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Comment by JPKab | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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I only kind of agree.

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.

https://www.helpforvictims.co.uk/content/Q1.htm#:~:text=You%....

No idea how/if that would work in US, but in general you should be able to report it locally.

>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.

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.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-than...

It’s clear that emotion clouds judgement on this issue more so than even murder.

Did you just cite Washington Post as an authoritative source?

> 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.

>What, exactly, do you imagine that the police are likely to do with her report?

If it's anything like the UK (and I suspect it is), they'll likely take it seriously. For example, see the police's reaction here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/mt1kw4/withd...

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.)

Sweden and Uk spent tens of millions dealing with extradition case for just getting a hearing over an accusation with similar amount of evidence.

Technically the legal system could do the same in her case.

Technically correct is the least useful kind of correct.

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.

Per https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rape-kits-are-sit... police in the USA TODAY have over 100,000 untested rape kits collected from women who claimed to have been raped.

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.

Piss off a superpower, and you'd be ASTOUNDED at how far backwards law enforcement will bend to take any complaint about you seriously.

I would not take Julian Assange's situation as indicative of anything other than that Assange made powerful enemies.

> raped

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.

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."

How can that be known? Why do you presume that someone is a harasser or rapist if they weren't convicted?

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.

I'm one. I'm also male. It was brutal. No, I did not go to the police. I was far too afraid.

Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-than...

Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false. Worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown.

Doesn't your set of statistics show that rape accusations are 2-8 times as likely to be proven false as they are to be proven true?

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.

And yet you wouldn’t like to fall within those 2-8%.

Aren't you more worried about the 99% of rape victims who receive no justice of any kind?

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.

Is there any evidence that would convince you that actual rapes are a more prevalent and more important problem than false claims of rape?

If so, what form would that evidence take?

If not, you're really arguing based on faith, not evidence, right?

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.

> Same article notes that between 2-8% of rape complaints are false. Worries about false rape claims are wildly overblown.

That is a HUGE percent of false accusations! On the high end that's 1 in 10! In the middle, it's 1 in 20. That's a LOT.

Yet you express no concern at the amount of unprosecuted cases...

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.

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.

[1] https://ia800209.us.archive.org/4/items/FalseRapeAllegations...

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.

You're on point with this.

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.

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.

It doesn't actually say that.

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.

[0]: https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/publications/2018-...

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?

That's not what the study (linked from the article) says. It estimates that 2-8% of complaints are false, and that the remaining 92-98% are true.

>Less than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions

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.

From your source: "...based on the best of the imperfect measures available."

What are these imperfect measures? How imperfect are they?

How are these numbers even measurable?

> 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?

It's a very appropriate bar to keep men safe from false accusations!

>2-8% of rape complaints are false

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.

https://blogs.findlaw.com/blotter/2017/07/how-often-do-rape-...

"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."

Not prosecuted != not provable. Not provable != false.

>Not prosecuted != not provable

Fair enough. Only 4% are known to be provable.

>Not provable != false

I neither claimed nor implied this. My point could be summed up as not provable != true.

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.

Do you think that OJ was innocent?

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?

OJ probably did it but the prosecution failed to prove him guilty so he walked free as he should.

He's lucky he was a wealthy celebrity or he wouldn't have gotten the full protection that the courts supposedly afford to the accused.

> the courts are stacked against the victims

Ah, that pesky presumption of innocence getting in the way of our 100% conviction rate. /s

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 first sentence is literally:

"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.

> 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.

"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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case

>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.

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-central-park-five/convictio...

>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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-48609693

>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."

Good that you linked the Wikipedia article. It has a good description of the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case#Armst...

"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.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case#Assai...

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.

If you did a little research you will find they got paid $41,000,000 by the City of New York!

You think the City just handed over tens of millions of dollars because settling would be cheaper then going to trial?

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.

> 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.

[0] Table 21, as of 2009 https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fdluc09.pdf [1] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fdluc09.pdf

This problem can only be solved with trial by coin toss

> 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.

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."

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.

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 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 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 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.

> The "existing laws setup to handle any false allegations" exist only for accusations made in the court system.

This is wrong though.

> Did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, lawyers and filing lawsuits might be expensive, prohibitively so?

Indeed, and reporting a crime, and ensuring it is handled appropriately by a police force is also exceedingly costly, though perhaps not financially.

Significant portions of your post violate the HN guidelines.

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

If it's hard to demonstrably prove actual cases of sexual assault, doesn't it follow that it would be as hard, if not harder, to prove the negative?

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.

"but the abuse potential is massive."

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 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.

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 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.

> Imagine that you were convicted of murder

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.

John Wayne Gacy was convicted in a criminal court of law, with rules, where he was presumed innocent until proven guilty.

You attempt to draw a connection, but it's a false analogy out of the gate.

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.

I think there are a few problems with this:

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.

> there is no physical evidence that remains

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.

I think there’s a crucial point that you missed:

“...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.

All true, but you forgot the money shot:

“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.

https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/john-wayne-gacy

John Waters hangs one of John Wayne Gacy's infamous clown paintings on the wall of his guest room, so his guests never stay too long.

Politically Incorrect with John Waters

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7zFp7CaJqE&ab_channel=lurie...

Chilling paintings by ‘killer clown’ John Wayne Gacy expected to sell for £7,000 each

https://metro.co.uk/2017/10/09/chilling-paintings-by-killer-...

> heard from someone in HR that the charges were false, but "optics" were the reason they had to move forward with his termination.

Time to name the company.

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.

Seems like your brother can probably sue for damages if this is the whole story

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.

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.

So now you see why most women who are sexually assaulted don't report it.

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system

Seriously! The justice system is often ineffective for delivering justice both to victims of sexual abuse and victims of false accusations.

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.

You're missing the point.

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!

So they swooshed it under the rug, and you don't want to air max facts about the case in public?

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.

IANAL, but if the story is true, would it be reasonable to sue that coworker for defamation/slander and for lost wages?

The average person doesn't have the means to launch an extensive and hard to win lawsuit like that.

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.

You see the double standard you’re preaching?

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...

Abusers will use the platform they have

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.

Except there's no such thing as witchcraft but sexual harassment is very real. Victims have every right to speak up.

Libel and slander laws are also real. If someone is actually making a false accusation, there's already legal ways to deal with it.

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.

>there's already legal ways to deal with it

suing can cost money, time, effort, and may not able to necessarily clear your name even if you won.

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.

Even if you had multiple other people corroborate it?

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.)

Why would I magically trust two or three randoms when I dont trust one random?

What are you going to do ? Just believe it ?

-----------

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).

I’m sorry that happened to your family but what do you get out of doing all that. It can’t be more than some sort of satisfaction.

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.

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.

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.

HR isn't there to protect you, it's to protect the company.

> his coworkers had warned him "not to cross" because she was "a total sociopath" according to his other team members.

This is exactly what the author of the blog post is doing: warning other people about this person.

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.

> Imagine a letter like this targeted at you one day, except unlike Mr. Pretty, you are innocent.

You already assume he is guilty ?

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.

Yes, what happened to due diligence?

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?

I think you made my point.

We used to have a process to figure out what happened and make a judgement after the facts have been laid out.

What we get now is emotional responses to outrageous headlines and mobs ready to crucify the accused.

What a farce.

> We used to have a process to figure out what happened and make a judgement after the facts have been laid out.

When was this? In your living memory? Was that time before or after Emmet Till was murdered by a lynch mob?

Very tactful. You should respond with this story in real life when someone tells you they were sexually abused.

I'm sure what your brother faced is terrible but how exactly does this relate to the story?

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.

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.

It was an example of how this method can be abused comparing to the criminal justice system.

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.

Contact law enforcement.

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?

What do you do if you're mugged in a foreign country?

Generally count yourself lucky to be alive and then fly home in a few days.

So you suggest the victims should just shrug it off.

The chances of the police and the court system doing something are not many and it will cost you.

I tried fighting injustices in court, it often doesn't work and you just end up wasting money.

I would have rather spent the money on a guy with a wrench.

I mean they could post on social media about their account and see if the community acts.

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.

Yes, I'm sure they'll treat it with the seriousness that they treat the decades-long ignored pile of rape kits.

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.

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?

Publicly taking high moral ground when it costs you nothing is insanely gratifying and as old as the humanity itself.

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.

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.

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?

Public law enforcement doesn't have any incentive doing anything.

We need private police and a new legal system

Private police??? Like, uber but for swatting? No thank you

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.

I was not commenting on the OP’s experience.

I think using the example that you did to showcase the failings of a public court wasn't a fair comparison for the reason I said.

My sister has been raped. The officers laughed. My wife has been harassed. The officers wrote some things down on forms and did nothing.

It achieves little.

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.

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