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Comment by lexcorvus | Hacker News Reader

This story (unfortunately now dead on Hacker News) claims to fill in what's missing:

Money quote:

Around the end of 2012, Julie started dating a close male friend of the cofounder’s wife and didn’t like that they were close. She asked them to stop being friends and when they would not end their relationship, Julie started telling coworkers that the wife had affairs and that the cofounder’s newborn child was not his. She told this to multiple coworkers directly and also to the wife through her boyfriend.

This is where the wife reached out to her and the rest of her story starts. All of Julie’s story involving the cofounder’s wife occurs only after Julie was spreading vicious rumors about him to even new employees.

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Of course, if you doubt Horvath's story, what makes this one any more credible to you?

There is little to suggest to us that one account is more credible than the others. Our main take-away here should be uncertainty. We don't know what happened; we can only know what some people think happened. Considering other viewpoints, even anonymous viewpoints^, serves to highlight the inherently uncertain nature of the truth.

^ Non-anonymous viewpoints could perhaps be considered more trustworthy because there is the threat of a libel/slander lawsuit if they are complete fabrications. However on the other hand, all/most of the non-anonymous viewpoints that we have are the viewpoints of people directly involved in the scandal. We can assume that the anonymous viewpoint, if it is not a fabrication, is not from somebody involved in the scandal. However since they were not involved directly in it, it is also possible that they received an incomplete picture of everything... Everything is uncertain. I am reminded of the closing dialog to "Burn After Reading".

It's much closer to how people actually behave.

I don't think I could ever so narrowly define "how people actually behave," personally. I'm not even sure what you're implying the implausible behaviour in Horvath's account is.

Honestly, I found Horvath's account to be fairly implausible from the first time I read it. The kinds of things she alleged don't happen in a vacuum: if what she was saying was true, there should have been a lot of other instances of that sort of harassment, or at least indicators that something like that could happen. Horvath described some very extreme behaviors that just don't appear out of the blue.

The anonymous account just makes the whole store make a lot more sense.

> I don't think I could ever so narrowly define "how people actually behave," personally.

Really? I can. They behave messily and almost always with a keen eye towards advancing their own position, whatever it may be, rational, honest, or otherwise.

> I'm not even sure what you're implying the implausible behaviour in Horvath's account is.

The part where complex, multi-party, interactions are dramatic in the extreme, bad behavior is completely one-sided, and the entire situation ascribed to a simplistic (gender bias) narrative.

That never happens.

Putting the pieces together, what seems to make a more convincing narrative is that Howarth was a bully herself.

> The part where complex, multi-party, interactions are dramatic in the extreme, bad behavior is completely one-sided, and the entire situation ascribed to a simplistic (gender bias) narrative

I am incredibly curious how this doesn't describe the anon account much better than Horvath's, only changing 'gender bias' to 'relationship insanity.' Who has bad behaviour other than Horvath in that account? How is it not incredibly dramatic?

It reads like an episode of Jerry Springer.

Pretty obviously there was a second side to this story. Not at all surprised to read something like this, but it is sad.

Wow. Wait, what? How is this not more widely known?

If this were actually the 'truth' then you could be pretty sure some statements would have been made to implicitly discredit Julie-Ann.

It's also fairly meaningless since if you interpret this story as 'Julie-Ann started dating someone close to Theresa Preston-Werner who shared he slept with her and could even be the father of Tom's child and then refused to distance himself from Theresa; a sad state of affairs which Julie-Ann shared with some colleagues,' it immediately paints an entirely different picture.

Not really; even if that were the case, she still had no business sharing that with work colleagues.

I think its pretty telling that this an anonymous account and that no one is will to attach their name to the Medium post.

Not really. You'd have to be an idiot to attach your name to this given the shitstorm twitter would unleash upon you for questioning the narrative. No idea if it's true but in this environment anonymity is probably the default.

> the shitstorm twitter would unleash upon you

Not to mention the fact that, assuming the writer is indeed a Github employee, the fact that it would instantly place her at grave risk of losing her job.

If this person has proof (documentary, whatever) that their narrative is correct, they should step out from behind the easy cloak of anonymity and show it. Until then, they're really nothing more than a troll.

First feminists take a man's job. Then they taunt people who criticize them to use their real names. Yeah, I see where this is going.

The new Hacker News moderation team is more politically correct than it used to be. You can bet stories questioning tech-feminist narratives will be dead-ed as "non-constructive"

Pretty sure we haven't touched any of the several posts of that article. Users flagged them.

Edit: I checked. It was posted three times. First was deleted by the poster. Second was flag-killed by users. Third is still up but heavily flagged. No moderator touched any of them.

so the hn crowd is mostly pc. no surprises.

Actually the HN community is politically deeply divided. Complaints about its bias thus tend to contradict one another. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7630388 says much the opposite.

Many flags on political stories and flamewars come not from users with opposing politics but from users who, regardless of their politics, don't think HN is the place for them. It's a "pox on both their houses" thing.

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