It was flagged to death by users. Normally we kill reposts of such stories (because if you can just repost them, then the flags don't mean anything), but not if there's an ongoing discussion, and this repost has already been flagged heavily in its own right.
So people flagged it and it got marked as spam? I think since the rest of the hearsay got to the top of HN, this should too to balance things out. No matter what happened, the more sides of the story we hear the better.