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Comment by irpapakons | Hacker News Reader

What makes you think that the women liked him, or that he thought they liked him? They were pitching to him, that's a business transaction. He himself said he leveraged a position of power in exchange for sexual gain, and the linked article mentions groping and harassment with unwanted sexual propositions.

Now the question is, what motivates you to seek out a relatively far-fetched justification for this man's possible innocence?

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Perhaps they see a trend of knee-jerk reactions to these kinds of cases where the defendant is presumed guilty before the entire story or evidence is out, or before any sort of due process occurs. I can see why someone would at least try, even weakly, to counteract this type of community pressure.

I realize this isn't a legal matter at this point but I'm speaking of the principle(s) on which those features are based.

It almost always seems to become a case of "you're either with us or you're against us," so let's try to steer clear of that.

The "defendant" has already admitted to the accusations and stepped down.

In this case, I agree in the sense it defeats the point I made above, but for various reasons others may continue to push back on that pressure on principal rather than on the facts of the matter.

> Now the question is, what motivates you to seek out a relatively far-fetched justification for this man's possible innocence?

You're implying he supports sexual harassment.

He's bringing up a perfectly valid question for discussion: what if the person has an outsized opinion of his attractiveness, and also happens to be a VC -- is that still sexual harassment or just stupidity?

Well, the answer is that in this case it's still harassment.

And so now there's question, answer, discussion, etc. No need to accuse the poster of being complicit himself in harassment.

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