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Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

Ah but did you witness it?

We are all reasonable people here and can agree that this behavior, if true, is disgusting and unacceptable. But is a "claim" evidence and should we assume it is by default "truth"? This is the crux of the issue.

If you stood accused of sexual harassment I'm sure you would hope society would take a moment to gather the facts before judging you, even if on an individual level you weren't a likeable person. Because being likeable and condoning sexual harassment are two different things.

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> Ah but did you witness it?

Of course not. The comment I was replying to was saying (paraphrased) that this is typical, every company has these kinds of accusations, and I'm disagreeing and saying no, this isn't typical, either she made all this up out of whole cloth or Uber is an especially bad outlier.

> But is a "claim" evidence and should we assume it is by default "truth"? This is the crux of the issue.

That is emphatically not the issue, no one in this thread suggested that she should be believed (or disbelieved) uncritically. This stuff is murky enough to discuss without strawmen!

No. I was not talking about the sexual harassement stuff.

I was talking about "people make serious complains and get rebukked". Now, whilere there's quite a wide range of what a "serious complain" is, people say that everywhere.

Not all complains are equal. I'm not pretending they are.

I mean, most of her claims she explicitly mentions having a paper trail. There is probably many legal reasons why she couldn't directly posted the private email and Slack conversations to her personal blog. However, no one is stopping Uber from presenting evidence contrary to her narrative.

Really. You don't need to dump all your ammo on the very first day.

She said what needed to be said. If Uber challenges her account, she can post more information, assuming she is telling the truth (which I am for now).

Can you list some specific pieces of evidence that Uber could post (if they existed) which would change your opinion and make you believe she was not telling the truth?

> Ah but did you witness it?

I am curious about your question. I read Fowler's post, and then subsequent posts,articles,tweets,comments by other women and men indicating that the observations approximately matched their experience at Uber as well. Even in this thread, I see: "I've been with uber for nearly 2 yrs and most of the article content are valid. Employees voicing out genuine concerns will be met with severe rebuke. " . The article this thread is about is from Mitch&Freda Kapoor who are also stating the same.

I'm wondering, do you believe that Fowler's claims are faulty or false in some way and that the issues raised about Uber are similarly faulty/false or are you speaking about other cases/companies?

She says she has screenshots of those messages if she was lying Uber would have sued her by now. They know she has enough actual proofs to back her story.

She should release them.

In the article, she explicitly mentions sending screenshots along with thoroughly documenting the incident.

Yeah, I somehow do not understand why she resorted to blog about it and not just file a law suit (I just asked this in a top level comment).

A lawsuit would not really pay out that much. She got another job, so her damages are, what, a few tens of thousands of dollars? And it would mark her, for life, as someone who sues.

A friend has worked on sexual harassment suits and says it's unfortunate that, as far as he's experienced, every single one he's been involved in has been bogus. Meanwhile, he knows there are several people with good cases who don't bring them, because the social penalties are too high.

Part of the reason I believe her is that she isn't bringing suit. She's not trying to make a payday out of this. Further, she has alleged specific acts which can be definitely proven or disproven. If she made it up, it would be trivial for Uber to show she did so.

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