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Comment by indrax | Hacker News Reader

Imagine if some company was dealing with a lawsuit related to sexual harassment, and some mid-level executive of the company wrote a prominent article mentioning the case, their own position, and criticizing the victim's story...

I don't understand how she's shocked that this could be taken as retaliation. It's disingenuous to say she "mentioned no one by name" when she was clearly talking about the student that filed the complaint.

If you think professors should be more 'free' than corporate executive, how do you ensure the students aren't more vulnerable than corporate employees?

This is a person in a high status position mocking someone for being intimidated.

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> It's disingenuous to say she "mentioned no one by name" when she was clearly talking about the student that filed the complaint.

Read the article carefully. The student that filed the complaint wasn't the one who she mentioned in the previous article. It was someone she had "mentioned fleetingly" -- so looking at the previous article [1], it might be the grad student that the professor had previously dated, and that he subsequently filed a lawsuit against. His reasons for doing so are not mentioned in the article.

I fail to see how mentioning that the professor filed a lawsuit against someone he had previously dated is retaliatory. It is a simple statement of fact, and if anything, paints the professor in a bad light.

[1] http://chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes/190351/ (paragraph starting "The aftermath...")

You can make a lot of propaganda by choosing facts.

>>"The professor sued for defamation various colleagues, administrators, and a former grad student whom, according to his complaint, he had previously dated; "

She's repeating a 'fact' out of the professor's complaint, while leaving out the supposedly defaming statements. The additional relevant information might include the conditions under which they started and stopped dating, or if it happened at all.

So this person said something about a sexual assault suspect, then got sued for it, and he said they had dated. Then some other professor writes about her, and nothing about what actually happened. (And we, still now, are mainly relying on that other professor's narrative.) And the article she's mentioned in is extremely dismissive of the whole situation.

So who's getting attacked for free speech and stating facts here?

Let's not forget the professor's most recent book "Men: Notes From an Ongoing Investigation (Metropolitan Books, 2014)."

The allegedly defaming statements that the professor was suing over are irrelevant, since she is citing these lawsuits for their existence, not their content.

> You can make a lot of propaganda by choosing facts.

Like you did by choosing to only quote half of her sentence? The full sentence was "The professor sued for defamation various colleagues, administrators, and a former grad student whom, according to his complaint, he had previously dated; a judge dismissed those suits this month".

I'm not sure of the relevance of this sentence, but since I just read the original piece, it may be relevant that the original text didn't have the "according to his complaint" bit until they made a correction.

Presumably this means the professor is suing someone he claimed to be dating, who denies that they dated, and again presumably that person has made some claim about the professors sexual conduct.

The content may be more relevant to the people involved. The content may be relevant to whether this is retaliatory.

ETA: Also, you highlight my omission of the mention of the dismissal, as if that's relevant. Why?

I live in the UK and people writing about on-going court cases need to be very careful how they do it or they risk heavy fines, sometimes even prison, for contempt.

There's a guide to reporting sub judice here:

http://www.out-law.com/en/topics/tmt--sourcing/media-and-cre...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/journalism/article/art201307021...

I'm not sure why you're so heavily downvoted. What you're saying doesn't seem so outlandish: be careful when you blog about stuff that's currently being litigated.

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