If this is the bar for unacceptable discourse between men and women, without being a mind-reader, I'm not really sure how one is ever supposed to win.
[1] https://www.notion.so/image/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazo...
Is that really 100% of the interactions they've had?
You seem to be pretty confident there's only his side of the story.
Also, not proud of this, but I used to have a weird troll dating account. I sent weird messages to women that I didn't know, but nothing offensive (to me). I googled my username once and found that someone had thought it was her ex. She posted it on Reddit in an alcoholism subreddit, and anyone in the thread questioning her was then also accused by her of being her ex under an alt. It was insane.
But random people are free to make whatever conclusions about him that they want, with as little or as much evidence as they personally require to render their judgement. You don’t get to tell other people how they should form their opinions.
It isn’t fair, but there is no other way for the world to work. Everyone has their own criteria for judging people... we can put legal requirements on some things (like what criteria you can use to determine if you hire someone, or rent them an apartment, or let them into your store), but people are free to dislike someone for whatever reason they want.
For me to believe their accusations. It's not just something that exists in the courts, it's a principle that many (most?) people adhere to in their lives. If you have one co-worker who accuses the other of stealing their phone, would you punish the accused without first asking how they know they stole it or looking at camera footage of the time of the alleged theft?
It's not illegal for you to believe unsubstantiated accusations (not just unsubstantiated, but unsubstantiated in the face of exculpatory evidence). It's not illegal for a boss to fire an employee over an unsubstantiated accusation. Legal, but still harmful to society.
But you are free to believe whatever you want.
Personally, I don’t hold a belief either way about this person. I neither believe or disbelieve them.
As it stands, he's provided receipts and the other side hasn't, so for me any reasonable person believes the person with the receipts.
And sure, we can't force people to form opinions in one way or another, but we absolutely can (and arguably should) criticize people who form their opinions in a way that is best modeled after a lynch mob, in the exact same way I would react to a... real life lynch mob.
Beyond that though, when our opinions have consequences, we have an obligation to form them carefully when they affect others. Not being able to force someone to behave well doesn't mean there aren't reasonable criteria available for them.
Now, if I (or someone else) harass the guy over the accusation, then that is a problem (and there should be consequences), but belief is personal.
You're free to believe whatever you want, but if you are wrong and they didn't do it, someone was just publicly executed for the wrong reasons.
You're also free to not care about any of that, but some people want to be cautious not to pile on without evidence.
Are you really arguing it's fine if I accused you of something and convinced everyone of that, without ever providing any evidence? And when you said "no, I didn't do that, here's some evidence," people should shrug it off because why does if matter what side they believe? After all, they are free to judge you based on anything they want, as long as they're not threatening your life or firing you, right?
No one was arguing you can't judge people based on any arbitrary thing you can come up with. It becomes an issue when you use that belief to actively destroy their life, possibly for no reason at all.
If an opinion being held doesn't have any practical ramifications for others, it's not really a big deal to have opinions formed on a questionable basis, except that good judgment tends to be a habitual process, so doing it with bad criteria with low stakes could affect how we form them when the stakes are higher.
Maybe one analogy would be the way that gossip and rumour in a very small town could harm a person, such as by affecting their livelihood, their family, and so on. Now that we have the global village, the "small town" is basically everybody. I see the current debates about "cancel culture" or whatever as a messy attempt to work out norms for this new space. We're probably still in the early stage of those getting worked out.