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Comment by redditadmin1499 | Hacker News Reader

The Vanity Fair piece on her and her husband is a good read. It was written before she became CEO, or really got that much attention. I have no idea how true her allegations were, but she's the sort of person who would take advantage of situations.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/scandal/2013/03/buddy-fletc...

The best commentary I read on her case with Kleiner Perkins was it was an imperfect case with imperfect parties. The press presented it as representative of gender discrimination in the valley, but it was really bad actors on both sides. While I didn't have any personal issues with Ellen, I know people who did, and I can absolutely see her taking advantage of the situation, so it was pretty appalling to see people who don't know her making her a champion of women in tech.

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I hadn't read that article before, but I just read it now - I don't see anything in it to indicate that Pao took advantage of situations (at least in the sense of unfairly taking advantage of situations - certainly there's a lot of advantage in the situation of being a VC and this profile paints her as ambitious and driven, but I think it's not what you meant). There's a fair bit in the article to paint Buddy Fletcher as not a great person - money that apparently disappeared from his fund, for instance, and the independent auditor not being that independent. But the article also goes to some length to argue that he tried to convince his wife not to sue KPCB.

This is potentially veering off-topic, but I think it's entirely reasonable for imperfect people to be champions of women in tech or whatever other causes. I know very few perfect people. (In fact one of the common reactions I heard to Susan Fowler's "very strange year" post is how lucky she was that her own behavior was blameless through that year - certainly all the forces that conspired against her had been at Uber and other companies for years before that, but nobody was able to tell a story where they were so clearly faultless, because, well, everyone's human, and sometimes you misjudge things, get into fights where you're in the wrong, etc.)

And in particular I think it's entirely possible - and entirely consistent with the details in the Vanity Fair story - for an imperfect person to have been quite factually sexually harassed and to have suffered for it.

I remember reading this article when it came out in 2013.

When I re-read it today, I finally saw all the obstacles and discrimination that Ellen Pao and Buddy Fletcher had to overcome just to be in a position to be embroiled in scandals like this.

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