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?
I made sure my demands were reasonable and gave them options. If they didn't want to bathe that night, they had to pass a sniff test. If they didn't want a haircut, they could grow their hair as long as they wanted so long as they kept it clean.
For eating, I made healthy foods available that they liked. This worked really well. One son has two conditions that can land a child in in-house hospital treatment for aversion to eating and he never had issues like that.
For trying new foods, they had to try it, not finish it. I never made them do things like clean their plate. Instead, I planned ahead for how much I expected people to eat at the meal.
I always had a good reason for what I was asking and it very rarely came to "because I said so." On the rare occasions where it did hit that point, they went along with it because it was rare, so they were convinced I had a good reason even if I couldn't get them to understand it.
I also am super flexible with food. Lots of obesity is caused by forcing kids to eat in excess. I don’t make candy available for meals, but not do they have to eat. When they do it, it’s natural food.
I have one major rule - if I give an absolute command, it must be obeyed immediately without question. In exchange, I promise to do it very rarely and explain my reasons as the earliest possible convenience. This has helped in situations where it wasn’t practical for me to physically drag them - get out of the way of the car, come towards me NOW and away from that crumbling cliff. Stuff like that.
Most other things fall into place just by showing by example. Show interest in their homework, talk excitedly about science, etc, they do their best in school.
> 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?
As a parent of teenagers... omg, yes. LOL. I think it's as much because they're teenagers preparing to leave the nest as much as anything.
The question was aimed at me. I never experienced that.
That doesn't mean the teen years didn't have some bumps. The worst of that was cleared up by explaining to my children that they were being flooded with hormones and a side effect of high levels of testosterone is aggression and anger.
So if they were feeling very, very angry, it wasn't because they were being subjected to extreme injustice they had never before seen. It was because they were hormonal.
That conversation ended with the punchline "You're problem is called testosterone, not my bitch mother." which caused everyone to crack up.
After that I occasionally would say "You sound like an icky, hormone soaked teenager." And my son would say "I am an icky hormone soaked teenager" and he would try to tone down whatever made me say that and I would try to cut him some slack for being hormone soaked and not entirely in control of his big, fat mouth because of it.
My grandma had a campfire saying that "smoke follows beauty." I realized many years later as an adult that it was part of a subconscious family mythology, handed down for who knows how many generations. If you're pretty, it's your fault for unwanted attention (smoke).
It’s your saying, but it doesn’t read that way to me. It’s not your fault but it’s a consequence. Just like with a campfire, perhaps this gives people an ounce of solace with unwanted attention, i.e. you’re dealing with this because you’re lucky to be pretty. It’s still not right to have to deal with it, but it’s reality.
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?
At least here in California (and presumably much of the US) the threshold isn't merely intoxication. It's intoxication to the point that someone is incapable of consent. Not impaired judgment or above the legal driving limit, but drunk to the point that they are not even capable of giving a yes/no. If two people are drunk and have sex, evidently at least one of them was capable of consent because they had the capacity to initiate sex.
So it was just two consenting adults, and the part about wine was... Flavor text, essentially? Unless she was saying she was unconscious and I missed it.
I thought the implication there was essentially that she couldn't give consent, which is a rape accusation - that's very serious. But it doesn't sound like either of them would pass the bar for inability to give consent?
Maybe in the case of financial agreements or other contracts, but that's not how sexual consent works with respect to alcohol. Otherwise, what happens if two people are both drunk and they both have sex? They're both simultaneously victims of and perpetrators of rape?
The above commenter is insinuating that society applies a double standard here: that if an intoxicated man and woman have sex, the former is considered a perpetrator while the latter is considered a victim. That is incorrect, both are treated equally in the eyes of the law. This scenario doesn't happen because if two people had sex at least one was sober enough to decide to have sex. This situation where two people are intoxicated to the point where they are incapable of consenting have sex cannot occur.
> A policy that, in the evaluation of complaints in the disciplinary process, it shall not be a valid excuse that the accused believed that the complainant affirmatively consented to the sexual activity if the accused knew or reasonably should have known that the complainant was unable to consent to the sexual activity under any of the following circumstances:
> The complainant was incapacitated due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, or medication, so that the complainant could not understand the fact, nature, or extent of the sexual activity.
Pretty much, yes. Women are held to the same standard as children in situations like. Sharing a room with a male stranger? How could she possibly know something was wrong. Poor, sweet, innocent woman.
Consent is too often treated as this magical concept that makes everything right when it's present in some form. Many people seem to think of consent as a "yes" when often it's more a lack of "no". Someone not protesting or going along with something doesn't absolve the other party of responsibility. Heck, even explicit consent doesn't do that. Would you accept someone repeatedly offering another person in their company drugs when that person hasn't outright refused them but not really shown interest either?
When someone goes along with something but ends up feeling uncomfortable or even resentful about it, they can talk about it with the other party. And that party should acknowledge it. They may have meant no harm or even be surprised or feel hurt, but a decent person would consider the other's feelings and admit they may have had poor judgement. This Jon Pretty guy allegedly has a pattern of maneuvering women into vulnerable positions, inappropriately bragging about his "conquests" and from what multiple sources confirm shows a bunch of telltale signs of an emotional abuser and manipulator. It wasn't one instance of them being drunk, it was an extensive period of pushing boundaries, coercion and probably gaslighting.
You'll always hear questions along these lines. "Why did she stay around him if she was uncomfortable/mistreated/abused?" "Why did she wait so long to talk about it if it bothered her so much?" "Why didn't she collect proof?" "Why didn't she just say no?"
These questions interpret the situation as far too simple. Abusers are great at creating doubt. They do something wrong, they make their victims feel as equal accomplices. Good and fun times are alternated with bad ones. They don't outright break the law or force someone but will push boundaries and wear someone down repeatedly to get their way despite the discomfort of the other.
That's why it's so hard for a victim to come forward. It's exactly because everyone says "well you didn't set hard boundaries, did you?" It's because maybe no crime was committed according to the letter of the law so they don't feel like they really have a case to make. It's because the victim initially feels like they share as much responsibility or it's their own fault and they should have known better. Abusers are great at walking that line where they get what they want while still maintaining plausible deniability, making it impossible to fully dismiss the argument that the other person is responsible too. It lets them justify their actions to themselves and others, believing it was as much the agency of the other party as their own. Meanwhile they're constantly using a position of power and a victim's weaknesses to manufacture precisely the situation they want.
They call them predators for a reason. It's cause they seek out prey. They know what to look for in a potential target. Don't blame a victim for being possibly naive, inexperienced or easy to sway when those were exactly the preconditions to be taken advantage of. It doesn't justify someone doing just that.
> then the women need to be treated like children and protected.
Mate, no. This applies to men, women, nonbinary folks, non-human animals, etc. Literally any living thing. If you don't consent, anyone having sex with you is wrong. It's wrong if a man tries to have sex with a drunk, non-consenting person, and it's wrong if a women tries to have sex with a drunk, non-consenting person.
This is the _opposite_ of making a decision for someone. It's recognizing that they kind of _can't_ make a decision, so you simply do nothing.
non-consenting means not actively choosing the activity. Words or their absence are evidence from which someone might infer consent, but do not define it.
A story that paints him as responsible for everything including her feelings.
Blaming behaviors are a marker of Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.
I'm obviously not qualified to diagnose either party, but a lot of the content of her article blames him for things he's not responsible for and that are completely out of his control.
Furthermore, it seems the worst he's guilty of is being interested in having consensual sex with her. Whereas she's interested in destroying his livelihood and career.
> For example, when I confronted him in person about the episode in Berlin, he told me that I had lured him. His words left me scared, humiliated, and ashamed. I found myself self-doubting, distressed, and depressed.
Ya from an armchair this does seem like classic narcissistic abuse. Mentor public figure in a position of power. Blame and gaslight the victim when confronted. Then shame the victim when she comes forward with her story.
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.
And an abused boy could well become an abuser in the future. Sad but true
Are you talking sexual abuse? If so, then references please.
There are a lot of ways that abuse goes down the generations. For example girls who were abused are more likely to get together with abusive men as adults. But I've encountered zero evidence that victims of pedophiles are particularly likely to become pedophiles themselves when they grow up.
I have personal reasons to be interested in the topic, so I spent a lot of time at one point looking for evidence that sexually abused boys were likely to become sexual abusers as adults. I have concluded that such evidence both doesn't exist, and it isn't true. Had I known that when I was younger, I could have avoided a whole lot of guilt and self-hatred.
Yes, those self-reports are very highly questionable.
First of all, we all rework our childhood memories to better fit our adult personas. Depressed people talk about all of the terrible things that happened to them as kids which make them depressed now. Happy people, all of the happy things that happened that make them happy now. A gay man might talk about wearing dresses and playing with dolls that made him gay.
But attempts to corroborate current stories with past events (the gold standard being longitudinal studies) find that none of that is true. Happy and depressed people have the usual mix of happy and sad childhood events, they just remember them selectively. The gay man's twin brother says maybe he wore a dress once, and has made a mountain out of a molehill. And so on.
Pedophiles are even worse. Pedophiles have the problem that they fall in love with children, and have to gaslight themselves into believing that they do no harm by having sex with the child. Under this pressure, pedophiles make up memories out of whole cloth.
However in general, we have not found any correlation between what actually happened to you before puberty, and who you wind up sexually attracted to after. We can't predict whether you'll be straight. Whether you'll be gay. Or whether you'll be a pedophile. Which means that if you were the unfortunate target of a pedophile, there is no particular reason to believe that have anything other than the 1% risk that every boy does of growing up into one.
This isn't true and looks to be a statistical issue. And the myth that you'll become an abuser is terrible one that haunts many abused individuals to this day.
To expand on this the two reasons for this myth are abusers tend to lie about their childhoods to gain sympathy. And basically there are a bunch of confounds that both increase the likelihood you will be abused and that you will be an abuser but there's no real causation.
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 can play devils advocate a bit on this topic, because sadly there's no real "rules" for being a parent other than "don't let your kid die".
I am lucky to have a mother who never hid the harsher realities of life from me; She taught me how to understand what "no" means, because it's easy for horny young boys growing up to hear "no" as "No, I want you to try harder" or "No, I am a good girl and I do not want to look like a slut by giving in", so, she said "no means no because the risk of hurting her is much higher than the reward of getting your way".
I don't want to blame the media for putting this in our heads, because it _is_ a real thing (that women are sometimes bashful and may expect men to be a bit more pushy to show that they are serious) but because it's so nuanced and difficult it's better to play it safe, because you really _need_ to be _looking_ for the nuance and looking out for clues they're not into it and I don't think people (especially men) understand that.
And even then it's not a given that we're taught to look for it; and even if we are: it takes time even if you _do_ look for it, it's MUCH better to play it safe.
Anyway, my point is, parents don't _necessarily_ teach men or women what consent actually means, the media doesn't help.
A good example, of course, is: Silence is not consent. Which is a very difficult concept to grasp given that it leads to weird thoughts about "it's not romantic to ask if she wants to have sex" but it's not just about not asking, it's about looking for non-verbal cues which could be easily missed if you're aroused.
When I was a boy, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we were explicitly taught that “no” meant “you’re not trying hard enough” and this message was backed by popular media/movies and sometimes actual testimony from the opposite sex. It took decades of unlearning to acquire a healthier sense of what consent meant. Not forgiving or excusing, but adding some often-missing context. I don’t think the current younger generation was raised with this warped view, thank goodness!
You're getting older and obviously you're interested in sex. Being sexual is a healthy and normal part of being human. Know that I support you if you are gay, straight, non-binary, binary, etc... I love you because you are you and that will never change.
As your father, it is important to me that you are a kind and caring person. Kindness comes in many forms, many of which are obvious. Such as lending your arm to an elderly woman trying cross a busy, snow-covered street, for example. Kindness is also being generous to and patient with your partner before, during, and after sex. It is being aware of their needs and desires as well as what they don't like.
To that end; nobody, and I mean nobody, should be forced to have sex. If your partner doesn't clearly consent to having sex with you then it is forced. To do otherwise is an act of violence--the opposite of kindness. If you are unsure about whether your partner wants to have sex then they don't.
It is my sincerest hope that one day you find someone who you will fall in love with and who will fall in love with you. When you do, you will find that kindness plays an important role in that. Because sometimes that person will treat you poorly. They will be angry, short, and disrespectful to you. And you will do the same to them. That is part of being in a healthy relationship. It's unpleasant but it's how we grow. One thing I have learned in the years spent with your mother is that returning such anger and disrespect with kindness goes a long way towards developing a deep and lasting bond with one another.
Know that I am always available to you if you have any questions about sex, or any other subject for that matter. I know it's uncomfortable to talk about this right now. It is for me too. But it will get easier the more we talk about it so come to me anytime you feel you need to."
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.
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.
My parents didn't really need to tell me. I've got all of society left, right and centre, telling me I'm a monster with a penis. You'd have to be thick as shit not to get the message.
But it always, always has to be "the boys need to learn". Women are treated like children: nothing is ever their fault and they're easily manipulated. Men are held to a much higher standard. Anything happens it's their fault, always.
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.
Asking for that doesn't take away the fact you decided to focus on how the victim's parents could have prevented that instead of focusing on the crime itself. It's an indirect way of blaming the victim instead of the accuser. We see this all the time when women get killed and someone says "we have to tell people it's not safe to go around alone at night". First, let's try to fix the real issue and then we can focus on stuff like that. And again, I know it wasn't your intention, but sometimes the impact is more important that the intention and this is still the first comment in the thread. People come, read this and then the idea of parents educating their kids lingers instead of how to stop predatory behavior from men.
If you want to suggest this wasn't the forum to bring up the topic of parents discussing sexual situations with their children then, fine, I'll concede to that. I believe the subjects of parents educating their children can coincide with how to stop predatory behavior, but I'm willing to accept the desire to discuss them separately.
However, to suggest I'm blaming the victim is the epitome of putting words in my mouth and I soundly reject that suggestion as nothing short of offensive. I have done no such thing, nor would I ever.
I respectfully ask that you retract any such suggestion.
Imagine for a moment your daughter was the one in this situation. She decides to share her experience and the first comment you see is "parents need to be better at teaching their kids about sex". How would you feel?
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.
Of course it does. Marriage means responsibilities and protects rights, and no one night stands. Just because abuse happens in some marriages does not mean that we should leave sexual relationships to happen adhoc. Limiting sexual relationships to contracts (marriage, not prostitution) is the solution that has worked forever basically. The widespread of STDs, not to mention children out of wedlock, not to mention the mental tolls that come out of easy relationships is already documented, and the society is paying the price.
The incident in very article you're replying to would have been avoided had there been no casual interaction with the man, let alone sleeping with him in the same room.
> your point is clearly proven wrong by and large.
Quite the contrary. We're already seeing the effects on conservative societies that have "westernized", and normalized sex outside of marriage. The effects have been catastrophic to say the least at every level: mental, societal, familial, health, financial. The society in its entirety is paying the toll.
By what metric has the solution worked? The number of kids produced?
What your logic straight dictates is that the solution to our freedom and dignity being stolen is to not have freedom and dignity in the first place.
You speak of mental toll. Do you understand the mental toll of being locked with your abuser in the same house and your abuser also having the support of the "society"? The mental toll of being devoid of any alternatives in the first place? The toll of being degraded and considered inferior and subservient to the other half of the population? Do you understand how much society pays because kids are grown up in such environments?
You speak of "Westernization" as if treating women as humans is a strange new counter-society idea. You got it backwards honey. Islam placing women below men and denying the freedoms and dignity of a human being, with the seal of approval of allah himself, with a small a, is the abnormal and perverse thing in human civilization.
You ask why I assume you are a Muslim? Only a Muslim would write such hateful things towards women. Even the misogynists of the other places and religions would not be able to write the things you did with a straight face and with such confidence.
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 hadn't thought about this before but it seems to ring true.
Even in the U.S. this spectrum exists. There are women who expect explicit consent i.e. "is it ok if I kiss you?", and other women who find that a turn off and expect more sexual assertiveness (aggressiveness?).
You don't have to be different nationalities to experience cross cultural misunderstandings. Americans come in a variety of religious persuasions, ethnicities, etc.
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.
TBF, I think a lot of people don't actually know what battery is. Internet definition:
the crime or tort of unconsented physical contact with another person, even where the contact is not violent but merely menacing or offensive.
Most people hear of that only in the form of assault and battery. I always have to look it up because my mind wants to say "That phrase repeats itself. Surely, battery means being battered."
As for when is it legally rape? That depends a lot on the jurisdiction. Different places have different laws and there is lots of debate about the merits of some of those laws.
I downvoted you (I've reversed that now). I'm having trouble taking your questions seriously as good faith engagement. It sounds rather like you are asking "How much can I get away with?"
If you really want to know how to reach meaningful consent with a sexual partner, investigating the details of "exactly where does the law draw that line" isn't especially useful and it's hard to try to reply to such a question in a constructive fashion that doesn't implicitly suggest ugly things about the motive of the asker, so trying to reply seemed like an unwise choice.
Thank you for responding. I'm sorry I gave you the wrong impression about my question, I personally never had any issues with this.
My wife is a relationship and dating coach, and so it sparks my interest where the law draws the line.
I know from my wife, that nowadays men can approach women (on dates etc.) is to first ask for interactions, like "Can I place my hand on your leg", or "Is it OK if I kiss you". That way to have an explicit consent in all interactions. But there is this other aspect, where most women prefer a "real man that takes initiative", and so the spontaneous kiss might become dangerous if the man is very bad at reading the woman.
My question is basically where the law draws the line, in interactions that can be very complex. But as others responded, it seems up to the jury to decide if something was wrong or not.
P.S.: By the way thank you for giving the best comment in this threat at the top. I'm the father of 1 boy and 3 girls, and your advice is very clear and actionable.
The law is something you turn to when things go extremely wrong. I spend very little time worried about the law.
I worry much more about how to ensure that things go right.
The problem with wondering where the law draws the line is that if you look for guilt, it's easy to find it. It's easy to take offense, to escalate offense, to dig your grave deeper.
I worry much more about cultural trends. Laws are written by people and interpreted by people. The same law that twenty years ago was used one way can morph into something else. What was once a protection can become a cudgel.
The law is certainly needed. But this problem won't be solved with laws and court cases.
It will be solved with mutual respect and civil discourse, which is why I chose to reply to you.
Thank you for pleasantly surprising me with this comment. I was about 90 percent certain I was making a terrible mistake and would regret replying.
I chose to bet a certain way, knowing the odds were long against it going well but it was the only bet with some hope of furthering civility rather than deepening the yawning chasm that so often stands between us and a better world.
> 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
It isn't weird at all. There is no reasonable expectations of getting consent for battery outside of very specific scenarios.
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".
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.
I've felt for a while now that the way the tech world talks about "the $foo community" is just fundamentally wrong. You can only have real communities as long as the number of people is small enough. Once you cross Dunbar's number, it's no longer really a community but rather a cluster of partially overlapping communities. Maybe the more accurate term would be "society" instead of "community".
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.
> "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..
Slightly later she writes "I maintained friendship with him for a few months after May, because I was convinced that it was all consensual". I think it is something of a philosophical issue to debate about whether you can think you consented and later determine you didn't. It's also strange to me that it takes months and consultation with a therapist to determine if you did or did not consent.
Have you ever been in an abusive relationship? Or seen one firsthand? People can be made to believe all sorts of things that aren't true by charismatic or powerful people. It may take them some time to realize they are being tricked or abused.
You absolutely can be told you consented, and trust that person's word, and realize later that no, actually you had not. It's just convenient for the abuser for you to believe you had.
>You absolutely can be told you consented, and trust that person's word, and realize later that no, actually you had not. It's just convenient for the abuser for you to believe you had.
There has to be a line drawn somewhere when you start talking about hardcore felony level criminal accusations though. Should anyone who's ever had an (at the time) consensual intimate encounter then have cart blanche to hold accusations of rape over you for the rest of your life?
I mean just picture this guy's POV for a moment. You think you had a consensual relationship with someone, who then continued having friendly relations with you for months afterwards. Then out of nowhere you're being called a rapist on the internet. I get that the guy is a total creep. But it's absolutely terrifying to think that being in a crappy relationship can land you in prison now.
To be clear, that guy held several positions of power over her. Even in the most absolutely charitable reading, which is that this is a bad relationship (a reading I strongly disagree with) -- if you hold significant power over someone, you shouldn't be entering into casual sexual relationships.
If you want to pursue that relationship, it can be done, but not carelessly. This isn't a situation where a one night stand went awkwardly, there are several additional factors here.
> if you hold significant power over someone, you shouldn't be entering into casual sexual relationships
I think this situation is stretching the word "power". There's a social power imbalance, sure - but nobody acts shocked when sports figures and rock stars sleep with groupies. Hell, they write autobiographies. We don't live in a caste system where people with X popularity can only sleep with other Xers.
She didn't work for the guy nor did her career or finances depend on him. He wasn't a VC lording (someone else's) money over her. She was a naive young adult new in town and the guy was an (extremely) minor celebrity. People have hooked up for far worse reasons. If the guy was simply a better date we wouldn't be talking about this.
> If the guy was simply a better date we wouldn't be talking about this.
This is what makes me really dislike this story.
The use of power to extort sexual favors is topic that needs serious discussion. But occurrences like these where there is so much gray just waters down the conversation to "She said, he said".
So much in her post just insinuates that is wasn't his behavior at the time she was having problems with but his later actions towards her. Nothing in this accounting is about power dynamics. It is about shitty behavior by a stupid guy.
> I did not blame him for what happened, and didn’t think those behaviors were problematic at the time, because it didn’t even cross my mind that he would do anything that I wasn’t comfortable with.
Stuff like that doesn't really help. So - she was okay with it until she wasn't anymore?
Perhaps why she did not explicitly call out rape in her message. However, it's a very realistic abuse and harassment claim, that in itself is already extremely problematic.
Maybe that's true and some Rasputin-like figure could manipulate you into believing you thought things that you didn't, but that doesn't seem to be what is alleged here. She wasn't living in this guy's cult, he helped her professionally and with conferences, and she agreed to share a room with him on a trip. That strikes me as less mind-control and more just a situation that people get into sometimes.
She is and was an adult woman. Can I not expect her to know, in the typical case, whether she does or does not consent to sex? And I'm not talking about "He got me drunk and then forced sex when I couldn't consent" - obviously that would be rape, but it seems like you should realize that when you sober up, not months or years later.
She was left panicked and crying. That's not generally a sign that there was unambiguous consent.
And it doesn't take a Rasputin-like figure to be an abuser. Plenty of people are taken advantage of and taught to believe things they later realize were abusive, even in relatively short situations. Pretty held all the power here -- he controlled where she was staying, he helped her get to the conference, she was intoxicated, she believe he was her mentor, she believe he had the ability to get her industry connections, etc.
Coercing someone into sex that they later realize wasn't consensual (once they are free from that person's influence) doesn't mean she was lying in the moment or is somehow "discovering" something now.
> Can I not expect her to know, in the typical case, whether she does or does not consent to sex?
Adult humans (because I think this can happen to men too), can absolutely be caught off guard and be "unsure" about whether they are consenting to sex. Not everyone is wired the same, and not everyone is able to make a quick snap judgement. Not everyone is fully able to say no when pressured.
Furthermore, grappling with the question, "Was I just raped/sexually abused?" is really, really challenging. What does that do to your identity? Are you forever a victim? Are you going to have to out yourself and someone else? Will you forever be the target of the public's pity? Are you going to have that stigma attached to you when you want to enter relationships in the future? That's a LOT to put on someone, and many, many victims choose to try and believe that things were consensual, because it seems easier that facing the realization they were abused.
She says that she remembers panicking and crying. I agree that those are both clear signs of non-consensual sex. Why does it take months and therapy for her to decode those clear signals? If Jon noticed her crying and panicking we would expect him to interpret that as a clear "I do not consent" signal.
The power Pretty holds here is pretty minor. He's helping her get into conferences and mentoring her. He "controlled where she was staying" in the sense that he made the reservation for their AirBnB. He's not confiscating her passport, she isn't destitute. She could've gotten another hotel, hostel, AirBnB. To be clear, I am not saying "She didn't get another room and so deserves to be raped" but I am saying that his "power" in this regard is pretty minor - just because someone is paying for your room that shouldn't make it impossible for you to say "No" to them.
A big part of why it is morally and legally wrong to have sex with children is that children aren't mature enough to make decisions about sex. Children cannot consent. You seem to be suggesting that a similar standard applies to this adult woman - she can't know if she consented to a sexual encounter or not. To me, that implies you are suggesting it should be illegal to have sex with this woman - after all, she apparently can't tell if she consented or not.
> Why does it take months and therapy for her to decode those clear signals?
Because brains aren't just bundles of logical interpreters that fully understand what they are experiencing all the time. There are many, many reasons why we may rationalize some behavior in the moment. Why do victims of cons sometimes defend the con artists for significant periods of time after they leave? Why do humans hold out hope for lost loved ones, when the evidence is clear they've passed away?
Emotionally charged topics take a long time for our minds to process sometimes. Sometimes we need help from others to put our thoughts in order or to gain perspective. Maybe she never asked herself, "Why was I crying?" until a therapist said, "Why were you crying?" We're all wired different, and we have to allow for some flexibility in how were perceive and react to events -- especially traumatic events.
> To me, that implies you are suggesting it should be illegal to have sex with this woman - after all, she apparently can't tell if she consented or not.
Come on, that's a clear strawman. I'm happy to disagree with you about this and discuss it, but that whole paragraph feels needlessly out of line.
I think the paragraph that you identify as a strawman is actually the core of our disagreement. I don't intend it as a strawman of your idea but as an illustration of why I struggle to accept the idea that you can retroactively change whether or not you consented - or, phrased in a way you might be more likely to agree with, whether or not you can reevaluate your consent decisions after the fact.
If she doesn't know whether she genuinely consents to sex or not, then how is it morally acceptable to have sex with her? You might be raping her. If she can reevaluate consent decisions in the future, that implies they are not certain in the present. It seems straightforward to say that if you are uncertain about whether someone consents to sex you shouldn't have sex with them.
If this is a strawman I genuinely don't see it. I think it is the logical consequence of accepting mutable consent and it is part of why I don't accept that - or at least why I hesitate to accept mutable consent.
Yes consent isn't an issue when you assume your partner is consenting.
The problem is enthusiasm varies wildly. There are people I know whose sex would never be described as enthusiastic. There are lots of mild mannered anxious lovers out there. And I could see how it would be difficult for someone to judge the exact level of enthusiasm in a new lover.
I've had plenty of sex I wasn't super enthusiastic about but I wouldn't consider any of those exes rapists because I didn't say no.
When you're in a relationship for years not all of the sex is super enthusiastic. There were times when I had sex because I didn't want to hurt their feelings or they traveled a distance to see me.
And I'm sure there were times when my partner wasn't that in the mood and had sex with me for reasons besides they really wanted to have sex at that moment.
Personally outside of established relationships I always waited for the other person to make the first move because I was always so terrified of kissing someone who didn't want to kissed.
But talking with plenty of men and women over my life the majority of sex does not involve an unambiguous yes.
The problem I see with your definition of "Not saying no." is that it leaves a lot of ambiguity and requires a lot of caveats.
An unconscious person can't say no, but no one would agree they are consenting. What about someone intoxicated or under the influence? What about someone who is scared? Where does "I'd rather not", or "If I have to" fit? (Both of those seem to imply not consenting to me.)
Whereas a yes provides an unambiguous signal.
> Personally outside of established relationships I always waited for the other person to make the first move because I was always so terrified of kissing someone who didn't want to kissed.
I've moved to asking, "Can I kiss you?" or "Can I hug you?" before making a move like that. Simple, brief, and once you have an answer you forget it was even asked.
The problem with defining consensual sex as both parties saying yes explicitly and unambiguously is it ignores the world around us. An enormous amount of sex and sexual acts that are happening today without explicit affirmative verbal consent. Your definition classifies all of those sex acts as non-consensual. Should we prosecute people for rape? I imagine almost everyone has had at least one sexual act where they did not explicitly ask their partner if they wanted to have sex. This would make almost everyone a rapist.
Should we be teaching people to just lay their quietly if a sexual encounter is starting they don't want to be a part of and hopefully the other party will ask them for their consent at some point?
> I've moved to asking, "Can I kiss you?" or "Can I hug you?" before making a move like that. Simple, brief, and once you have an answer you forget it was even asked.
Can I kiss you, can I touch your thigh, I can tough your boob over the shirt, can I tough your genitals over the pants, you can touch my genital under my pants but over my underwear. If each sexual escalation requires consent that's a lot of question asking and responses for a typical sex act. And maybe that how the world should work, but it's definitely not how the world is working right now.
> just because someone is paying for your room that shouldn't make it impossible for you to say "No" to them.
This is incredibly difficult to do, especially when you are young.
First, having the help and the time of someone who is known and respected in the community can already make you feel like you are imposing but also grateful for their generosity, especially if there are career implications (in your mind).
Second, when you are coming from a different culture, there may already be some battling of own (perceived) “inferiority” due to being an immigrant.
Third, when the person is “saving” you when you are in a situation of stress, the act of paying for a room is a lot more than just that.
Finally, the exact financial aspect of things can make it seem like you “owe” something.
I can picture my college self having a lot of trouble saying no in a situation like this. My current self would have no issues. In my own case, age and experience are very much factors that I would add as a fifth point.
She is and was an adult woman. Can I not expect her to know, in the typical case, whether she does or does not consent to sex?
Women often feel confused about the detail of their own consent after date rape or acquaintance rape. This is true in part because most people imagine rape is some kind of violent assault by a total stranger conking them on the head and dragging them into an alleyway.
They don't expect to have to ask themselves how much alcohol is too much alcohol for me to have been consenting? Did he or did he not intentionally get me drunk for the purpose of impairing my judgement?
Did he or did he not lie to me and maneuver me into staying alone with him in an Airbnb in the name of "helping" me? Since he did, in fact, help me get to this conference, does that somehow negate his bad actions or something?
Etc.
People expect rape to be some obvious, easily identifiable crime and it's often not.
I once saw a question posted to the internet where the woman was like "I know I need to drink less..." when a colleague plied her with alcohol until she couldn't stand up anymore and then took her to his hotel room. She felt she had been unfaithful to her boyfriend and internet strangers had to tell her "Girl, you were raped, not unfaithful."
Hopefully women are clearer than that "in the typical case." Presumably, "the typical case" isn't actually rape.
But what she described is very normal for anyone who has been treated abusively not by some random stranger at gun point but by someone insinuating themselves into their lives and claiming to be a friend who just wants to help, etc. Even without the detail of sex, people often agonize over what they did wrong, whether or not they "owe" someone who intentionally shafted them etc when they were supposed to be friends, business partners, etc.
People who know ahead of time how this works are much less vulnerable to such predators and can still get shafted. Predators typically seek to place themselves in a position of trust and to operate under a cloak of plausible deniability. They actively seek to obfuscate their real intentions and then act all hurt if you question their intentions, etc.
People expect rape to be some obvious, easily identifiable crime and it's often not.
They expect that because rape carries enormous jail penalties, because it's got a clear legal definition and because as the extremely low successful prosecution rate shows, most juries are not actually willing to send a man to jail for a decade on the basis of claims like "He invited me to his room, I brought a bottle of wine, we had sex and for months we were still friends because I told everyone I agreed, but now I changed my mind". That is not rape, and if she was claiming it was, she'd be making a false allegation of rape, which would be very serious.
This pretty simple concept has been relentlessly attacked for decades now by a rather nasty form of feminist activist who isn't satisfied with the standard definition of rape and who have been trying to change it to something more like this: "Rape is whatever a woman says it is". But they want the jail penalties to remain. That's dystopian and no honest person can support it, but sadly, many years of aggressive activism have resulted in the legal system being steadily chipped away when it comes to men and accusations of rape. That's why in the UK just a few years ago it was discovered there had been a massive set of miscarriages of justice, where men had been falsely accused of rape and sent to prison when evidence the women was lying was withheld from the defense. It happened because the woman in charge of the CPS had the mentality of "the victim must always be believed", leading to a collapse in standards. Many innocent men were jailed and their lives were ruined. Now one MP is campaigning to change the law to ban the form of evidence that was used to get the men released.
Honestly, I went into this article with an open mind. There are plenty of nerdy guys at programming conferences who don't know how to handle women. But this essay leaves a very bitter taste. As other commenters observe, she appears to be defining sexual harassment as "it means whatever I want it to mean at any later time", which is not something that can ever be fair to men.
That is not rape, and if she was claiming it was, she'd be making a false allegation of rape, which would be very serious.
The main problem is that it wasn't all that long ago that a woman couldn't attend a conference, agree to stay at an Airbnb with an unrelated man to whom she wasn't married, etc.
We are in a lot of new territory and still trying to sort out a lot of questions that simply didn't come up a generation or two back.
These questions are all too often being sorted out the hard way: By having things go wrong and having people who are upset about what happened air their grievances because they don't know what else to do to try to sort their lives and get everything back on track.
This article reads like she did not say no as much as she did not say yes, which leaves the reader in a muddled, grey area and unsure of how to interpret anything. Is she consenting, or more specifically, is she explicitly claiming to not consent? It's a very awkward article, leaving readers with more questions than answers at the end, which is never what you want your readers to feel when garnering support.
No, “consent” is, like “intent” on the other side, a mental state rather than an action: it is the active desire for the act.
An ambiguous and enthusiastic yes is outward evidence of consent, though, and it tends to be the kind of evidence without which (or at least, some similarly very clear sign) we would tend not to infer consent to other acts where consent negates criminality, like battery.
I agree that this is morally correct but the law and the majority of real life intimate interactions don't reflect this. "Yes, I agree to have sex with you, and I am stating this without being under duress" or variations of that sentence is very rarely verbalized as such beforehand. Hence innocent until proven guilty and not vice versa, reasonable doubt, etc. and all the other law jargon applied.
> This article reads like she did not say no as much as she did not say yes
Yeah, if I beat someone up and they didn’t explicitly agree or explicitly ask me not to pummel them, no one is going to hem and haw about whether or not it was battery or whether it wasn’t because of secret unexpressed consent.
But no, when the issue is battery-that-involves-sexual-penetration, *which legally had the same basic “without consent” factor (except that there tend to be more factors which explicitly negate or make the alleged victim legally incapable of consent), suddenly lots of people have a radically different view.
Beating someone up and having sex with them are two very distinct things. And saying sex is "battery that involves sexual penetration" is no helping either.
Just painting this as a simplistic "powerful male predator abuses helpless little female" does not help to move society forward one bit.
The same argument can be made the other direction. It is quite common for someone to be convinced after the fact it was nonconsensual when it was indeed consensual.
I'm sure it happens, I strongly doubt it's "quite common". Especially relative to the incidence of it happening the other way (where an victim escapes and abuser and realizes they were being abused.)
People believe all sorts of things on the basis of false memories.
You know there's a fairly large community of people that are convinced that they were abducted by aliens?
There's also a community of people that are convinced they have had a past life and know the intimate details of it. They don't suffer from schizophrenia, they literally just have false memories.
In the end it shouldn't be about what party X subjectively felt or what they felt afterwards. It should be about what party X actually portrayed and communicated at the time of the encounter. If they legitimately consented and weren't intoxicated but deep down were thinking "I don't want this", then that sucks for them but no crime was committed and the counterparty isn't culpable.
I'm talking generally, not about the specific allegation in question.
> it's also strange to me that it takes months and consultation with a therapist to determine if you did or did not consent.
No, this is not strange at all. Psychology is a non-falsifiable "science" with foundational literature that is littered with reproducibility scandals.
Psychological therapists are roughly as scientific as tarot card readers, and this woman's therapist had a full three years of time to gaslight her memories.
It's certainly possible that Pretty did what he's accused of. But any time you hear "years" and "therapist" in the context of an abuse allegation, be skeptical. The entire field is pure charlatanry.
Being taken advantage of while intoxicated and while there was a significant power imbalance between the two. She was not in a position to give consent there -- being intoxicated, being in a place that was being rented Pretty (and she could risk being out on the street if she refused), having no money and luggage on hand, being the mentee of Pretty (or believing she could be), etc.
She ended up crying and panicking. That generally isn't the outcome of a consensual relationship.
I don't know what the law is in Germany, but here in California the threshold for alcohol isn't intoxication it's incapacitation. What happens if two intoxicated people have sex with each other? They're both simultaneously rape victim but also rapists?
They were both intoxicated and Pretty is not a very big name, not even in the Scala community. It's not as if we were talking about Martin Odersky. The guy gives talks from time to time and contributes code to some projects. That's it.
> She was not in a position to give consent there [...]
Of course she was. If all the stated facts in her account are true, then Pretty was behaving like an asshole (In setting her up and then trying to get in her knickers). But she was absolutely in a position to consent. Otherwise you make it very easy for people to shed responsibility. Being in a shitty position doesn't absolve you from bad decisions.
> She ended up crying and panicking.
If that's true, Petty should have stopped right there and then. Pretty much an asshole otherwise.
That said; that's _her_ side of the story and while I'm not _not_ believing her, I'm also not making any judgement on Pretty.
It definitely sounds like he abused his position and did a horrible thing, but the thing he did is not rape (assuming OP story is 100% accurate description of events).
If 2 people are intoxicated and have sex, do they both rape each other? If one person holds more power than the other, while both are intoxicated, is it just a one-way rape? Or is it still a two-way rape, where one person just "rapes a bit more" and the other person "rapes a bit less"? What if the person who had power ends up regretting sex afterwards and cries, does it "turn the tables" and cause the rapist to suddenly become the victim of rape, after the fact?
Yes, she was drunk. Yes, she later regretted having sex. These things alone do not mean that rape was committed. As far as I can tell, she is not referring to the events as "rape", so maybe you shouldn't either.
She was unable to resist his advances, for various reasons listed. While it doesn't sound like she beat him off with a stick, it does sounds like she shut down, dissociated, and didn't say "no." Consent isn't presumed; consent is not the lack of a "no", consent is the presence of free, ongoing, and enthusiastic yes. Even if she reluctantly agreed, it consent wasn't freely given in light of the power imbalance and intoxication. Even if she reluctantly agreed, that isn't enthusiastic consent. Even if she wanted sex, but he refused to use the protection she wanted him to use, that's not ongoing consent. But she clearly didn't want sex with this dude; not like that
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".
That is rather astounding. And completely opposite anything that I've ever heard, including from a woman I know who reported her rape less than 5 years ago in Australia.
Meanwhile in the USA we literally have enough untested rape kits to fill a small city. According to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rape-kits-are-sit... at least 100,000. (Nobody is really tracking the numbers well, so it is probably more than that.)
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.)
According to the story they had sex while drunk. But then he kept on having sex with her, including when she was saying that she didn't want him to.
It is rape to have sex with a woman who didn't want it and told you not to. She describes exactly that happening later in the conference. Yes, she tried to convince herself that it was consensual. And he tried to convince her of the same. But that is also a common pattern for rape, both her attempt to deny it and his to gaslight her.
Interestingly in surveys, the portion of women who describe having had an encounter meeting the definition of rape has held fairly steady over the decades. But the portion of women who self-describe that as rape has steadily risen. Then really jumped in 2018. Given that fact I find it interesting that he seems to target women from cultures that haven't internalized "no means no" as a standard. Cultures where it is easier for the man to do what he wants, then convince her that he didn't rape her.
> But then he kept on having sex with her, including when she was saying that she didn't want him to.
Nope, the article doesn't contain such claims.
> It is rape to have sex with a woman who didn't want it and told you not to.
Yes it is.
> She describes exactly that happening later in the conference.
No, she does not.
> Yes, she tried to convince herself that it was consensual. And he tried to convince her of the same. But that is also a common pattern for rape, both her attempt to deny it and his to gaslight her.
Two people have sex. Both people come out thinking the sex was consensual. Both people think for months that the sex was consensual. Then the woman changes her mind. Boom! Rape! Welcome to 2021. (To be perfectly clear, I am making fun of your comment, I am not making fun of OP. OP at no point referred to the events as rape, it is only you and other internet commentors who are dead set on using the "rape" label here.)
> Interestingly in surveys, the portion of women who describe having had an encounter meeting the definition of rape has held fairly steady over the decades. But the portion of women who self-describe that as rape has steadily risen. Then really jumped in 2018.
Peculiar indeed! Might it have something to do with the "definition of rape" becoming wider and wider every year? It used to mean a very specific thing, but nowadays it means a lot of things.
We are not in the 80’s anymore. At least in the western world the police is far more prepared to help victims than in the past. Usually the victim is supported by a female investigator, because differently from the past, at least in bigger cities a sizable portion of the police force are women.
We are creating this culture of woman fearing getting help from police by pretending things didn’t change during the last 40 years
Counterpoint: a friend of mine was violently raped a decade ago, and I went with her to the hospital the next morning to get an exam and a rape kit to make a complaint. The police both refused to process the rape kit, and threatened to press charges against her for making a false complaint for 'regretting rough sex'. And that was with full on torn genitals, with an exam, violent rape, in a major metropolitan area in the US.
We haven't come as far as you're making it out to be.
I actually regret convincing her to go to the hospital and the police as all it did was increase the amount of trauma she experienced.
You can start telling me how much things have changed after the police take rape seriously enough to actually process physical evidence of reported crimes.
>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.
> That's what an embassy is for... they help deal with these situation.
Have you ever worked with an embassy? I have, it's no picnic even in the best of circumstances (lost passport). It takes time to setup such an appointment and you are expecting a young college student to have the wherewithal to navigate that all while being on a budget and having their current lodging with the aggressor.
You are expecting an abused person to do everything right in a foreign county while currently staying with their abuser.
Don't blame a sexual abuse victim for not doing everything right and by the books.
At no point do I blame the victim. I really want to know where you come off thinking I'm blaming the victim. Get off your emotional ego trip. I blame this rabid social media society that makes a victim imagine they are completely helpless. You make victims feel more helpless by saying there's no one out there willing to help.
If someone is wronged, there is a process is most countries, especially western ones. They, as a victim, need to start the process in some way to make sure justice happens. None of it is secretive. No one, ever, should make anyone feel powerless to do so.
"To do everything right"? Did they go to the police? That's basic step one. Why are you making this seem so difficult? I'm really failing to understand how that's so difficult when you're an adult traveling the world. Your narrative makes future victims think it's not an option. Don't you get how incredibly harmful that is? Then, when you're traveling, your embassy is where you go if something criminal has happened to you. That's another basic to know, or in all seriousness, you shouldn't be an international traveler. This new age society is making people unable to have agency in their own lives to take any action. Yes, you're not going to John Wick problems. But holy shit, a majority of the world has a criminal justice process. Stop pushing a narrative that victims should just wallow in depression instead of pushing for justice. Making blog posts isn't the answer and will only let it happen more often.
There are plenty of stories of law enforcement ignoring, downplaying, and even harassing victims of sexual crimes who try to report it. Please do not act like the police are a high trust authority who act only in good faith - we have overwhelmingly seen the other side of that in these past years.
There are also plenty of stories of the legal system working as intended. You can create any narrative you want from selectively paying attention to data.
Yes, sure. Instead, by holistically paying attention to data, we can see that rape is a wildly underprosecuted crime[0], and thus we can stop acting like there are no possible barriers obstructing these victims from justice.
Actually, it’s kind of hilarious when I put it this way... you’re the one selectively looking at the data to justify inaction.
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 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.".
First, its a poor place and topic for sarcasm (it just an observation, i'm not against it, i do have good friends like that) but more than that, GP actually adressed the point you're trying to highlight in his first sentence.
That wasn't being disputed. It does mean that, in the real world, a lot of victims will never see justice until there's overwhelming evidence, if ever.
The number of fake rape complaint surely depends on how they're treated.
If an accusation only has effect if it's proven in court, there will be few of them.
If you can destroy someone's life by a mere accusation, false accusations will be very common. Also, just a threat of such an accusation will be very powerful.
I think we can all agree that the accusers in the Salem witch trials couldn't have been telling the truth, unless they were hallucinating (there's a theory that lysergic acid in grain could have caused hallucinations, but its weak and not proven).
Let's just agree that none of the women executed in Salem were actually practicing black magic. Why were there so many accusers claiming they were? I mean, false accusations are "exceedingly rare" and accusers "gain nothing".
Yeah, people in the 18-35 demographic, to quote Bill Maher, "are the favored advertising demo because they're gullible." They don't know anything about human nature either.
It is huge but it's actually an under-estimate. The 2% figure has no actual basis, if you try and trace it back to some source you'll always end up at a dead end.
A more commonly cited figure is 10%, which comes from the clearance rate of DNA testing kits. i.e. someone accuses a man of rape, there is DNA and it exonerates him. So this is an absolute lower bound because a lot of rape accusations are a bit like this article: "we had sex a bunch of times consensually, and then also when it wasn't". You can't disprove that with DNA evidence but it can still be a false accusation.
Back in the 90s when this stuff was less politicised there was a somewhat rigorous study that put the true figure at around 50% [1]. It gave pie charts of the reasons for the false accusations and other interesting bits of data. This figure causes people to freak out these days due to the "believe the victim" mentality you can see above, where there is a deliberate conflation between accusations of rape and actual rapes, so it gets attacked a lot, but modern scholarship hardly investigates the question of false reporting rates for rape unless the authors already decided their conclusion before doing the research (you can sometimes see admissions of this in the study's discussion sections). The 50% figure has some other support: when interviewed anonymously police workers, both male and female, tend to pick this figure when asked to estimate the false reporting rate.
The low prosecution success rate is usually painted these days as an obvious flaw of the justice system, but that's identity politics. When you drill into it in detail and ask OK, where do these prosecutions go, and why are they dropped, or why do they fail to win in court, the answer is: because a LOT of rape allegations are not only false but clearly false. For example, because the complainant goes to the police and admits they made it up, or because they are clearly high on drugs when making the accusation and rescind it when sober. Even if you engage in some mental gymnastics to assume rescinding an accusation is never valid, it doesn't matter. It's really hard to win in court when the "victim" themselves are claiming they're not really a victim at all.
The cases would be prosecuted if there was evidence to support them. You can’t just punish people without proof. Contrary to popular belief the purpose of the legal system is not to make wronged people feel better.
The idea of someone being able to accuse someone else of a crime without evidence should terrify anyone who believes in freedom and democracy. Rape, murder, or any other crime.
I am curious. What percentage of all rape convictions would you tolerate being wrong (that is, the person behind bars is innocent) in order to ensure sufficient coverage of convicting the guilty?
What makes you think there is or should be a maximum acceptable tolerance for that sort of thing? The purpose of our legal process is FIRST to protect the innocent THEN to punish the guilty. The US legal system is not a hot dog factory where there is an acceptable concentration of rat feces levels in the food. If there is not evidence of a crime, no crime shall be punished. There are other countries where that sort of thing is tolerated.
This is a false dichotomy to propose. My claim is that the police - notorious domestic abusers, rights violators - are failing to collect evidence from women coming forward with rape allegations. Given the time-sensitive and trauma-riddled nature of such things, it is not a simple topic, so even without attributing malice, it is clear police are undertrained (here and elsewhere).
I wrote a bunch more and gathered some links, but Hacker News is telling me to slow down. 6 comments on this thread since 2pm, wow such spam
> Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions
We can measure the numerator here: it’s the number of felony rape convictions. But how do we measure the denominator? In some rape trials, the central question of fact is whether a rape occurred at all, or if the sexual encounter was consensual. If a rape trial leads to acquittal based on reasonable doubt over that question, is that alleged rape included in the denominator or not?
> Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false.
So here’s a different question. If 2-8% of rape “complaints” are false, then clearly we aren’t counting these false accusations in the denominator for the 1% figure, are we? But what do we do with the cases we can’t determine with certainty either way?
One way of interpreting these numbers might be:
* 92-98% of rape accusations are not provably false.
* 1% of the remaining accusations are provably true. 1% of 98% is still roughly 1%, so we’ll round to 1% of all rape accusations are provably true.
* 91-97% of rape accusations can’t be proven.
Does this make sense? A 90% acquittal rate for rape cases? That seems way out of line with other criminal justice statistics. So at some point we’re including accusations that never even result in charges being filed due to lack of evidence, and possibly accusations that are never brought to the criminal justice system in the first place. In either case, this vast majority of cases is legally indeterminate: neither conclusively proven to be rapes committed by a specific suspect, nor conclusively proven to be false accusations.
We should also take into account that this number of false accusations is probably the number where this was clearly determined by the court, probably with legal repercussions for the accuser.
The real number probably is higher
jfengel's comment was all about how the very high bar the criminal justice system sets for arrests/prosecutions/convictions for sexual assault is not the appropriate bar for the community to use to keep itself safe. So the low conviction rate is not helping you here.
My point is that there is scant evidentiary basis for any denominator for that 1% figure. The entire argument is an exercise in circular reasoning: you develop some methodology that results in 100 times as many rapes happening as we have rape convictions, and instead of questioning that methodology, we just assume that 99% of rapes don’t result in convictions?
Surely, there is a much lower burden of proof for this statistical methodology deciding that a rape occurred than there is for a court of law to determine that a particular rapist is guilty of rape. By what standard do you jump to the conclusion that the criminal justice system should lower the necessary burden of proof to incarcerate someone, and not that this statistical methodology should perhaps raise the burden of proof it requires? To be blunt, do you seriously think the American criminal justice system doesn’t incarcerate enough people?
The article notes that 2-8% of rape cases are PROVEN false. The real number is definitely higher than that as people do go to prison under wrongful conviction. Bottom line is if you don’t have compelling evidence for a crime you don’t have a case. That’s a good thing as it protects us from unjust punishment most of the time. It’s real sad that victims that can’t prove their case don’t have justice but it’s much more important that the innocent are not wrongfully punished.
The article cited[0] is a review of analysis from ~1980 to 2005. If you restrict yourself to only analysis that don't count cases involving alcohol as false reports, the number drops to 2-3%.
The article also notes that false reports are usually different from real reports, important among these facts is that false reports are often attention seeking, and so are examples of what society thinks rape "should" look like (violent, anonymous) as opposed to what it often is (ambiguous and often by someone the victim knows and trusts). As such, the percent of false rape accusations where a particular individual is accused of the crime are likely even lower than this 2-3% number.
> but it’s much more important that the innocent are not wrongfully punished
This depends. It's much less morally cut and dry than you claim.
This doesn’t seem very scientific. You can’t determine if someone is lying based on them “seeming like an attention seeker or not” deductive reasoning in a legal system demands “beyond a shadow of a doubt” certainty before convictions are made.
Also no it’s pretty cut and dry: if you punish someone who is innocent under ANY circumstance without reviewing the case under a very critical eye you might as well throw out the justice system entirely, break out the torches and pitchforks and start gathering wood for the witch burning.
The point I'm making here is that you're too hung up on the criminal justice system. No one is talking about criminal punishment except you. We extrajudicially punish people who are innocent all the time. I was suspended in school for getting stabbed. Professors make entire classes retake a test if there's the suspicion that a few cheated. There are all sorts of extrajudicial punishments that happen, all the time, to innocent people, that we collectively don't give a shit about.
Why are you taking a particular stand here about a person who probably did a thing that's much worse than the average thing that results in extrajudicial punishment, has so far received absolutely zero consequences, and is unlikely to receive many beyond his decision to no longer speak at conferences? Like why die on this hill when there are so many other forms of worse extrajudicial punishment that happen every day?
I am, and still I prefer a system where some guilty people will avoid a punishment versus an overreaching system which will also punish some innocent people for some kind of a greater good.
What the linked article is talking about, though, does not seem to be „rape” as defined by a criminal code, so all this rape discussion hardly applies.
Nevertheless, one can be a creepy disgusting asshole and still not do things which are illegal, technically speaking.
No. The two concepts have nothing to do with eachother. It’s bad that victims don’t get justice but it’s also bad if people are convicted of crimes they didn’t commit. Wrongfully punishing people without sound evidence just to satisfy the feelings of someone who was wronged is not a sane justice system.
Complaints is the key here. Obviously, we can't say much about the incidents that don't go reported. If one looks at the conviction rate for rape complaints it's around 2%. So if we take the lower estimate for false complaints, it still means that only 4% of cases are provable one way or the other, and that those which are have a 50/50 chance of being true or false complaints. (I'm looking at '92 stats, at a glance it appears the the rates for both rape and false rape convictions have risen a fair bit since then).
Interestingly, a 2% conviction rate is on par with that of robbery.
I think that's 2-8% where there is quite a bit of evidence that the allegations false. Quite a few allegations there isn't evidence either way besides the accounts of the two individuals.
Rape is hard to prove. If one party claims consent was obtained and the other that it wasn't, and there is no recording, it's going to be difficult to make a finding of fact based on the testimony of the two parties. In the absence of clear evidence of lack of consent, with no further evidence, I would expect most cases to result in a finding of not-guilty or not to ever result in a charge.
Think about what evidence would it take for you to be convinced consent was absent, beyond a reasonable doubt; and how would you provide that evidence if you were a victim in the situation in the article.
On the other hand, many false rape accusations are fabricated with completely made up details. Depending on the details, it can be easy to prove the accused (or the accuser) wasn't in the place claimed, or other details don't fit.
Sure but the statistics, 1% of reported rapes lead to conviction and 2-8% are shown to be false, do not support the conclusion that false report of rape is not a big issue.
Car break-ins outnumber car thefts by several orders of magnitude. Assaults outnumber murders by probably a similiar amount.
I'd be very suspicious if there was a class of crime where any large fraction of instances result in higher level charges being brought. Especially with how plea deals work.
>between 2-8% worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown.
If 2% of the time cops fired their weapons it blew up in their hand or 2% of car crashes resulted in a fatality it would be an outrage.
2-8% is huge when you're talking about people's lives being permanently altered for the worse.
If anything the worries are under-blown. But then again, when compared to the rest of the court system (not that long ago they were framing random minorities in order to close cases) and prosecution process 2-8% might not be that bad.
And if not, doesn't that imply you also agree (to an extent) that trials/law enforcement on heavily politicized cases have the potential to be totally mismanaged and end in injustice?
Because I know people who have been harassed and raped and whose harassers and rapists weren't punished.
I know literally dozens of stories like that, and maybe a handful where the harasser or rapist was punished at all. Of those, even fewer where they were convicted of a crime.
The majority of these cases the victim isn't public in their accusation, there's no argument that they're trying to gain something or hurt someone else. So by comparing the data that is presumably more honest, that people make in private, to that in public, we can assume that most instances of harassment go unpunished.
> 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.
It seems like 68% [0] of rape prosecutions result in a conviction. And that’s higher than the 61% rate for violent crimes.
So it seems we’re pretty good at convicting rapists, it’s the arresting that we’re bad at. And since RAINN [1] estimates that only 230/1000 are reported to police and of those only 43 lead to arrest and 9 to prosecution. If the ratios stay the same, then if we reported every rape then convictions would increase 4x.
> 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!
The Central Park five voluntarily confessed and were almost certainly guilty. The only issue was that there was a sixth perpetrator who had raped the victim after and wasn’t caught at the time.
The criteria for such a civil suit is whether the defendants' civil rights were violated, not whether the defendants are guilty.
And cities often settle lawsuits regardless of guilt to avoid the costs of going to trial as well as the risks of public backlash. Notably in this specific case, the decision to settle was a political decision after DeBlasio was elected mayor.
The City of New York is very wealthy, but you don't get almost $10 million for having your civil rights violated!
I assure you, if that was the case, there would be a lot more multi-millionaires in NYC because the local police play it pretty fast 'n loose with the civil rights of citizens.
And again, the City didn't hand over forty-million to get rid of a nuisance lawsuit. They have lawyers on staff -- it would probably cost under a million dollars for the city to go to trial.
"Almost certainly guilty," huh? Citations please? Are you talking about a DIFFERENT "Central Park Five" than the ones who were exonerated? Or are you just ironically quoting Trump? Do you agree with him that hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done?
>From the outset the case was a topic of national interest, with the commentary on social issues evolving as the details emerged. Initially, the case led to public discourse about New York City's perceived lawlessness, criminal behavior by youths, and violence toward women. After the exonerations, it became a high-profile example of racial profiling, discrimination, and inequality in the media and legal system. All five defendants subsequently sued the City of New York for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination and emotional distress; the City settled the suit in 2014 for $41 million.
>On December 19, 2002, Justice Charles J. Tejada of the Supreme Court of the State of New York granted a motion to vacate the thirteen-year-old convections in the infamous case. He did so based on new evidence: a shocking confession from a serial rapist, Matias Reyes, and a positive DNA match to back it up. A year later, the men filed civil lawsuits against the City of New York, and the police officers and prosecutors who had worked toward their conviction. In 2014, they settled that civil case for $41 million dollars. Despite their exoneration, the police and prosecutors involved in the case maintain that they were guilty of the crime.
>Five black and Hispanic boys, aged between 14 and 16, would be found guilty and jailed for the crime.
>They became known as the Central Park Five.
>But they never committed the crime.
[...]
>The role of Donald Trump
>New York in the 80s and 90s was much more dangerous than it is today.
>Race relations were strained - especially when it came to the police.
>Meanwhile, Donald Trump - then a New York property mogul - seemed convinced the teens were guilty.
>He spent a reported $85,000 (around £138,000 today) on four full-page adverts in New York newspapers titled: "Bring Back The Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police!".
>He wrote: "I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyse or understand them, I am looking to punish them."
>In an interview with CNN at the time, he said: "Maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done."
"In its January 2003 Armstrong Report, the panel "did not dispute the legal necessity of setting aside the convictions of the five defendants based on the new DNA evidence that Mr. Reyes had raped the jogger."[103] But it disputed acceptance of Reyes's claim that he alone had raped the jogger.[103][104] It said there was "nothing but his uncorroborated word" that he acted alone.[103] Armstrong said the panel believed "the word of a serial rapist killer is not something to be heavily relied upon."[103]
The report concluded that the five men whose convictions had been vacated had "most likely" participated in the beating and rape of the jogger and that the "most likely scenario" was that "both the defendants and Reyes assaulted her, perhaps successively."[103] The report said Reyes had most likely "either joined in the attack as it was ending or waited until the defendants had moved on to their next victims before descending upon her himself, raping her and inflicting upon her the brutal injuries that almost caused her death."[103]"
That quote about "nothing but his uncorroborated word" regarding Reyes acting alone isn't the established truth, despite Armstrong Report saying it, wikipedia listed it just to demonstrate the opinion that Armstrong Report held.
Check these two quotes from the same wikipedia page[0]:
>In addition, his [Reyes's] DNA matched the DNA evidence at the scene, confirming that he was the sole source of the semen found in and on the victim "to a factor of one in 6,000,000,000 people".
>DNA analysis of the strands of hair found on the clothing of two of the defendants, conducted with advanced technology not available at the time of their trial, established that the hair did not belong to the victim, despite what the prosecution had testified to at trial
The second one circumstantially supports that the defendants weren't involved, but the first one pretty much proves that the defendants weren't at the scene. Unless you want to claim that the defendants fully sanitized the victim after they assaulted her, leaving no traces of their DNA on or inside of her. I haven't heard that being claimed anywhere on the wikipedia page though.
Are you aware the Armstrong Report that you cite was written by the government?
In any case, prosecutors were well aware the defendants were innocent. Once they saw the crime scene it was apparent that there was just one assailant.
However, they had a big problem. How could they find the actual rapist? They had five innocent defendants in custody and it would embarrassing to everyone to just let them out. So, prosecutors framed them for the rape.
> 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.
I mostly agree with the point you're making, but I think it's a bit of a stretch to assume that the jury actually really presumed Gacy innocent at the start of his trial.
Like everyone, they were certainly biased toward assuming his guilt in the run-up to the trial.
No system is perfect, and humans are fallible. But that's kinda the underlying issue with this entire discussion: if she had gone to the authorities (especially if only years after the incident in question, and also consider that the incident happened in a different country), would there be any legal remedy here? I think it's pretty likely that nothing material would have come of that.
> bit of a stretch to assume that the jury actually really presumed Gacy innocent at the start of his trial.
This seems perfectly reasonable to me and juries are explicitly picked so they aren’t familiar with cases before trial. If a potential juror knew of Gacy, they would be excluded.
> 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.
Another commenter mentions somewhere here that the specific thing that happened may not have been illegal in Germany then (but is now). I don't know how to verify that as I don't speak German.
This happened several years ago; there is no physical evidence that remains. This, as you allude to, is a he-said-she-said situation. I assume there are emails/texts/etc. that might speak to Pretty's poor character and ill intent, but that's not much. In the US this would almost certainly not be enough for a conviction. Maybe it would be in Germany or the UK, but I suspect not.
Agree that she may have opened herself up to legal liability (at least an accusation of libel or defamation). As I recall, in the UK it is harder than in the US to defend oneself in court against accusations of libel.
It is possible, though, that Pretty might be dissuaded from bringing any legal action because doing so will only draw more attention to his bad behavior, and could result in a worse situation for him than just going and hiding under a rock for a few years.
not needed, she has plenty of people who can coroborate her story and even somebody who stepped forward as another victim. impossible to ignore under German law.
> Maybe it would be in Germany or the UK, but I suspect not.
it is most certainly prosecuted in Germany as I've indicated. I can't promise he'll get a conviction but he certainly would get his time in "U-Haft" given he presents a flight risk.
I agree that the chances of Pretty having the stomache to come after her with libel charges are remote. But if what she says is the truth then she shouldn't have anything to fear. She has people who said this happened to them too and others who saw things. It would all be very hard to ignore.
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.
No, because Gacy was accused of things that were actually illegal, whereas much of what Pretty was accused of is clearly not illegal, just shitty. So, as I said in my comment and hardly “glossed over,” the court of public opinion (and the possibility of social / professional sanction) are entirely appropriate!
This idea that individuals aren’t allowed to publicly criticize the actions of public figures, or report on their own experiences with public figures, is so painfully stupid that I find it astonishing that you are arguing in good faith. This is not something you would actually believe in other contexts (say, if a CEO is accused of verbal abuse).
> This idea that individuals aren’t allowed to publicly criticize the actions of public figures, or report on their own experiences with public figures, is so painfully stupid that I find it astonishing that you are arguing in good faith.
Then maybe you should step back and consider the possibility that you are misunderstanding the point and arguing with a straw man. I never at any point said that “individuals aren’t allowed to publicly criticize the actions of public figures”, and I don’t think you’re acting in good faith by interpreting me as such.
I’m not saying the court of public opinion is the wrong venue for this sort of thing; I’m saying the court of public opinion is, by any reasonable standard, a kangaroo court, and we should exercise much more caution and skepticism toward its judgments than we exercise towards the judgments made by a court of law. Keeping this caution in mind is, in fact, what distinguishes a measured application of social/professional sanction from outright “mob justice”.
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.
“A clown can get away with murder.”
—John Wayne Gacy
John Wayne Gacy, often called the "Killer Clown," was one of the worst serial killers in U.S. history, raping and murdering at least 33 young male victims.
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.
And people who are accused are damned, period. I can see why mob justice can sometimes be the only options for victims, but the abuse potential is massive.
By the way, I see no reason a woman or a trans person could not make this statement.
I think people grossly exaggerate this. We have libel and slander laws. Individual companies aside, entire communities of people aren't that stupid. In my opinion, this is a really pessimistic view of people and also not based in reality in my experience.
At the end of the day, we need to be able to listen to victims. The amount of fake accusers compared to real victims is microscopic.
"And people who are accused are damned, period."
Not really. There are literally countless examples of accusations/allegations and nothing happening to people for whatever reason, usually influence/popularity.
> I think people grossly exaggerate this. We have libel and slander laws.
Yeah, but think about how those work. (IANAL).
If I can convince enough people that you are an awful person, I can ruin your reputation. As a recourse, you can sue me for defamation. But once you do that, we’ve switched sides—now I am the defendant and you are the accuser. Unlike a criminal defendant, the defendant in the court of public opinion never enjoys a presumption of innocence. Instead, he has to carry that burden of proof through a civil lawsuit just to clear his name.
> Individual companies aside, entire communities of people aren't that stupid.
If that’s true, why bother with courts of law in the first case? If the mob is capable of adjudicating questions of guilt or innocence, we’re wasting a lot of money on lawyers as a society.
I should note that my brother thought exactly the way you did, before this happened to him. Just an FYI.
He didn't move to Portland randomly. He's the most liberal of the liberal. Just remember that you almost never hear media coverage of accusations that turn out to be false. You just hear about the accusations when they are first made. Do you think the coverage of the Duke Lacrosse case was equally high after the accusations were proven to be fabricated?
>"I think people grossly exaggerate this. We have libel and slander laws."
I don't understand what those laws have to do with this? As if they somehow protect a potentially innocent party from incorrect accusations? At what point would an accusation such as the one in the blog post even constitute as libel/slander?
We need to be able to listen to accusers. We also need to be able to evaluate the accusations honestly. If it's taboo to express doubt or skepticism of accusations of sexual impropriety, then that isn't functional either.
I think you've got the phenomenon backwards: when people are skeptical of a murder accusation or an alleged robbery, it's accepted as part of normal discourse. But showing skepticism of allegations of sexual impropriety is not.
Right. I think it's reasonable to be doubtful if there is only one accuser, and the accused can provide hard evidence refuting at least some of the accuser's claims.
But when several people stand up to make accusations, and there's a bunch of corroboration, it's hard to wonder if skeptics are skeptical out of bad faith, even subconsciously. I'm not sure we've passed this threshold with Pretty, but two accusations, as well as some others corroborating parts of the stories, is starting to look pretty compelling.
I'm curious to know what Pretty's response will be, but I think he already has a steep uphill climb.
There's also the possibility that you believe the testimony of the accusers, but what they allege is not sexual assault. What exactly is Pretty being accused of? The two women's statements talk a lot about how their relationship with Pretty left them feeling used and objectified. But they're pretty sparse when it comes to detailing an actual instance of sexual assault. This is where Vic describes her relationship with Pretty:
> What followed was an on-and-off long-distance relationship in late 2015-2017. He visited me on his terms when it was convenient for his nomadic lifestyle. I quickly grew to feel isolated and objectified by him. As a non-native English speaker, I often felt manipulated, but I found it hard to articulate why. He wanted to constantly monitor my activities. He habitually criticized my lifestyle choices and diminished my self-esteem.
Pretty only wanted casual sex at his convenience, and his relationship with Vic left her feeling criticized. A bad boyfriend? Sure. A sex crime? Not even remotely. Yifan's allegation that Pretty had sex with her when she was drunk comes closer, but she's still vague about it.
I don't think Pretty really has much of a hill to climb. I believe the allegations, but at the same time I believe Pretty is innocent of any crime. He probably seeks out inexperienced women, and presents greater commitment than he really harbors. Scummy? Yeah. Criminal? No. Worthy of ostracism? Maybe, but I'd want to hear his side of the story first.
It's also a completely false argument since there's libel and slander laws. If the accused was innocent, they would simply sue the false accuser. That they don't says everything.
The barrier and punishment for coming forward as a victim of sexual abuse, rape or harassment is great indeed. Questioning every case is ignorance of existing laws setup to handle any false accusations.
Not trying to sue someone for slander doesn't actually say anything.
There's a lot of factors. How much will it cost? How much publicity will it generate and is that worse than just letting it go? What is the standard of proof that must be met and are they confident they can prove that it's a false statement? What are the consequences if they somehow fail to meet that burden? Etc.
Also, how did the left become the party of "if he's in the courtroom he must be guilty of something"?
So are you saying that victims must win a court case to have their story believed but perpetrators should be taken at their word?
If someone wants to clear their name, go to court and sue for slander. If it's two people's word against each other, I'll believe the victim every time since there's such a high cost of coming forward and slander laws exist.
EDIT Since I'm now throttled...
I'm saying that coming forward either means:
1. Something really happened to you.
2. You're breaking the law and can be punished.
High stakes, no? Which is one of the many reasons false accusations are exceedingly rare if not non-existent.
I will always believe the victim unless the perpetrator wins a libel case. It's the legal mechanism for fighting back.
So are you saying that victims (of slander) must win a court case to have their story believed but perpetrators (of slander) should be taken at their word?
The sword cuts both ways.
Except it doesn't, because if you're in the news for {serious crime} and later clear your name, your reputation is still probably trashed. There is no real mechanism for recovery in the modern panopticon. Lowering standards of evidence required for conviction (to basically nothing, if some people are taken seriously) is such a kludgy, cumbersome hack to solve this problem that it shocks me that people present it seriously. It's utopian thinking.
> So are you saying that victims must win a court case to have their story believed but perpetrators should be taken at their word?
Not the person to whom you're replying, but the presumption of innocence means this exactly. If you are accused of a crime, you are presumed innocent until it can be proven you're not.
So in your judgement, a person who is accused is guilty if they don't retaliate with a slander/libel lawsuit? Did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, lawyers and filing lawsuits might be expensive, prohibitively so?
The "existing laws setup to handle any false allegations" exist only for accusations made in the court system.
It's amazing to me how little thought people like you have behind your beliefs. You basically just regurgitate what you heard from your college electives with zero mindfulness or introspection.
That's not how libel and slander works. You not only have to prove that the statements were false, but that the accuser knew they were false and was deliberately malicious in spreading the falsehoods
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.
Sounds like your brother believed in something and sacrificed everything. If I were him, I might hire an employment lawyer and sue the shit out of them. Ya know, "Just do it."
The cost was hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the company would have fought it for about 3 years, based on the advice of the wrongful termination specialist he consulted. He would have been bankrupted, and did what most people do, and just moved on.
Can you explain the reasoning a bit more? JPKab's argument is that the estimated costs were $100k+. In my uneducated eyes, the estimated cost of reporting a crime is 30 minutes trip to the police station and filling some report / talking to someone, maybe 2 hours of your time? Essentially trivial.
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.
JPKab's point was that pursuing justice would be very costly to his brother (assuming that he didn't win). I can't see how pursuing justice is costly to your sister (my condolences!). There is a low chance of success in both of those pursuits.
Clearly the original crime is costly in both cases, much more so in the case of your sister!
That's awful. Even more reason for me to despise That Company.
My father managed a mom & pop shoe store in the 80s. That Company got its start distributing through small local shoe stores, and as soon as they started making big bucks, began treating the local stores like garbage. Throughout my childhood, we were banned from buying or wearing their, as you accurately put it, overpriced, low quality crap.
He was told his case was legitimate, but the cost was too much for him to afford. Also, large corporations have massive legal teams.
The narrative that is widely believed is that "the cost of making an accusation is so high that nobody would do it, so automatically believe accusers" and they pretend that there is no cost to being accused.
It's an oversimplification and ignores the game theory involved in these things.
Yes clearly, if he has corroborating evidence. Also, it's easy to get an unfair dismissal lawyer on compensation share I.e. they take 40% of any compensation as their fee. Plus if it's a major corp and your brother has evidence then they'll usually have a budget/insurance for paying off these types of claims.
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.
> 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?
I'm confused that you think this is something I can prove through citations. The way we adjudicate whether someone is a victim is through the courts, my claim is the courts do a bad job of this. There are only two things I can think to poinnt you at:
1. The numerous written accounts online of women attempting to get justice and being stonewalled. Some of the more famous cases during the beginning of the #metoo era showed this.
2. I can say that the lived experience of every woman I know to have gone through the courts found it unnecessarily degrading (n~=20) and while I believe all of them, only a quarter (n~=5) received a guilty verdict. I know far more women who did not go through the process due to stories from women they know.
I'm personally convinced, if you're not I understand but am not ready to expend the energy digging up cases to try and convince you.
> can you clarify what you mean by "verbally insulting and degrading them"
Literal slurs, misogynistic generalizations about women being temptresses, stereotypically horrible questions such as "were you asking for it?"
> 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?
Nobody is asking for near 100% conviction rates.
In the UK there are about 150,000 rapes per year. Police record about 60,000 crimes. CPS prosecutes fewer than 5,000 cases. Courts convict fewer than 2,000 people.
Rape is a very serious crime. A less than 2% conviction rate is failing the victims.
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”?
Of course not, but that's because I know my friend personally. If I saw someone putting up posters outside my apartment complex saying "the guy in Unit 214 is an asshole, he used to beat me up in middle school", I wouldn't spread the accusation without knowing more about what's going on.
I can't imagine a situation where I would spread an accusation against someone I don't know based on the word of other people I don't know. I'm frankly a bit confused why this is controversial - it seems like common sense to me, and nobody I know in real life has ever done this. (Of course, this is symmetric, so I wouldn't disbelieve the accusation either.)
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).
As the parent mentioned, the problem isn't recourse it is by that stage your life is already ruined. I don't think there is a clear answer though, the only moral thing to do is to support the accuser.
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?
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.
You've listed a number of disparately connected recent news events and referred to some ominous "Court of Public Opinion" which has come to some perspective as if it somehow unites them. My point is you're drawing some thread and connecting this all to your brother. I'll echo again something I said in another reply, I'm not sure how analogous or connected these things are. It sounds mostly like your brother had his word against another accusation, and HR sided against him. Is HR now the "court of public opinion?" I thought that qualifies as due process in this case.
Again you're making some bigger point only you seem to be hearing but spell it out for me and for everyone else.
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.
My point is that these are not that analogous. The linked account is one of many accusations against John Pretty. What the comment is referring to is an accusation that sounds like it's one person's word against another and primarily a conflict confined to one HR department. It isn't really "mob justice" then, it's HR siding with one party.
Well, in this instance given that his coworkers sent him a gift basket, it sounds like the mob came to the right conclusions while the institution took the wrong action.
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.
A relative ran an online community. It was small, but not tiny
There was some cyber-bullying (for lack of a better word) going on. My relative called law-enforcement, then was referred to the FBI. A case was filed and was told they would circle back on it to collect details. They never called back. My relative was never able to make contact with them about it again.
Completely ignored. I can't remember the details, but it wasn't just a "you're fat and ugly" type of bullying. But it was a real safety issue for a member of the community. Law enforcement completely failed in this case.
Now what?
I despise the "public court". The internet and viral online comments deciding who's innocent and who's guilty. (the man during the US capitol riots who lost his job because he was seen in a photo holding a black woman. Turns out, he was actually saving her life! But the "public court" announced him as guilty and they went after him, contacting his employer, people saying awful things about him online. https://kfor.com/news/washington-dc-bureau/white-man-seen-in... )
But on the flip side... what do you do when law enforcement completely fails?
The difference between posts like the one Yifan made about the sexual assault/rape and your news article you linked is that in one, neither person talked about what happened, and in the other, one of them is being _extremely_ clear and explicit about what happened. Don't pretend that Yifan's article is anything like that photo of the man grabbing the woman.
I guess you’re responding to something I didn’t intend to convey because I’m a little confused to find this comment.
To be clear: what I was responding to the comment that said only “contact law enforcement”. I was merely pointing out that “contact[ing] law encoforcement” is not a silver bullet.
But I was also mourning that the alternative (the court of public opinions? Is that the right phrase?) also has its problems. Sometimes it feels like we have no options.
You mean the law enforcement in a foreign country that you are visiting for only a few days? The one that would require you to spend untold thousands of dollars, that you don't have, on flights if you had to testify in a court in a language that you do not fluently speak?
This seems international though, this is not simple. As a victim doubly so, since you also have to combat your damaged pyche. In the end there needs to be an investigation, but sadly some uproar is needed for something to happen in cases like these.
Law enforcement will tell you to pound sand. Much (not all) of this kind of abuse isn't illegal, and DAs rarely want to prosecute the parts that are. It ruins their district's crime stats, it's difficult to prosecute, and many of them just don't care.
Not to mention that this took place while traveling to a foreign country.
Edit: I'm assuming that folks disagreeing with this post have had nothing but success with reporting sexual harassment and assault to police departments, foreign and domestic... Because the alternative assumption is a lot less charitable.
This is generally a good idea and the right thing to do, but cancel culture still exists for some reason. Probably it's because people do not trust conventional justice and do not believe in law enforcement?
Law enforcement is not perfect and these crimes are often hard to prove in isolation. So worst case you go to law enforcement, they talk to the perpetrator but do nothing, and then the perpetrator mostly destroys your future career. A lot of downside and risk for the victim. You can look at the film industry for numerous famous examples of victims being blacklisted in retaliation.
That’s exactly my point. The law enforcement is not adequate to the needs of society and cannot offer efficient protection for victims. Cancel culture can be ugly, but for many it’s the only way to get justice, and it is a sign that some reform is needed.
In the legitimate "cancel culture" cases you generally find that all other avenues have been tried multiple times, often for years.
In the original #metoo Hollywood case it's that the whole culture was/is rotten and has been for decades. There's no other recourse because the culture normalizes "casting couch" type stuff. That's where the term comes from after all.
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.
>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.
Change just a handful of words and this exactly describes Stallman. I think my description is more apt than you might think.
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.
> 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,
None of those things even remotely imply consent for a sexual advance. Those are all things that should be fine for anyone of any gender to do together without there being fear of a sexual assault.
Anyone who looks at that list and thinks that it's ok to have unwanted sexual intercourse because they happened to have a bottle of wine in an AirBNB I'm not sure I want to associate with.
She says that he 'insisted'. Typically someone 'insisting' on something implies an initial 'no'.
And furthermore, "not saying no" is not the bar for consent. An enthusiastic, unambiguous yes is the bar for consent. Not giving consent is the default, assumed position until that yes arrives.
In English, it can mean doing it. "I wanted to split the check, but he insisted on picking up the bill." For instance, could mean that the person paid the whole bill or that they are putting up a strong resistance.
As an thought experiment try to think that your husband/wife does those things with somebody (accepts invitation to sleep in the same airbnb, without anybody else, with single opposite sex, bringing bottle of wine) - would you be worried? And if yes, why? Is it not even remotely possible that somebody would feel weird about their partner doing it?
One thing you’re missing here is that sexual consent is an ‘in the moment’ thing. Someone might be coming over to your place fully intending to have sex with you and then change their mind. You have to respect that.
Absolutely, agree. One thing you may be missing is that description doesn't mention anything like that happening and the opportunity to mention it is right there. Why wouldn't this be mentioned if it happened?
It says "there was another time that he insisted ..." which unfortunatelly forms ambiguous sentence, it's not clear if it happened or he just insisted and that's it.
Later paragraph reads "I maintained friendship with him for a few months after May, because I was convinced that it was all consensual ...".
I'm not a lawyer but the case of "being convinced of consent" at one time and after few months changing mind about the situation and realising it was not a consent makes an interesting case.
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.
"Insisting" on sex does not mean sex happened. If you're a shitty person and ask another person "come on have sex with me", and the other person says "no", and then you don't have sex, are you now a rapist?
> The construction used by the author indicates that it happened. That's how the term is used.
Do you actually believe that or are you just making stuff up? If the author had actually been raped-while-screaming-no-stop, I'm pretty sure they would have explicitly said so. This article is extremely well articulated and thought out, I'm pretty sure that would be explicitly in the article if it happened. To me the "insisted" line in the article sounds like there was an event where the man was being an asshole and trying to have sex, and the woman said no, and they didn't have sex at that time (or the woman changed their mind, said yes, and then they did have sex).
>The author doesn't appear to want to make the claim that Mr. Pretty raped her
That is quite different from the question of whether what happened was rape. (EDIT: To make it clear, if it did happen as the author writes, then I totally agree that it was rape. This is completely distinct from the question of the author's intent to make the claim that she was raped. The word does not occur in her piece.)
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.
I don't agree. The crime here seems to be rape and the use of power to extract sex from another. That's the problem. I don't see how sharing an AirBnB is by itself a problem. In light of everything else, it fits a pattern of manipulation, but it by itself isn't harmful.
She would not otherwise have been able to attend. She is able to attend specifically because of his "generosity". This wasn't something she proposed, and when she tried to bring others into the arrangement he pushed back, insisting it was just the two of them.
So yeah, sharing an AirBNB isn't necessarily bad, but in this case specifically it appears to be predatory.
I agree that by itself it wouldn’t necessarily be a “problem” but even so, it would strike a lot of people as pushing the boundaries of appropriateness.
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.
Similar happened to me. I dated a woman whose step sister was dating my 2nd cousin (no genetic interbreeding). At some point we had a falling out about her infidelity, but her emotional sway with both her family and mine were more supportive of her story. At first it was just "it didn't work out" but as time passed she decided, for reasons I don't know or understand, that I needed to be punished. She invented several different stories and spread them at the family gatherings I wasn't invited to, and eventually I had both her and her extended family and my extended family first avoiding me, then actively excluding me from communication and visits.
Eventually I learned that she claimed I was touching her daughter and was cheating on her with her coworker (whom I had never even met). I tried to defend myself but it was too late.
Today she has been married and divorced twice, and I have zero contact with any of those involved. I only know her status because Facebook doesn't stop sending me update email despite deactivating that account years ago.
Point is, the whisper network is powerful, and doesn't give a shit about reality.
I'm sorry this happened to you. I definitely believe it happened to you, without knowing you, because I don't see much reason for you to make it up..
It's a shame your ex made up lies about you, that probably happens a lot.
It is worth pointing out that you are trying to make a point with this story, and you are the only one telling it, and I'm supposed to take you on your word that this actually happened..
Yet here we have multiple adult grown adult women, unrelated to each other yet similar (minorities, poor, vulnerable), trying to make their point with 3x the "backing", and so many want to call them liars immediately.
Like a previous story, this is truly harrowing, and I think everyone reading this sympathesizes with you. This however doesn't really sound like exes teaming up to destroy you, this is just one bad person.
Edit: since I wasn't clear, I am looking for examples of when this has happened to you, or your friend, or anyone that you have heard of...
Edit 2: also by "pretty much" does not happen, I don't mean never happens. But I think the rate at which it happens is probably a rounding error, and I think a lot of people would rather just say "oh well they could be lying" before even bothering to read what they have to say.
Projared, a game review channel on youtube was falsely accused of being a child predator by a bunch of kids who coordinated to destroy him on discord. Those kids provided fabricated "evidence" and managed to destroy Projared's growth, get their channel booted of their network, and destroyed their business relationships with their sponsors and other partners. All this because of the mentality that multiple parties can't lie. The poor host was branded a pedophile by everyone and looked like he aged 10 years in a couple of months.
Projared was fortunate enough to posses the mental fortitude and evidence needed to clear his name. Others in a similar position might not be as lucky.
Both of these cases were high school situations, a typically traumatizing environment, with immature teenaged people.
I'm sorry, I do not see the same likelihood of collusion in this case of intelligent women who had no relation to each other. I am not saying it is impossible, but I have a hard time seeing it.
What on earth makes you feel confident enough to say something like “this just pretty much does not happen without reason” . Some empirical evidence I hope.
Where are you getting your stats from that you're referring to? If it is a hunch, you shouldn't say "statistically".
Also, it seems fairly presumptive to assume that ex-partners are intelligent. And to assume that intelligent people don't do crazy things(see: Lisa Nowak)
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.
There doesn’t need to be a grand conspiracy to want to smear someone. Additionally, what happened to innocent until PROVEN guilty? Allegations are not proof.
Yeah, you're right! If enough people say you did something you should have to prove you didn't do that thing. Everyone knows it's much easier to prove something didn't happen, then to prove something did. Show me the evidence you didn't do the thing!
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.
Projared, a youtuber, got his business destroyed and was falsely labeled a pedophile because a group of kids coordinated a release. Unless a conviction is secured, a coordinated statement is meaningless if you care about justice.
"If a bunch of your ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends got together to assassinate your character..." you are probably attracted to extremely destructive relationships. You might be confusing drama with passion.
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.
Some evidence that would help would be conversations which were allegedly had, where one party clearly says "Don't contact me any more at all", and then later attempts of the other party to contact them.
This isn't proof, it is evidence, but I think that would help a bit. Even if party A and party B disagree about something that happened, if party A says stop contacting me, and party B continues to do so, that is wrong enough in itself.
not OP and I believe the accusations. but if she would have wanted a) real justice and b) create even more hell for the accused while c) staying out of the firing line of misogynists on social media, and d) get closure sooner because people won't be after her for the next years to remind her, then she should have filed a police report.
Given his situation (see my other comment[1] on why) she could have made his situation much (I repeat MUCH MUCH) worse than what she did. I wouldn't want to know the amount of abuse she now gets because of it and in the months (if not years to come).
Have you ever filed a police report regarding rape/sexual assault? It can be incredibly dehumanizing, especially when it is nearly impossible to prove that someone date-raped you when there are no witnesses.
> Have you ever filed a police report regarding rape/sexual assault?
no, have you?
I do know people in the system so I'm quite familiar with how they work (and what is lore from the US and Hollywood that people assume vs how it works). Germany isn't some Banana Republic, so she actually gets a professional (even she shows up without a lawyer) walking her through these things.
> It can be incredibly dehumanizing
so you do have personal experience with it how this works in Germany? Do tell me, is it more dehumanizing than going on social media and knowing that you will be hunted by misogynists for the next couple of years so you won't ever get closure and need to hope that the mood of the mob doesn't go against you one day (because you have no legal ground to stand on)? I hardly think so.
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.
The default boundary should be "I do not want to have sex with you".
It's even more important when one person is in a position of power and when there's an inherent element of trust (teacher, mentor, etc.) because it's going to be much more complicated for a person to set appropriate boundaries and feel like they can say no to them.
I'm not blaming her. I'm ignorant of any facts. I'm just saying she doesn't seem to have her head screwed on quite as tight as Accacin suggests.
Accacin suggests that sharing a plausible story is proof of wrongdoing. I don't think so. I'm ignorant. Accacin is ignorant. Everybody on this thread is ignorant of the facts.
I'm saying that Jon Pretty shouldn't have his livelihood and career destroyed by ignorant people and an accuser who admits to having her own set of issues.
I'm not a jury, I do not require any proof. I'm not asking for the guy in question to be arrested or anything else. The story has come out, now it's a matter for the relevant authorities.
I'm merely saying that I believe what she's saying, and as I've not got the power to arrest, it's perfectly okay for me not to require more proof than a general feeling of her honesty.
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 once had 11 different people, all friends, accuse me of doing something bad(littering). Literally everyone was confident I did it. They all saw me do it. Everyone piled on me to just admit I did it. I said I never littered, that I hate litterers, and that I have never even eaten the kind of food item that the wrapper came from. They got even madder at me for denying that I did it, as if I was trying to gaslight them all.
Email threads were started where one person collected everyone's recollection of the events, who was there, and what happened. Every response lined up perfectly with each other. I don't think anyone explicitly coordinated their accusations, but knowing there were multiple other accusers certainly made the accusers feel more comfortable and correct in their accusations.
I was presented with the evidence, literal written testimony of 11 people who I considered my friends at the time. I was given an ultimatum to admit it or be kicked out of the group. I said I wouldn't admit it. I started looking at each person's recollection.
You know what actually happened, that all 11 people missed? There were actually 13 people in the group that day. The 13th person, that absolutely everyone forgot about, was a person who didn't normally attend the group. He is 6'10" and 350 lbs. Hard to miss. But everyone forgot about him. I called him up, put him on speaker phone in front of everyone, and asked him "Did you eat <food item> last time we hung out?" His response "yes". I then asked him "Did you throw the wrapper on the ground?" His response "yes".
I asked my friends if that settled the matter, and everyone still believed that I was the litterer. So I stopped hanging out with them.
Nobody was vindictive at the start. But they were all so confident of their own recollections that they became vindictive when I said that they weren't remembering things correctly.
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?
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.
> 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.
Maybe "somebody" doesn't like him and managed to convince multiple other "somebodies" who (I assume in your scenario have nothing against him?) to put themselves and their reputations on the line tell lies about him?
Every case is different and should be judged on the merit of testimony of those involved and actual evidence.
Due process and presumption of innocence are good things.
Always believing accusers isn't a good principle. It enables and emboldens abusers not acting in good faith, especially people with narcissistic and borderline personality disorders
I re-read the article to try to figure out what this "specific case" actually might be.
Two people engaged in a consensual physical relations. She was not happy with the outcome.
At the time, she "did not blame him for what happened, and didn't think those behaviors were problematic at the time. ... I maintained friendship with him for a few months after May, because I was convinced that it was all consensual."
So, only months/years later does she decide she's a victim.
She absolves herself of all responsibility ("There was nothing [I did] to cause this"). Yet, she brought wine to dinner with her mentor, drinks until she's hammered while her partner does not drink (Who does that? Other than alcoholics?). Somehow, every decision she makes is his fault.
90% of the article is about her feelings and his responsibility for them. She feels entitled that he show her "remorse, sympathy, and guilt."
She repeatedly accuses him of gaslighting, when it seems more accurate to say they had different recollections or expectations.
She quotes “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.” implying he is evil and she is an avenging vigilante.
"I am not trying to convince anyone of anything." This is disingenuous. I think this her way of saying "This is my story, therefore I do not need to provide proof of anything."
"by speaking up, I can take my stolen power back." It's not obvious how her "power" was stolen. Maybe what she really means is, "I feel powerful by destroying his career."
Mature adults learn from uncomfortable experiences and move on. Emotional infants wallow in life-long self-pity and construct elaborate fantasies to support their victimhood.
--
Any woman.
Can take down any man.
At any time.
With a word.
- An Empowered Feminist
I'm fairly certain that exists, but it's actually not a requirement to never have false accusations before justice can be pursued.
In the same hypothetical where character assassinations can be organized and bring someone down with false accusations, the same can be true of defending someone as well. Multiple people coordinating by speaking in defense of someone against accusations are just as possible.
I'd even speculate and say there's more instances of coordinated defense happening more often than false accusations, as powerful people being protected from accusations is what started MeToo
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.
Your second link puts forth some very dubious examples of coercion. In reality, laws vary by state. While some of the examples it lists (such as threatening physical violence) unambiguously invalidate consent, others almost certainly do not (such as ending a relationship if there is no sex). This is a more in-depth review of non-physical coercion: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/25544/4-...
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.
"We will not use or promote any software artifacts that are maintained by Mr. Pretty"
This part seems over the top. You go down this road and you end up in some foss hell. Later you find out someone who abused someone checked in code in linux. You can't use windows or a mac because of jobs and gates and you are back on a c64 until you realize what a bad person Jack was and you end up on OS/2.
I guess those who signed want to use an unmaintained version?
I get that people want to do something. Maybe conferences are not the best avenue for the community to meet safely. Providing gender safe housing would go a long way to having a more successful conference if successful means less rapes.
Edit: Would you characterize that part as "a bit like a public lynching"? Because I definitely wouldn't, even if I disagreed with it or felt it was too much.
---
I think you are very uncharitably reading that comment. There's a difference between, "This person checked some code into a repo" and "this person is the maintainer of a project".
And I think that it's reasonable for people to hold the stance of, "I don't want to run this person's code because I believe they are a serial abuser" and to clearly state why. If other repos see that, maybe they decide to take on that stance, maybe they don't.
They encourage others to consider doing the same, but the don't demand them.
If you are not going to fork and maintain the repos yourself encoraging others not to use open source is a weird group control method that doesn't feel right. Remember the code is open and apolitical.
Even thought I disagree with the group who signed the document I will still use whatever they maintain if it makes sense for my project.
Sure, we all make choices and have our own values. We all prioritize differently. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to ask you not to use a library, and it's not unreasonable for you to politely decline their request.
>Which part of that is 'a bit like a public lynching'?
We further resolve that:
We will not support the efforts of any party in the Scala community that provides a platform to Mr. Pretty. That includes, but is not limited to, boycotting events the party organizes and refusing to buy any product or service the party offers.
We will not attend any conference or user group meeting organized or attended by Mr. Pretty.
We will not attend any conference or user group meeting that does not have a code of conduct that is both specific (it must not allow predatory sexual advances in professional spaces) and actionable (it must provide a safe and accessible reporting mechanism for people who have been targeted).
We will not use or promote any software artifacts that are maintained by Mr. Pretty.
I'd rather avoid believing anything within Scala community until its proven.
The similarity is that both are mob actions, done without legal charges or rules of evidence.
I'm not defending the guy specifically; I have no idea whether he's a guilty scumbag or a persecuted innocent. But even jerks deserve a certain amount of due process before punishment. Maybe she's the scumbag? I don't know, and neither do you.
That’s not what lynching is. Lynching is mob justice without a trial. The name came from Charles Lynch, who punished Loyalists during the American Revolution.
In the US, lynching has extremely strong implications of racist violence. It's not strictly the definition of the word, but most folks in the states will understand a lynching to imply race related murders.
I'm not. In fact, I'm the opposite. That's literally why I wrote that comment. It was for the benefit of people who were not US citizens who may not understand that a US reader will likely interpret the phrase that way.
not me or you are to judge this, we don't know the details, it may as well be that he is completely shit partner and not much more than that, which is not unlawful.
do you think after those posts his scala/programming/whatever he's doing career won't suffer? he's dead in many professional circles regardless if he's jail material or not.
He wasn't her "partner", he was her mentor; he abused his position, tricked her into staying in an apartment alone with him, got her drunk and forced himself on her against her wishes.
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.
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.
Please provide sources, hint: make sure not to include people asking questions and not categorically wanting to lynch the horrible rapist based on a single story and you interpreting that as "creep defenders".
The crimes were mostly committed in foreign countries of which neither party is a resident and which the parties were only visiting for a short duration of time. Countries whose language the victim may not speak fluently or at all. The chance of getting the local police to care is low and even if they did the cost of flights to testify at trials would be beyond the means of the victim.
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.
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 essentially assumes incompetence on the part of women. That's not the only possible explanation.
I don't even think it's the most plausible explanation. Social pressure and upbringing are large factors in human behavior and it takes time to make society-wide changes.
Is noting that women have two times less upper body strength misogynistic because it implies less competency in hand-to-hand combat or heavy manual labor?
I'm assuming women are more compassionate and less aggressive, which makes women less competent in competitive settings where self-advocacy is important, and more competent in scenarios requiring cooperation and caretaking, like child-rearing.
Whether these differences are inherent to female biology, or a result of deeply ingrained structures of human culture that mold girls in their upbringing is orthogonal to my premise. But as it happens, there is overwhelming/definitive evidence that much of these differences are biological in origin, and noting that is not misogynistic.
We do not make the world better by deceiving ourselves about it. An accurate model of the world is needed before any positive changes for it can be formulated. A positive but inaccurate vision of the world does not result in actions that improve the world.
There is zero reason to believe that this superficial appearance is due to innate wiring.
Female aspies tend to be under diagnosed because girls get pressured to conform socially so much that even when they have an actual social disability, they are expected to get with the program anyway.
That right there is shocking evidence of the extreme social pressure the world places on girls and not boys.
There is every reason to believe that higher female agreeableness is due biological sex differences, given
1. the evidence, which I'd be happy to share if you're actually open to having your views changed
2. females bear children and have been the primary caregivers of young children throughout all of human evolution, which is going to apply massive selective pressure for sex-mediated traits in females conducive to nurturing children, like agreeableness
Personal observation is not 'pulling it out of thin air'.
And I did the opposite of victim blaming. I stated that even a woman's consent does not absolve men of responsibility for women suffering poor outcomes as a result of the interaction.
You mischaracterized my comment to an extreme degree, without even bothering to understand, let alone contend with, the points raised.
Attitudes like this are not conducive to constructively discussing complex social issues. They lead to the forwarding of certain propositions being avoided, out of a fear of eliciting exactly the kind of response you provided, which increases the possibility that society will settle on a faulty model of the situation, and thereby not institute changes that improve it.
Sorry, but what a pathetic tone policing reply to blatant misogynistic garbage about women being inherently "more emotional", "We've tried the 'rawr girl power", and so on. You're just wrong and clearly not worth the energy.
Being held to account for your false accusations is not "tone policing", so please stop gaslighting.
I didn't write that women are "more emotional". I wrote they are generally "more emotionally vulnerable".
It's irresponsible to make extremely harsh accusations against someone when the analysis that the accusation is based on is sloppy and low-effort.
And as an aside, claiming that women are generally more emotional wouldn't be misogynistic, any more than noting that men are generally more aggressive is misandrist. There is nothing sexist about claiming general psychological differences between the sexes.
Your accusations are extreme mischaracterizations, and the basis of your dismissal of my argument is based on a weak/entirely-ideological heuristic.
Let me suggest this then. Post your initial reply to a forum with a lot of women and ask if they find it misogynistic.
Adults can "read between the lines". Putting all your statements together draws a perfectly clear misogynistic narrative. No amount of deflection by trying to rebrand each point individually will make that go anyway.
I don't have time to run that experiment, and that wouldn't prove anything any way. Opinion polls don't tell us what the truth is about anything except opinions.
There is no misogynistic narrative between the lines. That misogynists would exploit the facts I am presenting to push their narrative does not make me uttering those facts misogynistic.
We cannot avoid certain ideas and discussions out of fear that bad people will incorporate them into the narrative they use to push their agenda. Their narrative has to be countered by presenting factual arguments, not by avoidance of discussion and suppression of facts.
> Opinion polls don't tell us what the truth is about anything except opinions.
If you honestly believe that there's some sort of objective "exactly here is the line, don't cross it!" I feel bad for you.
> the facts I am presenting
Facts? It was a blatantly fact-free reply with your subjective "takes"; - "maybe the old times was better because I think women can't handle this new reality".
It's surprising to you that someone did not fulfil a request from a random person on the internet who has been rude and angry toward them, while mischaractering their statements, to post their argument in another forum?
I even gave you a reason why it would be pointless, and yet you insist on making this passive aggressive accusation.
>>Facts? It was a blatantly fact-free reply with your subjective "takes";
I made an argument based on objective facts. If you'd like to discuss my argument, or whether the claims it is premised on are factually correct, we could do that, but your tone and attitude suggest you cannot entertain the possibility that my argument could be right, and that instead you'll just provide more caustic and sarcastic quips.
If you think your first reply was based on objective facts you're delusional. It's full of your subjective assumptions:
> "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."
From your very first reply, up until now, all you have done is personally attack me. That is not a decent or constructive way to contend with points raised.
Like I said, if you disagreed with the claims I'm making, about the psychological profile of a typical woman, or even what proportion of that profile is biologically determined, and expressed that skepticism in a polite and open-minded manner, I would have been happy to provide sources.
But you are not open to counter arguments enough to even evaluate what evidence supports them. Your position on this issue is based on a weak/entirely-ideological heuristic.
More gaslighting where you mischaracterize someone calling you out for your ad hominem attacks as "tone policing". I've already refuted all of your points, and you've simply evaded my points and regurgitated yours.
Let me help you then, take the statement I quoted:
> "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."
"We've tried" = subjective
"rawr girl power, women can do everything men can do' culture" = subjective
"the result" = subjective
"because they were not capable, emotionally/temperamentally" = subjective
What do you mean "subjective"? These are claims about objective reality, which can be proven or disproven with facts. I think you're confused about what 'subjective' means.
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.
Someone being assaulted when they’re intoxicated is not equivalent to someone knowingly driving a car when they’re drunk. The sexual predator consciously chooses to assault their victim; the car doesn’t choose to crash.
EDIT - a lot of you seem to think that this is equivalent to a DUI. It is not. If you are driving under the influence, then you are the perpetrator of the accident. If you are drunk and somebody else sexually assaults you, then the other person is the perpetrator.
Cars don't choose, the driver does. The driver is always responsible, regardless of state of inebriation.
There's a very big distinction to be made here between an assault and if the person gives consent - or sometimes could even be the initiator. Again, to be very clear, I'm not saying that was the case here.
If you get drunk downtown, does it make getting your pockets picked and your smartphone stolen your fault?
You’re stupid if you get drunk downtown with an expensive smartphone where it can be easily stolen. Still, does it mean that you have somehow to share jail time with your thief, or does it mean that the thief has to serve less time, or that your thief may go with your smartphone because it’s your fault to get drunk downtown in the first place?
>If you get drunk downtown, does it make getting your pockets picked and your smartphone stolen your fault?
Even if you are not drunk those are still not your fault in the way its argued here. A better (similar) analogy would be: if you are drunk and someone downtown asks you for 60$ and you give them, but tomorrow realize your mistake, is it your fault?
Worse, you can be sober and still defrauded. Again. This might prove you naïve or stupid, sure, especially if uou should have known better, but not at fault or less of a victim.
> 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).
The point is that many comments here are assuming that men lack the agency to keep themselves from assaulting people. That lets the men off the hook. To your example, if we blame the bear, we should blame the man, as well.
Absolutely. We do blame wild bears for their actions (we shoot them). We should blame men for their actions (shooting them is likely considered less appropriate in most cases).
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.
It does matter in most jurisdictions. Rape is usually not a strict liability crime. Conviction requires both an act (actus reus) and criminal intent (mens rea) on the part of the defendant. (Statutory rape, on the other hand, often is strict liability with only an actus reus requirement).
Generally if an act can be legal or illegal and the defendant believes that they are doing the legal version, the mens rea requirement is not met and the defendant is not guilty. Many jurisdictions do require that the defendant's belief be in good faith and their mistake be one that a reasonable person could make.
For an example of the kind of thing the prosecution must typically prove, here are California's jury instructions for "rape of intoxicated woman or spouse" [1].
I think it may be the only thing that can decide the difference between a crime here or not. If the other person gives consent, then how you judge their ability to make their own decisions here is the difference between having intent to rape or not having intent. Intent matters in a lot of crimes, I don't think it matters in rape cases - I could be wrong.
> Is the perpetrator less guilty of rape depending on his blood alcohol level?
So the victim has no responsibility if blood alcohol level is too high for good judgment, but the perpetrator is responsible no matter their blood alcohol level and judgment? That seems self-contradictory.
> Intent matters in a lot of crimes, I don't think it matters in rape cases
As in other forms of battery, intent matters in rape, but it is thr defendant’s intent to commit the requisite form of physical interaction, not the defendant’s intent with regard to the absence of consent by the alleged victim.
> > > Is the perpetrator less guilty of rape depending on his blood alcohol level?
Interestingly, legally, the answer (in the US) is yes if the intoxication makes him incapable of being cognizant of the nature of the act, because it makes him incapable of thr requisite mental state. But there is a huge caveat: in general, voluntary intoxication has been specifically adopted into law as not defeating the mental state requirement for a crime (or, equivalently, as satisfying it for any mental state up to and including specific intent).
> So the victim has no responsibility if blood alcohol level is too high for good judgment, but the perpetrator is responsible no matter their blood alcohol level and judgment? That seems self-contradictory.
Well, no, its not self-contradictory. If your voluntary intoxication causes harm to yourself, you suffer the consequences as much as if you had chosen the outcome (and that’s true whether or not someone else is punished for their role).
If your voluntary intoxication causes unlicensed harm to someone else, society has decided that you suffer the consequences as much as if you had chosen the action, as well. No inconsistency.
> So the victim has no responsibility if blood alcohol level is too high for good judgment, but the perpetrator is responsible no matter their blood alcohol level and judgment?
Exactly. That's why they're called 'victim' and 'perpetrator'.
If the victim got triple blackout drunk, the only person they'd hurt is themselves. But the rapist, in addition to physical damage, inflicts deep, lasting psychological damage upon their victims. It's not just "regret".
Ok, let's say it's a man and a women, she's the "perpetrator" and he gives consent. She's his boss and they're on a business trip and drank too much at the bar. In the morning he feels taken advantage of and deeply regrets it because he's married. Do you still stand by that?
> If "he gives consent", then she isn't a perpetrator. By definition.
> If one of the parties gets drunk, they can't give consent. Again, by definition.
Say she comes on to him, and he responds enthusiastically. But he's too drunk to give consent by your definition. Then she's just committed a rape? From her POV, also drunk, she made a move, he reciprocated, all in all it was a pleasant evening.
She clearly didn't mean to commit a crime in this case, and both their judgment was impaired. Whose fault is it?
I don't think it's fair to say it's all her fault - and I don't think a court of law could find fault here, fairly, with no witnesses and no evidence.
> 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's not vague. Consent is an enthusiastic and unambiguous yes. Was there an enthusiastic and unambiguous yes? You have consent. Was there not an enthusiastic and unambiguous yes? You do not have consent.
People have agency. They're allowed to choose, of their own free will, to do things they aren't 100% on board with. That includes sex.
Blowing your husband because it wastes less of your time then him trying to woo you or popping a Viagra because your wife is hitting the bong and you know what she's gonna want next aren't ideal but they're facts of some peoples lives.
There's no way you can honestly allege those sorts of things are rape. So how do you justify your redefinition of consent?
Those folks who are not interested can say, "Nah." and if their partner presses the issue that's definitely problematic. A signal of "I'm not interested" should be the end of discussion, there are plenty of tools for folks whose partners aren't in the mood.
That said, there are many folks who aren't enthusiastic about the act itself, but have enthusiasm for the outcome. Many asexual folks I know, for instance, are enthusiastic that they can do something that makes their partners happy, even while not particularly enjoying the act. You are interpreting my definition in only the narrowest possible lens.
I'm not arguing about what consent is, I'm arguing about whether you bear responsibility for what happens to you if you put yourself in a vulnerable position, give consent without being of sound mind, and then regret it later. I think 1) that's pretty dumb to put yourself in that situation, and 2) you do have partial responsibility for what happened.
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.
>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.
If you have a trauma: Work on it with a therapist in private.
Don't write a viral public post about it, ahead of the court case, invite others to comment on it, then blame the women struggle in tech on others who don't agree on the very strong, and damaging, qualifier of rape.
Rape is when you agree to have protected sex, but the man removes the condom sneakily, or the woman punctures the condom. What happened here was consensual sex without a condom, and one party regretting that after the fact (and being unspoken uncomfortable about it during).
Imagine having unprotected two-night stands years back, and suddenly your name is in a widely distributed article, charging you with rape. Like damn, and we wonder in a few years why the overreaction and demonization of the Scala community damaged its growth and inclusion.
I think the US has some different, more prude, views on alcohol, which causes later excesses, requiring education as above.
Alcohol lowers your inhibition and makes you do stupid stuff. When age limit is 16, you do that stupid stuff when you are 17, and know your own limit by the time you are 21 and dating.
If you are a girl at a house party, you drink beyond your limit, go upstairs, and sit on a bed with some boys, you are not responsible for any assault that happens, but you do have your own choices and a will to avoid such risks. For:
> Regardless of how drunk or incapacitated a person may be, it is never their fault that they were assaulted.
does not count for the attackers, who may be very drunk as well, and sitting on a bed with a pretty girl.
Anyway, those rules are more for having students not act out, and have the rich parents of a cheerleader sue the university, when she somehow ended up drunk in the basement of a frat house, completely unable to consent.
Such sexual assault does exist in adult life (under police, not campus - supervision), but is of the degree of completely intoxicating a person, then dragging them home. Not: I drank wine, don't know how much, could have been drunk, then he made an advance on me. Like, she had to remove her clothes herself... it is not like she was passed out on the couch and he forced herself on her.
It was not even "rape" in her own mind, because they had sex another time.
> 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.
If he didn't do anything illegal, then your suggestion that she poke his eyes or break his finger is entirely misplaced. You don't get to hurt people when they're not legally a threat to you.
Never mind how ridiculous a suggestion that is. Do you think maybe she made the rational decision not to risk her safety or even her life by escalating a fight she likely couldn't win?
That's blaming the victim. You can say you don't think she's at fault, but picking at her choices with no consideration of the situation she actually faced isn't "feeling for her."
You should talk to more women in your life about their experiences.
Every suggestion you're making here is premised on priors from your experience as a man that do not hold true for many or most women.
You say she should get out and call her dad or a friend. Yet your own reaction is one of questioning her experience and shaming her for "a long chain of bad decisions to end up drunk on your own wine, in a foreign country, in the apartment of a stranger you met on the internet." Do you imagine that a woman friend of yours reading your comment would trust that she should call you?
This is laughable and just reinforces what I'm saying: you need to listen to more of the women in your life about their actual experiences, not what you imagine them to be. I am not invoking my experience as a man. I am invoking the experiences of the vast majority of women I know. Their experiences are not even close to equal to mine, when it comes to their ease of moving about the world, not to mention their physical safety.
Any person, placed in a situation where they are in danger, can react in a way that isn't necessarily a matter of deciding in the first place. I was pointing out that even where there is a decision to made, it doesn't obviously favor fighting. But your confidence that a victim can fight back ignores what we know about rapes and the fight/flight/freeze stress response. Not reacting is entirely natural and very common, particularly when the situation isn't one that you've trained a habitual response to.
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.
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.