Comment by akoboldfrying
6 hours ago
I read both statements, I'm just not as willing as you apparently are to take their claims at face value.
In a dispute between two parties, one side's claims about the other are not to be taken as gospel. This applies to both sides.
Whether or not or other people have made similar complaints about JP is actually one of the few independently verifiable claims that can be made in a case like this, so I would argue that speculating about this aspect is especially egregious.
This is not one person complaining about another’s behaviour - these are two people who are alleging the same thing about the same person. Either a) they are colluding or b) this is a pattern of behaviour by the accused person that needed to be addressed.
Whether the way it was addressed was appropriate or not I don’t know. The person may have been warned about it and what we are reading about may have been the end of a lengthy process. Maybe, as the accused person alleges, this was an enormous unexpected surprise and they had no warning of it.
You’re entitled to your opinion about what has taken place in this situation.
I agree with you that there being two complaints rather than one strengthens the accusers' case, and that there's either collusion, or not. (Collusion is something I don't discount as a possibility -- it happens all the time.)
In the no-collusion case, I think how much the accused's behaviour needs to be addressed depends on details that have been left vague in the accusers' posts. I certainly think that continuing to contact someone after they have asked you not to do so is a violation. Regarding what I take as Yifan's main claim:
> There was another time that he insisted on having intercourse regardless of me didn’t want to.
If she expressed her unwillingness, then this is straightforward rape and JP belongs behind bars. Explicit consent is rightly the gold standard, but in practice I think many people, men and women, prefer to proceed on (fallible) intuition. If she did not express consent because she felt she was under duress, the situation is murkier. Immediate physical threat? This would still be rape, but her later actions contradict this. Fearing loss of her future career? I don't buy that JP has that much power over her. Merely fearing loss of the "treats" JP provided her through his high status (Twitter highlighting, introducing her to others in the community, etc.)? I don't know what the law says, but in my opinion, that would be an implicit quid pro quo that she chose to accept, and not rape.
But what makes me suspect that it was none of those things was this:
> During those horrifying days, I felt that he was treating me as an object. For instance, he distanced me at conferences but wanted to be intimate in Airbnb.
Sexual harassment is not conditional on whether the accused smiles at you and and makes you feel valued the next day. I think this excerpt shows that she was likely initially romantically interested in JP, and had sex with him willingly under the belief that they would become an item, but later felt hurt when she realised that he was interested in her only for sex. If so, then JP manipulated her emotions callously, but his crime is ultimately no worse than the crime of a beautiful woman who dangles the possibility of sex before a hopeful male "friend" in order to secure his attention, without any intention of having sex with him. In the latter case, we might feel sympathy for the man, but we do not expect a convention they are both attending, let alone the police, to take seriously his complaint of manipulation.
We might also think that the "friendzoned" man has to some degree brought this suffering on himself, by not being upfront about his intentions -- and that as an adult, he should have known better.