EDIT: Ah, it seems going on record is necessary to actually bring charges to someone.
https://www.axios.com/pro-rata-2446752020.html
One journalist got six sources, three on the record, and claims to have verified parts of the stories (such as reviewing message history on phones), which led him to have the confidence to go to press.
It just seems like an unnecessary risk/vulnerability. Of course, there's also the fact that by going on the record you also encourage others to do the same, which is an immeasurable benefit.
I know it must have been a hard decision to make because you were probably worried about how you & your company would be treated afterwards but this is going to help open so many people's eyes.
Not only does naming sources give more credibility, it also doesn't rely fully on the credibility of journalists. You can only say "it's true, just trust me" without being able to back it up so many times.
Testimony of anonymous sources are useful as corroboration, not as the main evidence. The sources here don't need to fear for their lives, nor are they able to produce documents to back up their claims.
I do not wish to diminish the courage that was needed to go on the record here. In fact, this is even more risky because hard evidence is so hard to come by in cases like this.
So it happened, it's just that he doesn't realize how wildly unacceptable it was.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but due process exists for a reason. We should reserve judgement until the investigation progresses further.
They have fucking text messages to back their story up. Are those easy to fabricate too, when it comes to rich and powerful people?
My comment was a bit too female-focused. It wasn't about she-said's or a female conspiracy, but rather the ease of getting people to smear someone that has enemies.
It's hard not to notice that the claim of sexual harassment is as equally damaging now as being called a communist was in the 50's. It's obviously quite different, but the damage is identical. And when it comes to something so powerful, we should at least respect due process.
It's not, and it's not.
Communist witch-hunts were conducted by secret, back-channel, anonymous snitches, and were all about guilt by association. Accusations of sexual harassment put the accuser incredibly out in the open.
They were also largely used as a weapon against the weak and unconnected - people without the resources, or even awareness necessary to fight back against secret blacklists.
Not to mention that there is a colossal distinction between blackballing people for being communists, and blackballing them for being sexual harassers.
And besides, if history's any indication, the latter don't have problem making a living. There's always someone willing to take a chance.
Communist witch-hunts were conducted by secret, back-channel, anonymous snitches, and were all about guilt by association. Accusations of sexual harassment put the accuser incredibly out in the open.
It was both. A lot of accusations were made in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, on public record, and those accusers were very visible. For example you can read through http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6458/ and see that Emil Lustig, Robert Burman, Herbert K. Sorrell and a number of others had no doubt about who they were accused by - they were accused by Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney.
There was also accusation by rumor mill, which might or might not ever lead to a public accusation.
I've seen both modes with sexual harassment claims. Indeed it is not infrequent that, as with this case, the public claims only emerge after someone has been tarred and feathered by anonymous accusations in the rumor mill.
They were also largely used as a weapon against the weak and unconnected - people without the resources, or even awareness necessary to fight back against secret blacklists.
Most of the people caught up had little actual power. The same is true today by virtue of the simple fact that most of us have very little actual power. But there were very prominent people affected of accusations of being communists, such as Charlie Chaplin and Aaron Copeland. Which is again no different than today.
Furthermore the THREAT of being called a communist was used against very prominent people. That was the heart of Joseph McCarthy's power - powerful people were sincerely afraid of him.
Not to mention that there is a colossal distinction between blackballing people for being communists, and blackballing them for being sexual harassers.
There is a distinction, but I suspect that it goes the other way from what you think.
Communists stood accused of being covert agents of a hostile foreign power that we were at undeclared war with. Their purported aim was to undermine and destroy our country to ensure the victory of said foreign power. And there really were such covert agents. For example Harold Ware, Julius Rosenberg, and Aldrich Ames - all real people and all actually agents of the USSR who worked to undermine the security of the USA.
Sexual harassers stand accused of a personal crime whose legal status is not dissimilar to burglary or arson. They are clearly bad people but not an existential threat to our country.
Which accusation sounds worse?
And besides, if history's any indication, the latter don't have problem making a living. There's always someone willing to take a chance.
Can you provide stories of accused communists starving to death due to the blacklist?
They were more likely to commit suicide for lack of work. See: Philip Loeb and Bartley Crum, for two.
The analogy remains accurate.
Should you doubt the analogy, I strongly recommend reading http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/when-kids-are-a... to see how the modern "sexual assault equivalent of the communist blacklist catches children in its net, and what the impact is. Do you think that this is rare? Read https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227763.pdf for evidence that 1/4 of registered sex offenders were themselves juveniles at the time of the offense.
No, and if you see anyone hauling an actual, physical tree around to nail him to, you can tell them I said that.
But commenting based on one's perception of the facts based on the published allegations and responses is not, even remotely, analogous to crucifixion.
I'm genuinely curious, and the question is in good faith.
I think people should be conscious of the uncertainty in the facts when commenting based on limited information, but that he is entitled to no more deference from private actors than, essentially, avoiding libelous statements (those known to be false or made with with reckless disregard for truth.)
General private commentary is not, morally or ethically, dependent on an investigation.
And, in any case, an investigation has occurred, preceding publication of the story.
It's especially relevant given how all of this played out. (See the other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621765 and subsequent admission https://www.axios.com/justin-caldbeck-takes-indefinite-leave...)
Any ideas for recognizing situations where a bit of skepticism is warranted vs situations like this? In this case, I'm a little saddened that my comments caused some more stress for the founders. One of them personally came to correct me upthread.
I think it's still important in general to reserve judgement and to wait for due process, but is there much reason to hold so fast to those views anymore? The speed at which accusations can be confirmed or denied seems to have increased to the point where it might not be so bad to just assume that the truth will usually come out. I don't know.
Skepticism is always warranted, this situation was no exception (even though the admission that has since emerged seems to implicitly confirm the reports.)
But skepticism doesn't mean don't form and express a view on the facts based on what information you do have, it means be aware that you don't have the whole picture and refrain from action that is too extreme for the information you have, and remain willing to revise your opinion as more information becomes available.
The last bit takes active effort to counter confirmation bias and the desire to avoid having to admit error.
> I think it's still important in general to reserve judgement and to wait for due process,
Even in government, “due process” isn't a binary thing; what process is due varies based on the action being taken and other elements of context. Even if we extend the concept to include private action, things like posting a comment expressing concern would have much less process due than any substantive government action.
Even a government agent acting in their official capacity doesn't have to wait for a conviction to say that they believe someone is guilty.
But @sillysaurus3 basically said that there is no amount of evidence that could satisfy "reasonable doubt" with this statement:
> When it involves rich or powerful people, the ability to get many she-said's becomes easier.
This statement basically says that gathering multiple claims and multiple accounts/allegations cannot be proof against a rich or powerful person because of some inherent propensity of women to come out of the woodwork to lodge harassment/assault claims against rich/powerful/famous people. So once you are rich and powerful you immediately win all he-said/she-said situations because people have to give you the "benefit of the doubt." (not that I agree with this statement)
It's not a controversial observation that rich and powerful people can acquire enemies, and some of them have been slandered by the press.
It was difficult to separate that situation from this one. I assure you, I'm a reasonable and thoughtful person and it's not fair to say that I basically said there's no amount of evidence that can satisfy a claim against a powerful person.
The original comment was "Maybe we should wait to see how this plays out before making any judgements." Nothing more.
This whole conversation was a request for more information, so if you're going to throw me under the bus for it, you'll just push those who want to ask harmless questions further into the camp of "I shouldn't say a word." And when people have beliefs that seem reasonable to them, this can be a harmful situation when those beliefs are false.
For example, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that a journalist shouldn't wield the power to destroy someone's reputation without any independent oversight. It's a simple proposition with simple, obvious consequences. But pointing out that no investigation is going to occur helped me realize that it's an absurd standard.
EDIT: Also, most of my comments received around 8 upvotes. They've been bouncing up and down, but the point is, clearly a lot of people felt similarly. So by voicing these concerns, it probably changed a lot more minds than my own. Talking this out and being open with it seems like a good thing.
> When it involves rich or powerful people, the ability to get many she-said's becomes easier.
when taken at face value is implying (indirectly) that it takes more "she-saids" to make a claim against a rich/powerful person believable than it would for a "normal" person.
It doesn't even have to have anything to do with women. It just implies that even multiple claims by separate parties might not be enough when the target is someone rich or powerful (or famous) if it's a "my word against yours" type situation. From my point of view, that's just giving more power to the rich or powerful.
Most of the men replying in this thread have an incorrect "prior" (in the statistical sense) of the odds that a woman will experience serious sexual harassment in the workplace. This prior emerges, one presumes, because we look at ourselves as the model for estimating that behavior, think "there's no way in hell I'd behave that way, so this must be really rare", and assign a relatively low probability to the occurrence.
That prior is incorrect. There are enough harassers out there, each of whom harms multiple people, that, in fact, the average experience is of having been inappropriately approached, harassed, or outright assaulted, to the point where [1] a woman has a lifetime 1 in 6 chance of being the victim of rape or attempted rape, and in one survey, 1 in 3 women reported having experienced workplace sexual harassment. [2] Those numbers may be wrong a bit in either direction, but the decimal point is probably in the right place.
When we hear a claim like "X was sexually harassed by Y", we evaluate the likelihood of that statement in light of our own experience and prior - and assign to it a much lower likelihood of it being true than the true probability. In other words, you mentally calculate: P(harassed | X says harassed). By bayes rule, that's equal to P(X says harassed | harassed) * P(harassed) / P(X says harassed). So when our mental model of P(harassed) is too low, our estimate of P(harassed | X says harassed) is too low. And thus arises excessive disbelief in claims that are more likely to be true.
So, my very geeky suggestion for this is: Be very precise about the question you're asking about and the assumptions that go into it. You can often find a way to validate those assumptions to check what you're asking about.
[1] https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/19/1-in-3-women-sexual...
https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/task_force/harassment/upload/repor...
pdf page 15 (document internal page 8): "Based on testimony to the Select Task Force and various academic articles, we learned that anywhere from 25% to 85% of women report having experienced sexual harassment in the workplace. ... We found that when employees were asked, in surveys using a randomly representative sample (called a “probability sample”), if they had experienced “sexual harassment,” without that term being defined in the survey, approximately one in four women (25%) reported experiencing “sexual harassment” in the workplace. This percentage was remarkably consistent across probability surveys. When employees were asked the same question in surveys using convenience samples (in lay terms, a convenience sample is not randomly representative because it uses respondents that are convenient to the researcher (e.g., student volunteers or respondents from one organization)), with sexual harassment not being defined, the rate rose to 50% of women reporting they had been sexually harassed."
The cited EEOC report has fairly extensive citations backing up its claims.
As I said - I have no specific numbers I believe are The One True Answer, but it's fairly clear from a variety of sources that the decimal points are in approximately the right place. For the purpose of what I was discussing, 25% and 85% are approximately the same ("Very much higher than one might guess if we use our own behavior as a model").
Do you apply this standard in other areas? If someone tells you they had chicken for lunch, do you say, "Hold on, let's wait for the investigation to determine what you actually had for lunch"? Or if six people told you they had chicken for lunch?
If this guy could say "I was never even alone in the same conference room with any of these women, let alone at a bar where any impropriety is a matter of their word against mine" I think this story wouldn't have run.
Seriously guys, when you're at work, just fucking work and all this bullshit magically goes away. No dating, no uncomfortable discussions of race or politics or sex, just do your job and go home. Talk about tabs versus spaces if you need to spice up a Friday afternoon lull.
I dispute this very much. For example, you have people like Chris Brown that can turn their girlfriend into a human punching bag... and nothing happens to them. They just say that they are sorry, and keep in making money hand over fist (and even get women on Twitter saying things like "he can punch me any day").
It is documented that he was beating the crap out her, and he has suffered no ill consequences, or lack of popularity. I'm pretty sure that this does not match up with being called a communist in 1950's America.
> No, I don't. But do you think it's reasonable to crucify him before any investigation happens?
He has come out with a statement basically admitting to it after completely denying it.
I believe you are wrong about this. Text messages are easier to fabricate than other forms of digital evidence, and less risky than something like paying people to pretend to be witnesses.
I have nothing to gain from this. I am not suing. I'm founder & CEO of a Greylock-funded startup. Thankfully Greylock has come out in full support, but I didn't know that beforehand and was very nervous when I decided to do the article. The only way that any reporter would agree to publish was if I used my real name. I knew Justin was continuing to harass women, and this was the only way to stop him.
sillysaurus3, you may be thinking of cases where women go to accuse a "rich or powerful" person and are trying to get something out of it. I had nothing to gain and a lot to lose.
"The unfortunate truth is that I simply could not write this until Albergotti published, as I didn't have anyone on the record, which is virtually essential from a journalistic perspective. "
https://www.projectcallisto.org/
Victims report incidents, an their info is not shared at the time of report. Victims can elect to have their reports unsealed if subsequent accusations are made against the same individual. This mirrors the current status quo, where it's less common for victims to speak out if there are no other cases to corroborate, but makes discovery of other cases more feasible.
It's being rolled out specifically in the context of college sexual assault, but I imagine the approach could work elsewhere too.
I can only imagine how stressful a situation like this can be, so I certainly didn't mean to increase it. Best of luck.
This is about calling out shitty but legal behavior. The VC didn't even deny he was lecherous, just that he didn't do anything illegal. That's tacit confirmation that it did happen.
This is an interesting comment and sheds some light on what is happening here.
There is no need to be publicly named in a news article to bring charges in a court of law; but in a court of law there is a clear and regular process for evaluating charges; and one does actually submit to the possibility of retaliation in a limited form: false accusations carry punishments of their own.
Justin has already quit. In some sense, charges were brought in the court of public opinion -- and for these to have any weight, there must be some element of credibility attached to them. Journalists are not cops and just quoting "unnamed sources" is not enough to substantiate the idea that someone should lose their job, in part because unnamed sources accept no scrutiny and no risk. Attaching one's name to something like this is the only way to lend any weight to it, in the absence of any judicial process.
EDIT: Thanks for the clarification, all. As many have pointed out, there's also the harassment portion. I guess my question is now: how do you prove intent? I know nothing about due process, so I'm curious. I suppose in this case it really matters what it says in the texts.
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/assault
edit: For reference the actual physical acts are battery in the legal sense.
They help move the needle from simply "He said; she said."
Some types of sexual assault can be proven by medical examination, if the exam happens soon after, although many actions that qualify as sexual assault will either not show up on an exam, or can be proven to be "sexual" but not "assault." However, in cases like this where there is an ongoing relationship before and after the incident, the text messages will often refer to physical events. These can be evidence that a physical event happened, and what the attitudes and beliefs of the involved people were towards the incident at the time. Although even that is still a large amount of he-said-she-said and drawing large inferences from circumstantial data.
Sexual harassment law only applies to the workplace.
An action need not be legally actionable to be newsworthy, or to be important for people who might want to know of their risk of being subjected to similar action.
He is accused of sexual assault and harassment. The particular harassment is, in principle, more readily demonstrable (though perhaps not legally actionable, “sexual harassment” short of assault isn't always illegal, though it may well be newsworthy, without an employment relationship.)
OTOH, in the case of a VC against people seeking funding, some forms of what would analogous to quid pro quo sexual harassment in employment could shade into the crime of soliciting prostitution.
In a legal case (which is not now pending from any information published, but that could change), any facts from which an observer could infer that the intent at issue was more likely than it would be in the absence of those facts are evidence (providing that they aren't inadmissible for other reasons.)
Legal proof isn't mathematical proof; in general, the ways you'd forms belief about something in your daily life are how it is “proved” in a court of law.
The degree of certainty a juror is expected to have for a conviction in a criminal cases is very high, but that's not a matter of how it is proved, but how conclusively it must be proved.