immediately called a lawyer (female, specialized in criminal law). She told my sister that since they were only two in the kitchen with no surveillance camera, she couldn't sue but only report (its called "main courante" in my country) and "hope" that another girl is raped before 2039 and report it. The policeman concurred, nothing to be done.
I still shout "rapist owned" each time i pass his business, as do my brother and my father, my sister privately shared her story with his daughter on facebook last year (his daughter is one year younger than my sister, the creep), basically destroying their relationship, and the cooking school my sister went to directly called all female student and ex-student to tell them to avoid his restaurant. I also scraped social networks (only public data, nothing illegal) for his activities two years ago but only found business contacts. Each of them still received a nice email though.
I will move back next month, so i will continue my shouting campaign harder after the pandemic end and hope his business can't survive covid. Since his restaurant will be between my place and the place i keep my boat, i'm pretty sure i can be successful.
-----------
Honestly i can't say i will ever stop stalking him even if he had to sell his business. I'm thinking of sending him accusing emails on temp email accounts (scripted of course, my sister got herself back in one piece after a year and a half, and i even think she is now way stronger than she used to, i won't waste that much time for him).
1 reply →
Except there's no such thing as witchcraft but sexual harassment is very real. Victims have every right to speak up.
Libel and slander laws are also real. If someone is actually making a false accusation, there's already legal ways to deal with it.
3 replies →
The redress for a false accusation that results in serious harm to your career is a slander lawsuit. Sounds like all the ducks are in a row, evidence wise, so just figure out how much damage she caused, and sue her for it.
I know it's not quite the same, and an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure- but there's this narrative that a person who is falsely accused is utterly powerless before the power of any angry woman willing to yell "perv", and that's just false.
My brother was suicidal at one time due to the accusations, and more importantly, the fact that everyone immediately believed them. When his wife got the idea to call the daycare and ask if they had video footage, he thought for sure he'd be saved. (His employer also had his company cell phone location data which further corroborated his alibi). He literally proved himself innocent to his HR department. But if you've ever been involved on the inside in one of these situations, once HR has initiated a termination, they end up introducing additional liability if they halt the termination (effectively admitting they were in the wrong).
He certainly COULD have sued for slander, but the cost of the lawsuit and retaining a lawyer, and for him, the emotional toll, was too high.
And I completely understand that there is a huge toll for accusers as well.
I think, depending on the venue, that the process can be very traumatic for accusers with real claims, and also accused who are targeted by false accusations. The colleague who accused him was a woman who his coworkers had warned him "not to cross" because she was "a total sociopath" according to his other team members. One of them even told him "you should have listened to me" after he was terminated.
It's interesting how poorly most coders understand the realities of human nature. People aren't devils, but they aren't angels either.
I just really resent the fact that any attempt at injecting nuance into these kinds of conversations brings out attacks from the un-nuanced, tribalists who reduce everything down to bumper sticker slogans and identity groups. It's disgusting and reminds me of the sectarian conflicts I've witnessed in other nations.
2 replies →
What's doubly ironic is that the bar for convicting an actual predator in a criminal court of law is incredibly high, but the bar for winning a libel case against a false accuser in a civil court is... A lot lower.
It's far easier to obtain justice when you are falsely accused, then when you have been assaulted - but HN threads on the subject are predominantly full of arguments about how awful the falsely accused have it.
Arguably the problem in your brother’s case is more his organization being willing to ignore evidence in favor of “optics”, and less the ability of women to make their experiences with predators public.
When accusations like this come out, organizations with a stake in the outcome should act with integrity to find the truth and respond to it. Witch hunts are never a good idea. But the fact that some men may be falsely accused doesn’t mean women shouldn’t speak up when they have experiences like this. Ironically, many (if not most) women who don’t speak up publicly end up being gaslighted and marginalized by the very same kinds of corporate entities who were willing to throw your brother under the bus for optics. By the same token, it’s often a last ditch attempt to get some help after all other avenues have failed.
>That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason.
If you come to my home and act in a way that my family and other guests find offensive, we're not going to invite you back. We're also not going to try to prosecute you.
There is a huge set of behaviors that are not criminal nor civil offenses, but still things that if experienced would likely lead people to want to avoid you, not hire you, not work with you etc.
The author did not claim that Mr. Pretty broke any laws. She doesn't call for any legal consequences. There's no basis for suggesting that the story needs to be judged by a legal system.
We have criminal and civil justice systems that have different levels of burden of proof, and correspondingly differ in the severity of their outcomes.
It makes sense to also have social justice systems that are lower burden of proof and have lesser consequences. Especially for crimes that are difficult to prosecute and have low visibility.
I can empathize with your brother's situation. That kind of thing is horrifying for anyone to imagine.
With that said, creeps like this continue to proliferate because the courts only do anything in very rare cases (Cosby or other serial abusers). It typically only hurts people who were abused, not helps - it can take years to go through court, and in this situation because it's across borders there's likely no court to file with.
People come forward in blog posts because it's often their only reasonable way to try to hold someone accountable and warn other potential victims.
It's a bit strange that you claim that the proper venue for this sort of thing is the justice system, but then relate a story where your brother for some reason did not avail himself of the justice system to right a wrong against him.
And that just rams the point home: often the justice system doesn't help, and actively hurts. If he'd brought suit against his former employer for terminating him, even if he won, he would have gained a reputation in his field for being litigious toward employers, and that would have greatly hurt his future employment prospects.
So maybe, just maybe, there are reasons the justice system isn't going to work so well in this situation either.
> Imagine a letter like this targeted at you one day, except unlike Mr. Pretty, you are innocent.
You already assume he is guilty ?
Being a manipulative jerk and creep is not a crime.
I think it's very brave of this woman to write such an article, and warn future victims about this person. So in that sense, such articles NEED to be written. Who knows how many young girls she saved from the same experience.
HR should have fired the female colleague upon discovering the allegations were proven false, not left it up to the courts and criminal justice system.
Yes, what happened to due diligence?
What happened to free speech? If you think this is slander, don't the same rules apply; mustn't we presume the innocence of Yifan until she's proven guilty?
2 replies →
Very tactful. You should respond with this story in real life when someone tells you they were sexually abused.
You know the reason people started leaning into social justice is because the cops and the courts weren't doing a very good job? That's why we are where we are. Also the fact that a lot of dudes just can't imagine a world where they just keep to themselves doesn't really help the problem. But again, this is where we find ourselves and it is going to keep continuing.
And frankly the idea that there are people that believe "smear campaigns" are as normal as every day sexual harassment is extremely laughable.
I'm sure what your brother faced is terrible but how exactly does this relate to the story?
Behavior like this should be punished within the framework of the civil and criminal court system. The court of public opinion has no rules as to the validity of evidence introduced, and relies on informal enforcement mechanisms as well, which are prone to abuse.
The court of public opinion still thinks that the riots in Kenosha were justified (the actual courts heard and saw real evidence that determined that Mr. Blake was indeed sexually assualting his ex and was indeed reaching for a knife when he was shot). The court of public opinion thought that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified because they thought Saddam helped OBL. The recent case of the teenage girl shot in Columbus featured the Court of Public Opinion weighing in that the girl should have been allowed to stab the other girl pinned against that car, and the cop should have "shot her in the leg", which any expert on use of force would immediately explain would not have worked. Why? Because the public as a whole is filled with smart individuals, but an an aggregate level are a bunch of moronic lemmings, like all large groups of people are.
1 reply →
It was an example of how this method can be abused comparing to the criminal justice system.
its a reminder that mob justice is really terrible when it is wrong. we dont have all the facts. we should absolutely take precautions from this guy causing further harm, but the rape accusation needs to go thru the legal process including allowing the accused to defend themselves.
2 replies →
I don't like this court-of-public-opinion stuff much either and the abuse potential is real. At the same time: what else are people going to do? There seems to be no other recourse.
Most people let bullies get away with it because even stepping in as a third party means standing up to a bully. It can be scary, but even if there's no real risk it's still a fucking pain in the ass. Who wants to get into a mud slinging competition with a predator? Or get a harassment lawsuit? If someone is willing to harass other people this way, they will certainly harass you this way.
Contact law enforcement.
23 replies →
The 2nd amendment still exists (for now). Protect yourself and eliminate a predator in 1 easy step. Please. For the children.
I don't blame the people who go public - I just wish that the rest of us would be a bit more hesitant to immediately signal boost them. (For example, I might avoid upvoting a story like this to the top of a tech news aggregation platform when the accused hasn't had time to respond.)
> I find the nature of these kinds of posts to be counterproductive. Therapeutic to the author? Likely. A way to mobilize support? Certainly. But the method can be abused.
I feel like you made your own point with the story about your brother. Everyone below is ready to boycott the company which you basically named already.
> who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women
In general I don't like it as well because it could lead to abuse as we just read - but that's also not always black or white. In some cases it could be real romance or attraction between two adults, even if one has a higher status than the other (that's of course not what happened in this story! I'm just saying it could be consensual, even if the "high status" person uses his status just to get sex. Movie stars and rock stars do the same thing.
Lots of comments obviously focus on the issue whether this is truth or slander. There is another angle to this:
A word of advice for new people in OSS. You do not need to go to conferences to be successful in the field. Many of the developers who actually write code do not attend conferences.
On the other hand, people who want to associate themselves with the work of others, narcissists, activists of all kinds, parasites and a lot more are to be found in the conference circuits. There are some legit people as well but you'll also find them online where the work happens.
Painfully true but kind of unfortunate as young professionals are often pushed into going to conferences as a way to get ahead in their career.
Jon Pretty responds https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085/ph...
I always try to remain approachable and supportive. Through this openness, I’ve nailed a lot of girls.
I have no clue on who this guy is nor do I have any sort of interest in Scala but this is terrible.
If this is even remotely true I hope he suffers enormous consequences including being persecuted.
How are people still getting away with this kind of abuse? How?
>How are people still getting away with this kind of abuse? How?
It's quite simple, really.
You know that phenomenon you see here on HN with big names like Steve Jobs or RMS, or Elon Musk? The phenomenon where people give them a pass for being disgusting, abusive assholes because "he's a genius/luminary/visionary" or because "his contributions to $thing are so great"?
It's the same phenomenon with people like Jon Pretty.
Being quite involved in the Scala community myself, I can tell you that the impact of his technical contributions is basically zero.
None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase).
He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow, presenting himself as some kind of grand architect pursuing grand ideas, while his effective impact was close to zero.
I think he was tolerated just because he's been around since basically the language was created, and thus was friend with many people, and could tell stories about the early days of Scala.
With him (hopefully) going away, this will have no impact at all on the development of Scala or related projects, apart from saving slots at upcoming Scala conferences.
So it's definitely not the same phenomenon as RMS or Elon.
2 replies →
Alternatively: people diluting the signal, where people bring up serious accusations of rape, and then others show up and compare it to people who are considered assholes by some.
1 reply →
Because people don't believe victims. They insist that somehow they gave consent, or that somehow the assaulter just couldn't have known. Or they blame the victim, saying that "they deserved it" or "they shouldn't have been in that situation in the first place."
I guarantee you that someone will post in this thread, if they haven't already, that she should know better than to get an airbnb with a man she doesn't know well. No, this isn't her fault. The dude should not have abused her.
It would be easier to judge if she said that she did not give consent.
You may be right, but you also have to agree that some people will pause before judging definite rape for described situation where girl accepts invitation to sleep in the same airbnb, without anybody else, with single guy, bringing bottle of wine, not mentioning she did not give consent, feeling bad afterwards. From that description it's really difficult to pass rape judgement - maybe it was, maybe not, what we know is that it was creepy at least for her.
11 replies →
It takes a critical mass of accusers to break past the inherent power differential and take down an influential figure without getting blacklisted. There are various reasons this often doesn’t happen. For one, it’s a coordination problem and second e.g. this post describes his clever choice in targeting immigrant women who don’t have much knowledge of western sexual norms and can be gaslit more easily.
This is also the community that brought us, for example, the Fantasyland Code of "Professionalism," a code of conduct that rivals the GPL in how unpleasant I have found it to read and piece together what is going on...
> How are people still getting away with this kind of abuse? How?
Read the comments in this thread six hours from now and you'll understand.
I think I know what you are trying to say and I agree but I’m also on the camp that Richard Stallman didn’t say anything necessarily wrong, just awkward.
On the one hand I want people to be able to to speak their minds but on the other hand this guy might be a sexual predator at best and a serial rapist at worst. and he is getting away with it!
1 reply →
bring in the stallmanites!
I for one am glad there is someone to stand up for him - it makes it very easy to tell who wants to cherrypick and debate semantics due to their own biases.
didn't even take an hour...
so many absolutely disgusting comments already.
Six hours? It'll be flagged out of existence by then, most likely.
On edit: it took mere minutes for the HN rape apologists to show up!
1 reply →
The top comment on this thread is a "what about the MEN?" exercise.
HN is incredibly pro-sexual harasser and anti-victim, along with the broader tech community, sadly.
The top comment discusses the fate of an accused in the court of public opinion, and the limitations of that court. The fact you conflate that with saying "what about the MEN?" is more an indictment of your world view than anything they actually wrote.
This may be a tone-deaf sidetrack but also perhaps an important piece of advice for some. There should be an impenetrable barrier between ones love life and ones professional life. While there are certainly people who have met their significant other in a professional setting, there are much better ways of doing that, especially nowadays. By striving to keep this separation water tight we can avoid both unwanted advances and false allegations.
The above is not comment on the allegations in the post, any more than if everyone followed the above basic principle we would not have to deal with disturbing stories such as this one. It is important that stories such as this one are told but perhaps with the names left out.
This is probably good advice but if people are spending more and more of their time at work and work starts becoming half of their life, with outings with coworkers, bosses being your friend and not just your boss, then where can you meet people exactly?
You can't honestly demand both that people be disconnected from their coworkers and that they make work be 90% of their life. One part has to give (preferably the latter part).
I've seen careers of members of both sexes ruined because people let the pheromones cloud their judgment.
The number one golden rule of professionalism: never f--- at the factory. Don't make advances. Don't even flirt.
That's simply unrealistic and unhelpful.
That the author met this person in a professional setting is beside the point. It would be just as serious if it happened at a hobby event.
Perhaps `professional` is too narrow then. I think the power differential is an enabling factor for behaviour like this. While there certainly are creeps in normal dating situations, they are often easier to avoid. This story is very much about how this power differential allows one person to abuse another like this.
Being aware of how this affects human relationships is neither unrealistic nor unhelpful. It is something to take seriously and talk about in groups where it could arise.
or maybe just don't rape people idk
To expound on this because apparently it needs to be done:
> if everyone followed the above basic principle we would not have to deal with disturbing stories such as this one
This guy would still be a predator and a rapist, and he would still be doing similar things to people. Wishing that people were robots and were able to completely separate themselves emotionally from people they meet in situations in which they share a common interest is an exercise in futility. It's simply not how people work.
This sidetrack is basically victim blaming with extra steps.
The "share an AirBnB to be able to afford the conference" part seems particularly damning to me. That seems entirely premeditated and predatory.
"seems" doesn't mean "is", we have law systems to deal with those kind of issues. Judges are for determining where the line between "shitty partner" vs "rapist" lies.
The author doesn't appear to want to make the claim that Mr. Pretty raped her. She suggests, strongly, that he's a shitty person. She wants other people to know this. Courts don't adjudicate such matters, unless they have further consequences.
5 replies →
I'm not a court, I'm a random person on the internet commenting here.
1 reply →
In particular, if true, the part where he first encouraged her to invite other people and then when she expressed interest in that, accused her of trying to bring a “chaperone” sounds very much like premeditation. The initial invitation was designed to make her think it wasn’t just the two of them, but then he shamed her into acquiescing to that exact situation.
To me it sounds generous and possibly completely harmless.
My experience with conferences is in a different field, but a senior participant proposing to share an AirBnB with a junior participant like a student would be extremely weird.
If you want to support the student, you either organize another student for them to share accomodations, or connect them to one of the travel grants for that conference.
It creates a power imbalance, or increases the power imbalance that already existed between the two.
If you have a boss/employee relationship, or a mentor/mentee relationship, or a professor/student relationship, you need to tread extra carefully around consent. One party in those relationships holds incredible power over the other, and can coerce the weaker party into things they may not be comfortable doing.
Likewise, enabling someone to attend a conference they would not otherwise be able to financially afford creates a possibility of coercion . It's not always coercive, but it needs to be handled delicately and appropriately. In the author's situation, if she refused, there was a chance she was thrown out onto the streets of Berlin at who knows what hour, with no money/luggage, and maybe no ability to speak the local language.
6 replies →
Do you think that accomplished, intelligent rapists like to drag helpless women down dark alleys by their hair after punching them out, or do you think they would prefer a situation where a naive response might be "That sounds generous and possibly completely harmless"? I am going to assume that you are an innocent, not a troll, and ask you that you think like a rapist. What situations would benefit a serial rapist, both in terms of creating a power disadvantage for the victim, a physical opportunity, and a plausible alternative explanation for the public? Bingo.
Let's turn it around. You are a respected figure in a community. You are aware, and have read on HN threads like this, how there are terrible women who smear men with baseless, yet career-ending allegations of sexual advances or worse. In what situation are you comfortable with that risk to your career? There is only one such situation: where you are the predator, and you have groomed a naive victim.
As a professional, you have no business sharing accommodation, of any kind, with a person of the opposite gender (or the same gender if that is your sexual preference). Frankly unless you are very good friends, not anyone at all.
The generous thing would be to fund a private AirBnB for her.
Jon Pretty's response: https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085/ph...
The girl had sex with a creepy manipulative dude and regrets it. I get it. She's obviously super naive. "Yup we can share an Airbnb, i'll bring the wine!". There's obvious sexual overtones there if you are in your 20's, no matter what any of you say. And having spoken at a conference does not put you in a position of power.
He's just a creep, they are pretty common, confident outgoing girls will turn down a creep every weekend. Does not warrant public shaming. I'd be pissed if some girl i texted "Wanna get it ;-8" on tinder, in a blizzard of hormones, three years back, decides to public and destroy my career. I'd be pissed and it wouldn't be fair. That said i'm glad she did, because he sounds like a complete tool. The perpetual conference go'er crowd is full of weirdos.
similar stories are emerging:
- https://killnicole.github.io/statement/ (edit i see she has added it to the article itself)
- https://twitter.com/brianclapper/status/1387115214064193537?...
- https://twitter.com/adelbertchang/status/1387090351626723329...
there seems to be some coordination here, as this came out pretty much at the same time. https://typelevel.org/blog/2021/04/27/community-safety.html
Yifan also linked to this piece on What You Can Do: https://hypatia.ca/2014/08/05/what-you-can-do/
When there's proof, only one story is enough.
What world are you living in? Sexual predators even when there has been proof (and sometimes they‘ve admitted) it often get away with to little to no punishment.
3 replies →
Sometimes character assassination is coordinated.
I personally only slightly increase the probability of something being true when multiple accusers come forward. I still want to see proof.
What if a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together and decided to ruin your life with accusations?
"What if a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together and decided to ruin your life with accusations?"
This just pretty much does not happen without reason, and I think it is safe to say that if it did, you are probably a terrible person.
29 replies →
If a bunch of people who once had close, perhaps even loving relationships with you all come forward and risk their own reputation to say you're bad enough to warrant criminal action, I'd say it's on you to prove them wrong.
Or maybe it's all a grand conspiracy, in which case let's follow the money and see that it leads... nowhere.
4 replies →
If a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together to assassinate your character, then between all of those separate relationship, there was only one common factor, you.
A coordinated release in my opinion reinforces the statement.
4 replies →
I'm seriously curious to know what kind of proof you would accept that would make you believe these accusations.
I hear your sort of response a lot, but it's mostly from people who won't change their mind no matter what (and will continue to move the goalposts as more evidence comes to light), or set the bar so high that it's basically impossible to provide the proof they want.
5 replies →
Seriously? How often does this happen? Unless you are a terrible person, I doubt anyone would try to ruin someone's life like this.
This lady seems to have her head screwed on. Her post doesn't seem to me like she's trying to cause a witch hunt and it seems like she's sharing her story in a logical and sensible manner.
I'll gladly read the post from another woman defending John Pretty, but I doubt that's going to be forthcoming.
7 replies →
I don't want to stir the pot, but as a comment below links, Pretty responded with a statement[0]. He doesn't say this is what happened at all but that's a conclusion one can draw if you just read his statement. He doesn't insinuate it directly but he says they were consensual relationships and the two people are upset about how they ended.
[0] https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085/ph...
1 reply →
I for one, while having a mountain of ex-girlfriends/boyfriends, haven't left them vindicate enough to do something like coordinate a character assassination against me.
3 replies →
I mean, I've been a giant asshole to a couple ex-partners (read: I cheated), and they never got together to coordinate an attack "to ruin my life."
I could maybe, maybe believe a well-known political figure might be the target of that kind of coordinated attack. But basically a thousandth of a percent of the population has even heard of Jon Pretty. What benefit exists for the group of accusers? An extra spot for a presentation at a Scala conference?
> Sometimes character assassination is coordinated.
People make this claim like it's common sense but I so rarely see even anecdotes backing it up. (Let alone data)
I've seen a variant of it once. This is my anecdote for false coordinated character assassination. There's a community called Get Off My Internet, which I believe is mostly women, who will do coordinated character assassinations, usually of other women. I've run into them by employing people they target. What happens is a lot of them post in a message board about how their target is a pedophile and fraud and embezzler. Then a few others will email me, the employer, helpfully noting how they've respected me for years, want to protect me and just happened to google my new employee. It's bullshit and so, so gross.
But... there's also this other pattern where victims of real abusers will form a whisper network ahead of time. As I understand it, the whisper network is partly for safety and partly for sanity. The sanity is "am I overreacting to an honest mistake?" Seeing it as a pattern makes it more clear that it's intentional. And then for safety, there's a lot of perceived and probably real reputational downside to speaking up. And since it's hard to prove a lot of the accusations, having multiple reports makes the case more compelling, i.e. safer from a reputation standpoint.
So that's why a report like this might feel coordinated. Of course it is. It's just too hard to make this sort of report without talking to people first and then by talking to people you end up discovering a lot of other victims.
I was close to one of these whisper networks, that Lightspeed VC. I'd heard from one victim two years beforehand. She didn't want to say anything because all she really wanted was to avoid him and complete her next fundraise. She took that company public. A lot of this "women are making this stuff up" fear is based on the idea that they get something out of it. This founder was afraid of the opposite, that doing something would botch her raise.
I'm close to another emerging whisper network right now and it's the same thing. "Is this safe? Will people believe me? He's done it to other people and will probably doing it to more people right now. But if I speak up will I put my career and business in jeopardy?"
Sure, in some theoretical perfect world it would be great to have a legal system that could easily and fairly render verdicts. But since we don't have this, what other choice do victims have than to band together to at least warn other people away from dangerous people?
My anecdotal evidence is that the one time I’ve seen this happen in real life, a former friend of mine had a group of ex-girlfriends talk to each other after their relationships with him about how he beat the shit out of them, which he did, which is why he is a former friend. He admitted the abuse to me. They did not try to character assassinate him.
I’ll give these victims the benefit of the doubt.
Bummed I had to scroll this far into the thread to see some reason.
This is horrifying if it did happen but I don't know Yifan and I don't know Jon Pretty nor the trustworthiness of either.
It's disturbing to see HN readers jump to conclusions so quickly without proper evidence. If we continue to reduce our capacity for assessment of a situation to individual anecdotal accounts what kind of world will we live in 5 years from now?
3 replies →
> ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together and decided to ruin your life with accusations
If all of your exes and close associates hate you enough to coordinate a life ruining operation, then it's quite probable that you were abusive in some capacity.
> Sometimes character assassination is coordinated.
Yes, you are right. But look at the other side too. How else do a group of people with no proof retaliate against an abuser but through character assassination ?
1 reply →
If a bunch of my ex-girlfriends coordinated a character assassination campaign against me I would probably be forced to consider that maybe I’m an asshole.
3 replies →
What proof would satisfy you? How is a victim of rape supposed to be able to supply that proof? Should women wear body cams at all times?
6 replies →
why would they be motivated to do that?
1 reply →
Is this theoretical or do you have an example of a case where a woman publicly made detailed accusations which turned out to be false?
Edit: This is an honest question by the way. Thanks to those who did provide some examples.
5 replies →
I have no interest in Scala and never heard of Jon Pretty nor his accuser but the accusations are of a criminal nature (either rape or slander) and it feels like as a society we've long developed more reliable tools and systems to deal with such matters.
Right, a system where rape kits sit unprocessed for years
How familiar are you with how Germany processes rape kits? I assume that you assume this was in America.
1 reply →
> 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.
That sounds like a community failure, not just One Bad Guy.
What can ScalaCenter do in this she said he said situation?
If Yifan has any issue with Jon, she shall resolve the issue in court.
Moreover, it appears that his behaviours were sort of an open secret - apparently this went on for years.
For those claiming this should be handled in courts: 1) you know it won’t be… especially internationally at the expense of the accuser that has to go through an extradition process. 2) it is still valuable to warn others that a predator is on the loose. 3) it’s already been publicly corroborated by someone else who had a similar experience and you can expect others to follow.
Yes, of course she should have contacted law enforcement, but she was in a foreign country, intimated and young. And law enforcement still fails women:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/how-po...
In an ideal world, the criminal justice system works. In the real world, it's a patchwork system that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2019/09/17...
So this is why we see women continue to post these stories. Her story is backed up by other women.
I believe her.
Meta: I don't know how to make the justice system work better in a case like this. The presumption of innocence is critical and I don't want a system easily abused by false accusers, but it's also clear that predators can take advantage of the presumption of innocence. Even if she had gone to police at the time, ultimately she would have to convince them it wasn't consensual.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/how-cops-respond-to...
Edit 2: found this paper from 2012 written by a police organization that talks about the complexities of dealing with sexual assault in the criminal justice system:
https://www.policeforum.org/assets/docs/Critical_Issues_Seri...
A quote from the conclusion: Rape is the most underreported of crime, because rape victims find it so difficult under the best of circumstances to report it to the police. But it’s made worse when victims say they were interrogated by the police as though they were criminals. Or they are disbelieved and threatened with lie detector tests, or essentially are blamed for the conduct of perpetrators.
Reading the paper, false accusations are barely discussed. The paper spends a lot more time talking about police not believing victims ("unfounding").
She should have agency to have her complaint heard, not an obligation to deal with police. Aside, she has claimed that he took advantage of her and that he harassed her - not that he assaulted her.
In the United States, sexual assault includes coercion:
Sexual assault covers a wide range of unwanted behaviors—up to but not including penetration—that are attempted or completed against a victim's will or when a victim cannot consent because of age, disability, or the influence of alcohol or drugs. Sexual assault may involve actual or threatened physical force, use of weapons, coercion, intimidation, or pressure and may include: ...
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/overview-rape-and-sexual...
Sexual coercion is unwanted sexual activity that happens when you are pressured, tricked, threatened, or forced in a nonphysical way. Coercion can make you think you owe sex to someone. It might be from someone who has power over you, like a teacher, landlord, or a boss. No person is ever required to have sex with someone else.
https://www.womenshealth.gov/relationships-and-safety/other-...
1 reply →
It was also, disgustingly, probably not legally rape in Germany at that time. (Or only recently so.)
It's not that I don't believe her. It's just such a slippery slope.
This is vigilantism -- the same as if you went out and shot a guy who stole your wallet.
We don't trust victims of crimes to dole out punishments. Justice is tempered by due process, checks and balances, proportional response, all that.
So I believe her, but I don't think the world is a better place when people use this approach to conflict resolution. I'd much rather see her go to court and get a conviction.
This is just revenge.
> This is vigilantism -- the same as if you went out and shot a guy who stole your wallet.
Nobody has shot John Pretty.
I don't understand how "justice" says that Yifan has to lie or pretend that she hasn't gone through a traumatic experience. Writing a blog post is not equivalent to shooting someone. Someone truthfully and honestly describing their own life experience is not violence.
And if nothing else, surely she has the right to warn other women and let them make their own decisions about how to calibrate their risk around John.
> I don't think the world is a better place when people use this approach to conflict resolution.
I'm not always thrilled with public shaming, but to argue that people shouldn't be able to speak about their experiences, or that people shouldn't be able to choose who they associate with, or that people shouldn't be able to warn each other about abusers -- that is also a very slippery slope. Especially in a world where the vast majority of rape cases are never reported or prosecuted.
It's just such an extreme position to say that people even just talking about abusers is "revenge". It's like arguing that because courts sometimes convict innocent people that we should abolish all laws. There is a middle ground between attacking someone for a poorly phrased 10-year-old tweet, and arguing that people shouldn't be talking about personal experiences they've had with sexual harassment/rape.
If you think ostracizing someone and removing him from positions of influence is equivalent to shooting him, I don’t know what to say to you.
> Justice is tempered by due process, checks and balances, proportional response, all that.
That's the ideal, but in the real world justice is pretty lacking.
What other action would you suggest she take, right now? What authorities should she go to? Does she need to get on a plane back to Germany and file a police report three years after the fact? Another commenter noted that this specific thing might not even have been illegal in Germany when it happened (but is now).
Even if there is no legal remedy, is this the sort of thing that we want to continue to happen in our technical communities? If not (and I seriously hope not), then what do we do to neutralize these sorts of people?
So what's the alternative? She just shuts up, gets no closure, and we allow a serial manipulator and probably rapist to keep trolling the Scala community for new, vulnerable victims?
It seems that this may be the only consequence of raping someone in many cases.
There has been a common theme in this thread that the justice system should just sort it all out. Leaving aside all the issues of jurisdiction and citizenship that make a prosecution vanishingly unlikely here, the criminal justice system is just not cut out for dealing with cases of rape.
To prove it beyond reasonable doubt would require a level of evidence that is simply not present here. And in the UK, a suspect is only charged with a crime in 1.4% of reported cases[0]. This is why its so sickening when people gloat that some defendant in a sexual abuse case was found not guilty; it really doesn't mean they didn't commit the crime.
But even though the criminal justice system is not cut out for this kind of thing, that doesn't mean we have no other recourse. The reason the standard for evidence is so high is because the system would otherwise be vulnerable to abuse, and the consequences of wrongful conviction (loss of liberty or even execution) are so grave. Whether or not you agree that this very high standard is justified (I don't), it is clear that the consequences of publicly calling out this behaviour are less serious. Social ostracisation within a very specific community isn't such a big deal, but the direct benefits (protecting women through awareness) may be almost as good.
Whether or not you agree with the above, it's definitely an issue we need to think about. All it takes is someone close to you going through this to realise that the pre-MeToo system is inadequate. This new one isn't ideal, but it's a million times better. If you can think of a way to make things better then I want to hear it.
[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48095118
> in the Scala community
The allegations are serious. If the author believes she was drunk and did not consent to unprotected sex and taken advantage of that should be reported to the police and the courts due to the seriousness, it’s rape.
The title is damaging “in the Scala community” it tarnishes a programming language and individuals who use the language due to the act of one person. The language is dieing with dramas among 1-2 specific people out of thousands.
No one in the right mind would condone the allegations or the perpetrator and sounds like at least one incident a matter for the police.
The allegations are against an individual and the ScalaCenter handling, not the community. The blog post lists individual people in the community who supported the author. I do wish the title wasn’t as click bait or more specific to the perpetrators as it is damaging, killing a really interesting industry and technology.
I hope the author finds the peace and justice they deserve from sharing this. The public naming and shaming will have serious repercussions for the accused.
I don't know who he is, who she is and I don't care about the scala 'community' too much, especially the types that give talks at conferences.
The writing is like a story that is missing pages. Surely the law needs to be involved here?
I'd like to give a Scala community "insider perspective" on Jon Pretty.
Something always felt off about him.
Being quite involved in the Scala community myself, I can tell you that the impact of his technical contributions is basically zero. None of the projects he developed along the years has had any momentum (save for one, called "magnolia", which has a modest userbase).
He was giving more talks than anyone else in the community, solely based on vague ideas he couldn't even make happen. He was always bluffing somehow, presenting himself as some kind of grand architect pursuing grand ideas, while his effective impact was close to zero. He wanted to be perceived as someone influential, but simply didn't have the technical level for it, nor put the effort in.
I think he was tolerated just because he's been around since basically the language was created, and thus was friend with many people, and could tell stories about the early days of Scala.
With him (hopefully) going away, this will have no impact at all on the development of Scala or related projects, apart from saving slots at upcoming Scala conferences.
Parallels with Jacob Appelbaum
It is terrible abuse and disgusting. Keep no silence, sue the predator and send him to where he deserve to be.
This is just downright disgusting, does somebody know if there have been consequences? I usually go to general or Go conferences and wonder if there is similiar stuff happening, but i have a good feeling since at least the go conferences alway emphasize inclusion. Lets hope this is true.
Everyone is migrating Scala projects as we speak.
This has very little to do with Scala and everything to do with the darkside of the conference scene. Getting involved with conferences at the level she did introduces travel - drugs - drinking - partying with somewhat like minded young people. The culture at the top can be about money, stars and groupies but it revolves around power. Those in charge decide who speak. Those who speak can get opportunity and money. Money buys speaker slots.
Conferences are an anti pattern to programming.
I have been going to conferences regularly for the past 9 years (eycept covid of course) and find them to be rather tame actually. Drinking is widely spread, but most other stuff i have not noticed. I also gave talks - maybe the community is different here in europe.
I must be going to the wrong conferences!
I straddle a handful of domains in my professional life. Each of these domains has these stories come up from time to time. Further each domain talks about whisper networks where people alert newcomers who the bad actors are. I have come to view it as more likely that every community has these problems than to view it as a localized concern.
Jon Pretty responded on twitter with the following:
https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085
> I've been aware for some time that a short relationship I had with another Scala developer in 2018, which is the subject of a blog post published today, was being discussed increasingly widely within the Scala community. A second post relating to an earlier, two-year relationship has also been published today.
> While I have no desire to discuss my private life in public, both posts contain several falsehoods, and I strongly reject their characterizations of me.
> I have always believed in unbiased kindness towards others, and given the relatively few women using Scala, plus my role as a prominent figure within the Scala community, I have gone out of my way to be as welcoming as possible to newcomers. This kindness extends to everyone in the community. And at the conferences I frequently attend or organize, I always try to make myself approachable and supportive.
> Through this openness, and over the last few years, during which time the Scala community has been the main focus of most of my activities, I have formed many friendships which have developed both at conferences and online. In the last decade, a tiny number of these proceeded, over a period of weeks or months, to become romantic relationships. They did so gradually, and with the full consent and cooperation of all parties.
> I have no doubt that both women who have published posts today were hurt when our relationships ended. So was I. But the nature of relationships is that many of them do end, and that does not always happen amicably. However, I stand by how I behaved during both relationships, and after they ended. The suggestions that I acted improperly are false or, at best, misinterpretations of my intent. I am happy to be independently scrutinised on any of the points raised.
> The nature of the claims that have been made is serious, and I do not discount that. But they are one-sided, retrospective revisions of the history of those relationships, which have evolved over the last three years.
> Nevertheless, given the open letter against me, I feel that regardless of the baselessness of these claims, it would not be appropriate for me to continue to participate at Scala conferences, so I shall no longer do so.
> I do not intend to discuss this matter further in public.
> - Jon Pretty
(OCR'd with tesseract)
You'd think this type of behaviour wouldn't happen anymore, given the whole MeToo movement and people constantly complaining about getting cancelled.
That's what makes me wonder if this kind of abuser can't help but do these things. But on the other hand, maybe anyone would, if conditions were right.
These public callouts which occupy the area between keeping silent and taking legal action are like antibodies marking a potentially dangerous cell.
Maybe it didn't happen then?
What does this have to do with the scala community? We all knew and covered for Jon Pretty because he is the Harvey Weinstein of scala?
> I maintained friendship with him for a few months after May, because I was convinced that it was all consensual and I didn’t want to “make a big scene” like he accused me of.
So for months, the victim herself was convinced it was consensual, but I, the reader, in the space of a few paragraphs, am supposed be convinced that it wasn't?
If I imagine this sentence prefixed with "Your Honor", I can see it not going very well for the plaintiff.
> As an inexperienced young woman from a patriarchal culture, I was running away from the stereotype of being thought of as someone “traditional”. I should, like he implied, and wanted to be “cool about everything that happened”.
“Just be cool” is such an abusive and manipulative behavior I’m flummoxed at how it’s lasted this long as socially acceptable.
Eveybody's talking about the "woke culture", "cancel culture" and all that and how it is bad for the society. The "cool culture" and associated social pressure is probably the single worst "culture" that happened in the last forty years, killed at least thousands and pushed even more to accept unacceptable things.
@dang I’m sad that this was flagged. It would be nice if you or some other mod could explain why this decision was taken.
Mods don't flag submissions; users do. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#flag.
I turned off the flags on the post when I first saw it (before it made the front page) but it has gone through a couple of different phases since then.
Thanks for the quick response.
It's time these women came forward and reported the person to the police. As with #metoo, justice does indeed gets handed out, it just takes time. The only thing I'm sad about is the considerable amount of pain and suffering these women have to endure. Hugs all.
Related:
Open letter of support for community members targeted by Jon Pretty
https://github.com/scala-open-letter/scala-open-letter.githu...
I don't know anything about it, but this starts to look a bit like public lynching.
Which part?
The part where people are saying they've become aware of several independent, substantiated accusations against Pretty?
The part where they state that sexual assault is unacceptable?
The part where they demand that Pretty stop this behavior, and that communities put stronger code of conducts in place to specifically call out preying on/sexually assaulting members of that community as unacceptable?
Refusing to associate with Pretty, who they believe is an sexual abuser?
Which part of that is 'a bit like a public lynching'? I want you to be specific, because waving your hand loosely at a document and being like, "Well I dunno, but this seems like an execution designed to drive fear into a community" is not only wildly inappropriate but also rhetorically hollow.
6 replies →
no, a lynching is a murder by a racist mob
this is a community realizing that John Pretty is a predator and deciding that they don't want a predator in a position of power
frankly, it's weird as hell for you to be confusing those two things
11 replies →
No, I don't think open letters are anything like public lynching.
1 reply →
It starts looking to me like a bit of explaining what happened repeatedly
@mirekrusin: "I don't know anything about it, but this starts to look a bit like public lynching."
Trial by Internet.
Make no mistake. This is a public lynching.
You have no evidence to be smearing someone's name and defaming them on HN in this way. Stop this behavior until there is legal grounds for doing so.
It's not defamation if it hasn't been judged so in a court of law.
I have lurked here for a long time, but felt compelled to create an account to respond to comments in this thread because of how disappointed I was. This community is part of the problem.
On a human level, how can you be so concerned that there's an outside chance that the accused is completely innocent, and at the same time, ignore the fact that in all likelihood, another human was exploited and raped?
Yes, there is a criminal justice system, and yes "innocent until proven guilty" is an important part of it, but it's clearly unable to handle cases such as these. If that's not obvious, you must not be paying close enough attention.
This. Many of the comments are deeply disheartening.
yes but what happens now is "guilty with no chance of being proven innocent", which is much worse. This will have a massive impact on the accused persons life. Keep in mind, it might not be true and it's only one side of the story.
we shouldn't be cancelling people on one sided stories when people reflect back on life and wish they made different choices.
Is the open source community harder to escape from, if you are a victim? If it's just one company, maybe you can switch. If it's open source, you probably need to switch jobs and discard a lot of your expertise.
Looks like he made a response.
https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085?s=...
I find these hit peaces extremely problematic.
The public doesn't have the tools to properly investigate the accusations.
It is impossible for anyone but the parties involved (and maybe not even them) to know what really happened.
This woman could have gone to the police. She could have gone to one of the many support organisations for rape victims here in Berlin or in the US. She could have gone to the police even years later, which would have opened the possiblity of an official investigation. Instead she chooses to publicly write about it, without first even trying to take the legal route.
First world problems. There is no such thing as "harrasment". Someone f... with someone. It was not blackmail or physical coercion, so it's just your free will, period.
I remember the first clue that Reddit was going downhill FAST was when I needed to "sort by controversial" on nearly every thread within every single mainstream sub because the hivemind had become both so ridiculously uniform and because the algorithms had become so blatantly biased against anyone with a differing point of view, that even if many others agreed, it would be almost impossible to see these comments organically using the defaults.
We are now at that point on HN.
This abuse is a huge issue in every single community and organization. When we aren't actively rooting it out, we are allowing it to flourish.
I don’t give two damns about Scala and its community, and I neither believe nor disbelieve the linked post, but boy oh boy does it remind me of the academia in some (many?) countries, where educational/academic advancement per vaginam has been practically an unwritten norm for decades, to the joy of many a creepy professor!
Definitely someone I would consider a creep and I would advise introvert women to stay away from. Because his manners seem to be quite predatory, and he tried to keep in touch with her while she asked him to back off.
But I can't really consider him a rapist, I read her statement, I read his.
She repeatedly shows she was unsure about her feeling, she doubted herself, she even remained friends for several months. Having sex with a drunk stranger is pretty lame, but all of these things make me believe she did not explicitly refused, she probably went along, internally horrified but externally somewhat willing.
I don't know what I would do if many years after, someone called me out publicly by claiming they did not consent, I would certainly feel sorry I hurt someone, but I would not consider myself a rapist and would treat myself like one.
was there a quarter without drama in Scala community? :o
Does this type of content really fit on this platform?
Yes. It's important that as a society we come to terms with the fact that historically, and now, a lot of people use whatever little power and fame they have to abuse others. We can't sit by and let this happen.
Yes, hackers care about their communities.
> Yes, hackers care about their communities.
The number of creep defenders in this thread suggests otherwise. See also: any discussion about codes of conduct.
1 reply →
Hackers care about 99% of what everyone else also cares about (you know them operating in the realm of humans.) What a ridiculous point.
I hope it does
I hope it fits in a courtroom first and foremost.
2 replies →
I actually don’t want to see stuff like this on Hacker News. But I don’t make the rules.
yes
things like this always make me shake my head and his "statement" on twitter doesn't do anything to help his case, twitter mob be damned. so generic (imo).
he was in a high position of power and used that to set up situations that were dubious at best. if he even did like 25% of what was claimed he deserves whatever is coming. it's like the boss having questionable relationships w/ his employees then turning around and hiding behind the "it was consensual so that's that!" without understanding the fucking power dynamics.
> "There was another time that he insisted on having intercourse regardless of me saying I didn’t want to"
This is rape is it not? Whoever this guy is, in my opinion this case should get in front of the judges. I can't imagine what the author of the story have gone through.
Rape is doing it, not insisting, I think.
> "I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I remember panicking and crying."
After reading above and then seeing the part about "insisting" I feel there was more behind this statement. The author's circumstances was also very easy to be taken advantage of. I'm not woman but my guess is there probably is shock involved in situations like this. People are not acting in reasonable ways when in shock..
Sex was had while she did not consent, she mentions in the fifth paragraph.
45 replies →
Insisting could mean doing it in this context. English is weird.
Not to discount her story or what happened to her, but I’d be interested to hear his side of the story.
I know nothing about this other than this one article, but I do know someone who committed suicide after a false rape accusation that stuck even after the accuser admitted to making it all up.
https://twitter.com/propensive/status/1387168037908910085?s=...
I’m not sure why you’re getting downvoted. Why shouldn’t we hear what he has to say?
That being said, he’s already said he’s not going to be saying much on the matter.
I'm just going to stay away from Scala altogether now.
This case in one of thousands
This case is one of thousands
What this story has to do with the whole "scala community"?
Seems like she is naive and got seduced by someone, nothing crazy
Why always portraying womens as weak people, c'mon
Women sleeps with infuential person and smears them after they are well positioned.
I think what's possibly needed is a return to a more traditional relationship and dating culture.
In the past, if a man had a dalliance with with a woman and she got pregnant, he was expected to marry her.
Now we expect women to have to be responsible for their own decisions the way men are, but women are generally more emotionally vulnerable than men, due to their more compassionate and less aggressive personalities, and are more easily manipulated as a result.
Therefore it may be up to men to not abuse that.
This was the assumption in place in the past, which is why young women often had chaperones present during close interactions with men, and why the 'marriage if pregnancy' responsibility was placed on men.
We've tried the 'rawr girl power, women can do everything men can do' culture, and the result is scores of women being used and taken advantage of because they were not capable, emotionally/temperamentally, to be their own advocate in sex and dating interactions.
Women are not more compassionate than men, that's false. Women have an instinct to take care of children (as do men), but this does not extend to society at large.
Women score higher on agreeableness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreeableness
That's a deeply misogynistic take. What do you base this on?
How is it misogynistic?
I base it on the prevalence of stories like this, where a woman ostensibly consents to sexual advances and later regrets it and feels she had be abused.
The issue is not consent. The issue is vulnerability. Women are generally more vulnerable to advances from men and more likely to consent to an interaction when it's not in their best interest, than men would be, due to well documented physiological and psychological differences between the sexes.
18 replies →
It's so hard to talk about something like this objectively because momentum of the mob towards the popular discourse makes it almost impossible to detach.
The woman does not say she was raped or anything happened to her without her consent (unless I missed that in which case I apologize and retract this comment, but I couldn't find it).
The person currently being cancelled was a "community leader" (apparently) but was not her boss, teacher, or in official power over her. It sounds like he is a creep who manipulates women to be with him. What specifically did he do differently from any other guy who tries to "woo" a woman?
These women consented to be with him at the time for the perceived benefits of being close to the community leader and what comes with it. They are adult women who made decisions. Now they want to retrospectively apply alternative morals to their actions at the time because they wish they didn't do that.
You did this, it didn't happen to you.
> I don’t remember how much I drank. I don’t remember him drinking. But I remember feeling uncomfortable when he made advances on me. I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I remember panicking and crying.
I don't want to victim blame here because this guy sounds like a grade A creep and predator. But does a person not have some responsibility here to not get so intoxicated when alone with a member of the opposite sex in a private space? Because sometimes the person is consenting at the time and then regrets it later - and then proceeds to ruin the other person's life by accusing them of taking advantage of an intoxicated individual. I just find this whole area very slippery about when consent means consent and when it doesn't - especially the way sex, alcohol, and drugs are so intertwined in our society. I rightly or wrongly think you have to have some responsibility for putting yourself in such a vulnerable place where you are not in the right frame of mind to resist advances or make sensible decisions. Am I wrong about that?
I don't know if she gave consent, and again, I'm inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, based on her story, age, etc. I just want to discuss this whole business of consent while intoxicated on which I do not have a clear opinion.
Yes, you are victim blaming. Men aren’t wild bears, they’re human beings who should be held accountable for their actions. How drunk someone is around another human being has nothing to do with the perpetrator’s culpability.
I don't think that's what the parent meant.
If someone is intoxicated, I agree that it seems weird to disregard their consent when drugs+alcohols are the social lubricant of society (and very interwined with sex).
Also, of course you are responsible for your actions even when under the influence (drive and kill someone? no excuse because you were intoxicated - it's your fault). It's crazy to me that people call that "victim blaming". Although I understand how someone can take advantage of others, I don't think the distinction is intoxicated = taken advantage of.
7 replies →
> Yes, you are victim blaming. Men aren’t wild bears.
They're also not harmless. And I chose the word person for a reason - this could happen between a straight man and a gay man, or a woman could take advantage of a drunk man (although he's not likely to regret it, unless maybe he's married or something - or she gets pregnant)
The thing is I think you have some responsibility for your own decisions, drunk or not.
I don't think it's right to take advantage of someone who's drunk - but it's tough to prove that after the fact and many a young man has had their lives ruined by a woman who they thought consented and then later accused them of rape.
On the other hand I can really empathize with the woman's POV here, and think that it's terrible that there are men out there who take advantage of them when they're under the influence - and I'm sure that's more common.
This just doesn't seem cut and dried.
Victim blaming or not, I think most parents wisely caution their children about alcohol, intoxication, and making good decisions about their own personal safety, when they reach the appropriate age. What parent doesn’t have that conversation with their teenage kid?
2 replies →
Without being too flippant, I'd like to point out that we do actually hold wild bears accountable for their actions. There was a news report last week about a bear shot somewhere in the US because it had attacked someone (it seemed to have been trying to guard a particularly valuable food stash).
2 replies →
Some men decide to behave like wild bears, it seems. So while it indeed doesn't change anything about the responsibility, it is still a good idea to take steps that could prevent becoming a victim in the first place.
Speak up HN, don't let voices like this dominate and represent you. Of course what the OP said was not victim blaming. How ridiculous! Several times the commenter expressed doubt and kept asking if he/she is wrong and how would like to be corrected if that is the case.
You come in here with the high moral ground and make such wild indignant proclamation that "men are not bears." Please take this to another community.
> How drunk someone is around another human being has nothing to do with the perpetrator’s culpability.
This is just stupid on its face. DUI exists for a reason and DUI tests are given not because police assumes the drivers, of course would, "take responsibility" and not drink, but because the police exercises common sense if an idiot driver is unable to walk a straight line.
>I don't want to victim blame here because this guy sounds like a grade A creep and predator. But does a person not have some responsibility here to not get so intoxicated when alone with a member of the opposite sex in a private space?
No. The idea that being around a member of the opposite sex (and does this apply to members of the same sex? e.g. men raping men, and women raping women?) in a private space while being intoxicated levies some kind of 'responsibility' to be on the lookout for rape is absolutely victim blaming. It's insisting that her non-sexual actions of literally just being around someone confers a responsibility of any kind pertaining to a sexual act on her.
> No. The idea that being around a member of the opposite sex (and does this apply to members of the same sex? e.g. men raping men, and women raping women?)
I specifically used the word person because I think this could happen between any two people of any sex. I'm certain it even happens to men, by women. Just men are much less likely to regret it the next day.
> levies some kind of 'responsibility' to be on the lookout for rape is absolutely victim blaming
If you gave consent because you were drunk, that's not really rape, it could be poor judgment. The perpetrator might reasonably think you're sober enough to make your own decisions. Especially if they are also inebriated.
Just calling it victim blaming is missing that this is a pretty gray area.
10 replies →
> I don't want to victim blame here ... but does the victim bear some responsibility?
The answer to your question is no. The victim bears no responsibility. The abuser took advantage of someone, who bears no fault for the result. There's no "well, both parties were in the wrong here". The abuser should not have abused the other party, no matter how vulnerable the other party made themselves.
You specifically said you didn't want to victim blame, then immediately blamed the victim.
And what if they were consenting - I'm not saying that's the case here, I don't know obviously, I'm asking in general, just like my comment is a musing about the vagaries of when is consent not consent.
8 replies →
Hello. A few answers...
>> But does a person not have some responsibility here to not get so intoxicated when alone with a member of the opposite sex in a private space?
No. You are shifting the blame to the victim here. You should not be assaulted/attacked/whatever whether you are sober, tipsy, drunk, unconscious.
It is... complicated, but if a sober person takes advantage of the apparent willingness of a very intoxicated person, they have done something wrong.
In general regardless of your state of mind, you should be deciding if somebody is actually capable of giving consent in their state of mind regardless of how they act.
A drop of alcohol does not remove all ability to give consent but there is a point where it is no longer possible and so you’re left with a situation where there isn’t right and wrong absolutely but a grey area of many degrees... which as a decent person you should always err on the side of caution.
Responsibility is the wrong word. There is a difference between good advice and victim blaming. Just because the victim was careless doesn't make them in any form responsible for the crime. Nevertheless, I would certainly advise my daughter against getting drunk in such a situation.
>> But does a person not have some responsibility here to not >> get so intoxicated when alone with a member of the opposite >> sex in a private space? > > Responsibility is the wrong word.
It's not a responsibility in ethical sense yet it is street smart behaviour.
A less amplified example: if you walk into a biker bar, insult that the regulars are assholes whose bikes you just kicked over outside, they have no moral justification to hurt you just as people are ethically bound to not sexually abuse intoxicated persons in our society. But there's some chance the guys in the biker bar won't just call the police and politely retain you until they arrive and, instead, you get beaten into some half-liquid state of matter.
The reason for that is because the regulars likely follow their own rules and not yours or the greater society's. Similarly, predator-type people don't follow the morals that we recognize. If all you can resort to is morals, you will lose with people who don't play by your rules. If someone doesn't see a moral problem in the sexual abuse of a passed out person it won't help to merely remind this person of just that: the abuser simply doesn't give a shit but plays a whole different game.
This is where the society could step in with its justice system and link the abusive behaviour to something the abuser does actually mind, like a harsh enough conviction to make the abusive behaviour less inviting. But society also has to be fair so as to not give harsh convictions to people who have not abused anyone despite being accused of doing that, and then the waters get muddy again. In many cases there's no objective verdict to be reached because no third party can ultimately tell what the heck happened, even if actual abuse did take place.
This leads to the bizarre but common pattern where the potential victims have to become proactive in taking measures to not actually become victims, and in doing so limit their choices and decisions of what to do, where to go and with whom. The onus somehow gets transferred to the person who shouldn't have to use time and energy to prevent these things from happening. The potential victims are the only party in the game who follow the society's rules and they have that losing stance because of that.
They shouldn't have to have -- and they don't have -- a moral responsibility to prepare for the worst: the moral responsibility single-handedly falls on the perpetrator -- the one who doesn't ever consider morals! So, the result is that the potential victims are imposed by purely practical concerns to limit their choices in order to secure themselves against wrongdoings, just in case. It's not right but it's also smart -- that's the big dilemma.
The front door of one's home always seemed a good analogy to me.
Is it good practice to lock your front door, on the assumption that some people are malicious and will take advantage and rob you if you don't? With particular caution suggested in some areas? Yes.
Is someone who is robbed when they did not lock their front door responsible for the crime in some sense? No, not really. A normal human failing to carry out a precaution that shouldn't be necessary in the first place, perhaps. I've forgotten to lock my front door once in a while, haven't you?
The analogy is shaky, because 'crime' notwithstanding, good luck with getting anything from your insurance if:
1. there was no breaking in;
2. you didn't take minimum precautions to protect your door (a 3-point lock is often required) and other openings.
> I don't want to victim blame here
And yet
A person that is in an incapacitated state is not able to consent, in that situation the burden is entirely on the other person. Just because someone is not able to say no doesn't meant they did consent.
I'm talking about close to blackout drunk, heavily incapacitated, not slightly tipsy.
So question then, what if the other person is equally incapacitated?
What if the other person believes the incapacitated person is not so far gone as to be unable to consent?
Is consent only consent if you give a breathalyzer test in front of a witness?
Would it be ok for the guy to get her drunk, then go to an ATM and talk her into emptying out a bank account?
Is it ok for bars to take advantage of drunk people so they spend frivolously (or alcoholics who throw away their paycheck every week?)
Strawman argument.
Since the pattern is so similar, I now recognize this as a form of harmful #metoo activism.
- Attack entire community, not individuals
- Court of Public Social Justice
- The charges amount to unwanted advances being made during a social interaction where that would be acceptable -- not sexual harassment, nor illegal behavior.
Compare https://medium.com/@kristianlum/statistics-we-have-a-problem...
Make the problem about an entire industry: Holywood, Scala, MIT, Statistics. Garantuee public shaming and punishment for your target, by calling out criticism or disbelief as "victim shaming", people calling for you to lose your job, because they got angry reading a Medium post, not because you've been proven guilty by someone without a bias. Ending up in an apartment with someone in another country, drinking wine, but not remembering how much you drank, but you do remember that he did not drink anything (to play up him taking advantage over you), then crying and feeling upset, because someone makes an advance towards you, instead of feeling flattered and politely declining. Going skinny dipping at night in the sea with a bunch of clumsy rowdy tipsy researchers, then blaming an advance someone makes, on conference culture.
Go to the police, get your day in court, and let justice prevail. Not going to join a mob, because someone made you cry once. Even giving the experience sympathy would needlessly rile me up. I'd like to think about other negative things when interacting with Scala and its community, preferably technical.
Agreed 100%. One of the few levelheaded responses on this thread.
On top of everything you said, which I agree with, I’d also like to see less of these kinds of posts on Hacker News...
All for a "he hugged me", not even anything sexual
>I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated.
At least read the article before being dismissive.
Imagine being 20, getting raped, and having randoms on the internet completely invalidate how traumatic it was because they think you're just meming. Like damn and we wonder why women struggle in tech.
4 replies →
>advance towards you, instead of feeling flattered and politely declining
Do you know what "advance" means? It's old-timey English for aggression as in
"The enemy advanced on the capital".
No that's not how it's used to today but it still typically has very negative connotations. So I think it's rich irony that due to your own (probable) inarticulateness and (probable) bias you think something that could experienced as violence should be flattering.
> Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.
Sex has always had aggressive and domination elements. Some women even request you slap them during.
> because someone makes an advance towards you, instead of feeling flattered and politely declining
Convenient to leave out the rape in the next sentence, and the other rape in the next paragraph:
> I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I remember panicking and crying.
> There was another time that he insisted on having intercourse regardless of me saying I didn’t want to.
Sorry you don't like to think about that.
She talks like a doll lacking any kind of autonomy. It is not "we had sex", but "he had sex with me".
I don't know any woman who does not want to have unprotected sex, but just let it happen like that. Then come back for seconds, even though she is not in the mood.
Are there naive young women who lack self-authority and self-esteem to say no, to an older man who needs those women to get their fix and wants to make up for their unpopular youth? Yes. And that awkward dance of nature takes two to tango. Panicking and crying during or after sex does not a "rape" make (but the definition depends on jurisdiction anyway, and we haven't even let a court in the right jurisdiction look if it qualifies, so I'd like to avoid that term).
Unless you want to claim openly that a named person is now a serial rapist. I'd like to think it takes more than a Medium post for you to do that.
11 replies →
This guy sounds like a practiced predator, he ought to be in jail.
Let's just do away with the justice system entirely since social media seems to fulfill its functions perfectly.
Right. Just like the justice system would, social media will sentence him to the extremely harsh punishment of... not being invited to conferences anymore.
This is actually a serious theory called anarcho-capitalism.
Yes. By Chomsky:
"Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error."
Except we're seeing its horrendous ideas flourishing.
Another person with a narcissistic personality disorder. I look forward to the day (I'll be long dead, unfortunately) when our society can recognize these people as evil and deal with them in a constructive way while protecting people from them.
Actions make people evil, not personality disorders.
I thought nothing in the post was particulary damning and all of it quite ambivalent.
You should come with a physical warning sign.
what does this have to do with Scala community? she was harassed by many people who use Scala?
Did they all wear Nike?
What mobile phones were they using, iphone, huawei?
Clickbait, trying to ruin a reputation?
To what effect is this article written is the central question.
Woman, use your head and learn from experience.
Unbelievable, the times we are living in. I wouldn't speak to this woman ever, who knows what she might write about it years later. This is insane to go public like this about your private life, and again, to what effect? You don't have to be above average intelligence to understand the whys of this drama.
Jesus...
Many Hacker News users belabor the "innocent until proved guilty" angle when it comes to sexual assault.
Could it be that users of a software focused site are overcorrecting for the threat of being labeled creeps?
Presumption of innocence isn't 'an angle', it's a human right.
Jesus christ
Innocent victim of mob justice, Jimmy Saville.
Innocent victim of mob justice, Jeff Epstein.
It's not looking pretty for Jon Pretty...
John Pretty is a troublesome character and as he reads through this comment section to find out how his reputation will be hurt by this... I hope it becomes a barrier for him to participate in the Scala Community with influence over others and the Programming Communities all around. Punish John Pretty IMO
> I felt bad that I made him feel untrusted and stopped asking others to join.
Mistake #1
> Remembering that he had suggested I get milk and wine in our previous conversation, I also bought them. I don’t remember how much I drank.
Mistake #2.
Obviously we're not excusing the behavior of the guy. However, when will we learn that we should not mix genders this way, and especially the many times people have been bitten with alcohol. It's bizarre really. People want to have their cake and eat it. They play with fire then cry when they get burnt.