You might not be trying to start a rumor, but other people could when they try to answer the questions from a place of ignorance — if you take a look at the comments on a gist summarizing the backdoor, there are quite a few comments by z-nonymous that seem to be insinuating that other specific GitHub users are complicit in things by looking at their commits in various non-xz repositories.

No one is running cover, just that most information so far points to the original maintainer not knowing that the person brought on to help out had ulterior motives, and likely wasn’t even who they purported to be. If you were running an open source project and facing burnout as the sole maintainer, I’d imagine you’d exercise perfect judgement and do a full background check on the person offering to help? I think many of us would like to believe we’d do better, but the reality is, most of us would have fallen for the same trick. So now imagine having to deal with the fallout not just on the technical side, but also the never-ending questions surrounding your professional reputation that people just keep bring up — sounds like a recipe for depression, possibly even suicidal thoughts.