Comment by wulfstan
2 days ago
I'm afraid I don't accept that you can split this into "experiencing something traumatic" and "making the accusation that you have experienced something traumatic".
The claim that "almost the entire community immediately sided with them" is accepting the accused's account of what happened in favour of the accusers. At least one of the victims started to raise concerns in the community several years beforehand and their concerns were not taken seriously:
"I have reported all of my experience to the ScalaCenter in 2019. I was hoping to see concrete actions, such as building a reporting mechanism, to protect minorities in the community. Unfortunately, I am not aware of such actions taken."
I'd also be very, very deeply skeptical that two public claims were the only claims made. We should bear that in mind. If the accusations are true, the public ones are usually the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
I doubt the Scala open source community had an HR department or lawyers on hand to investigate and take action on behalf of the community as a whole.
And I'm not sure some random software engineers contributing to open source projects have the proper expertise to build a sexual harassment reporting mechanism and a mechanism for fairly enforcing consequences.
Do we need to make sure there all those kinds of structures are in place for every permutation of human interaction?
> I'm afraid I don't accept that you can split this
I don't see how else to interpret your original remark:
> To make these kinds of accusations as a woman tears your life apart in unimaginable ways
> At least one of the victims started to raise concerns in the community several years beforehand and their concerns were not taken seriously
That's fair I think, though I don't share the conviction that it's the responsibility of a convention to prosecute criminal allegations (and especially not if the allegations are "sub-criminal" -- any behaviour that is sufficiently damaging to warrant any kind of formal punishment deserves to be a crime).
> I'd also be very, very deeply skeptical that two public claims were the only claims made. We should bear that in mind.
OK, but this is pure speculation. I prefer not to bear such in mind.
> OK, but this is pure speculation. I prefer not to bear such in mind.
Quote from the second accuser:
Because of similarities in our stories as well as the stories Jon Pretty told us himself, we have reasons to believe that other people in the community have had experiences with him that are similar to ours.
I think either you aren’t reading the accusers’ statements closely enough or you are choosing to discount them - but if they suggest that this is more widespread than just the two of them, I think this moves beyond “pure speculation” and into “quite likely”.
I read both statements, I'm just not as willing as you apparently are to take their claims at face value.
In a dispute between two parties, one side's claims about the other are not to be taken as gospel. This applies to both sides.
Whether or not or other people have made similar complaints about JP is actually one of the few independently verifiable claims that can be made in a case like this, so I would argue that speculating about this aspect is especially egregious.
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