Comment by naurupatel
4 years ago
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?
When these things happen, it's often impossible to provide evidence. There is nothing could be proven in the court of law. So we have victims, and no justice in that case, so what are we supposed to tell the victim? Don't get raped? And if they are, and resort to the only form of vindication they have left (openly sharing it), we're supposed to tell them to shut up?
Sharing these things often feels like (and IS) the _only_ thing a victim can do to maintain even a shred of their personhood or agency. If we take that away, we are telling victims of horrific abuse to pick up the pieces of their lives alone, and quietly. That is not how one heals, and it will exacerbate a chilling system of victim shaming that leads to untold anguish.
> There is nothing could be proven in the court of law.
In a court of law it is certainly more straight forward and less risky than on social media: go to the police, make a statement and get a lawyer, then get those people who sent out tweets in support and also came out with similar stories or to coroborate go on record. In this specific case the damage she could (and still can) do to him and get real justice is pretty massive.
What we're certainly not supposed to tell the victim is "hey, you'll love this, I've gotten hundreds of HN commenters to argue about the veracity of your story". I don't see how signal-boosting these kind of accusations on a news aggregator is helpful to anyone in any way.