I don't think we should ban people from conferences based on unproven accusations.
The organizer's reaction made it sound like he had reservations about inviting this person, due to older reports similar to the author's.
But a pretty bad one. I wouldn't mind if a murderer would give talk (if it was good). And not about the murdering, but about let's say ReiserFS.
In the US, people are generally free to associate with whomever they want. That includes the right to not associate with people. If a bar owner or a conference organizer wants to throw somebody out, that's perfectly within their rights unless they've contracted otherwise. Equally, patrons are welcome to their business elsewhere if they choose.
It's sad that this woman was apparently treated so poorly, but there's no possible way for a conference to write a legally-binding code of conduct for how people spend their social lives outside of that conference. It's utter nonsense to even consider it.
Don't worry, in no way am I going to abuse this information to make baseless complaints against you. All my complaints will be solidly based on malice.
Of course what will happen from a complaint should take malignancy in consideration and offer at least some kind of right to respond to offenders.
Can be paraphrased to apply to "rabid hordes of adulterous men who want to make your life miserable". Better ?
I'm just pointing out that for people discussing how to best setup procedures for handling deviant behaviour, you sure assume only perfectly honest people would come to use said procedures. If you assume p% of possible culpability for the accused, shouldn't you assume the same for the accuser ? Otherwise, you are just discriminating against the accused.
This is a hard problem society as large has not solved yet - witness both the huge cost of false negatives (unreported offenses) and false positives (false accusations). I'm just skeptical a conference organiser will correctly solve this between two round of emails.
Oh sure, he can publish a boilerplate "we take all complaints very seriously" policy. I predict we'll see them appear at most tech conferences shortly.
What I'm claiming is that policies ARE needed, the current "hmm, what should I do now?" policy is the worst policy of them all, because improvised decisions aren't usually the best ones.
Such a policy can any policy, from "yes, we believe all women, be them malignant or not, and we'll ban you on the first offense" up to "I don't care what you people do outside of the venue, you should call the cops (here's the number) if you have a problem." It's important to know where the organizer stands to take your pick. There might even be a niche for "female-friendly conferences" that will by definition have harsher policies on the issue.