I am one of the three women who went on the record: Niniane Wang. I'm one of the "she-said"s.
I have nothing to gain from this. I am not suing. I'm founder & CEO of a Greylock-funded startup. Thankfully Greylock has come out in full support, but I didn't know that beforehand and was very nervous when I decided to do the article. The only way that any reporter would agree to publish was if I used my real name. I knew Justin was continuing to harass women, and this was the only way to stop him.
sillysaurus3, you may be thinking of cases where women go to accuse a "rich or powerful" person and are trying to get something out of it. I had nothing to gain and a lot to lose.
As a fellow lady who has bootstrapped her business, and knows nothing about the VC world - I just want to say thank you. You coming out in the open has made the environment better for all of us. Seriously, thanks.
"The unfortunate truth is that I simply could not write this until Albergotti published, as I didn't have anyone on the record, which is virtually essential from a journalistic perspective. "
Victims report incidents, an their info is not shared at the time of report. Victims can elect to have their reports unsealed if subsequent accusations are made against the same individual. This mirrors the current status quo, where it's less common for victims to speak out if there are no other cases to corroborate, but makes discovery of other cases more feasible.
It's being rolled out specifically in the context of college sexual assault, but I imagine the approach could work elsewhere too.
Write an anonymous blog about it on Medium or whatever and submit it to HN, you'll get views. You'll persuade or not persuade some people in the blog's truth no matter what you say from confirmation bias alone (e.g. rise in sexism in tech vs. rise in hoax charges). Some people will be more persuaded if you use your real name, for others it doesn't matter. Some people will be more persuaded if you give actual specifics about what was said and done (I'm one of those -- "harassment" is very broad, "groping" might be too, you need to either define your terms or state physically what happened, because you'd think we would all agree on what "grope" means but there are videos you can find of women screaming "help, he's raping me!" when it's just a cop using force to arrest her), but on the other hand too specific and people might find it literally incredible that someone actually grabbed you by the pussy without a tape of the person admitting as much.
There isn't really, because the moment you reveal enough actual details that it's possible to identify you, you also open yourself up for subtle forms of retaliation.
Thank you for your courage. You almost certainly saved others from harassment directly and your bravery also will have saved hundreds of others since those in powerful positions will be more vary and those being harassed will be more vocal. This story is one more stepping stone towards progress.
Sorry, I didn't mean to cast doubts. All I meant was that we should reserve judgement. In this case, it sounds pretty clear-cut, but the point was about future cases that may not be so straightforward.
I can only imagine how stressful a situation like this can be, so I certainly didn't mean to increase it. Best of luck.
Come on, you totally meant to cast doubt. Still, it takes some degree of huevos to stand up in a semi-anonymous forum and admit your mistake (instead of deleting your comment or other dumb stuff). Kudos for that at least.
For what it's worth, I didn't mean to cast doubt on her character. It was more along the lines of "Maybe we should wait to see how this plays out." I'm also rather upset that my comment indirectly made HN a less welcoming place for founders. I've written extensively about the fact that HN has become less founder-friendly and they've had to flee to places like Bookface just to get some support. The idea that I contributed to that isn't a happy thought.
When it involves serial harassers, the ability to get many she-saids becomes easy, too. Do you really think that founders are lining up to put their personal and professional reputation on the line, to smear this guy, as part of a vast female conspiracy?
They have fucking text messages to back their story up. Are those easy to fabricate too, when it comes to rich and powerful people?
That's exactly why we have due process - to evaluate evidence in an impartial and equitable way. GP's point was more about due process than anything else, so could you extend the assumption of good faith to their comment and engage with that point?
I'm not a court of law, I'm not locking him up in a prison, and I don't need proof of guilt beyond an unreasonable doubt to take these allegations seriously.
No, I don't. But do you think it's reasonable to crucify him before any investigation happens?
My comment was a bit too female-focused. It wasn't about she-said's or a female conspiracy, but rather the ease of getting people to smear someone that has enemies.
It's hard not to notice that the claim of sexual harassment is as equally damaging now as being called a communist was in the 50's. It's obviously quite different, but the damage is identical. And when it comes to something so powerful, we should at least respect due process.
> It's hard not to notice that the claim of sexual harassment is as equally damaging now as being called a communist was in the 50's. It's obviously quite different, but the damage is identical. And when it comes to something so powerful, we should at least respect due process.
It's not, and it's not.
Communist witch-hunts were conducted by secret, back-channel, anonymous snitches, and were all about guilt by association. Accusations of sexual harassment put the accuser incredibly out in the open.
They were also largely used as a weapon against the weak and unconnected - people without the resources, or even awareness necessary to fight back against secret blacklists.
Not to mention that there is a colossal distinction between blackballing people for being communists, and blackballing them for being sexual harassers.
And besides, if history's any indication, the latter don't have problem making a living. There's always someone willing to take a chance.
You don't appear to know the history as well as you think you do. The comparison is fair.
Communist witch-hunts were conducted by secret, back-channel, anonymous snitches, and were all about guilt by association. Accusations of sexual harassment put the accuser incredibly out in the open.
It was both. A lot of accusations were made in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, on public record, and those accusers were very visible. For example you can read through http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6458/ and see that Emil Lustig, Robert Burman, Herbert K. Sorrell and a number of others had no doubt about who they were accused by - they were accused by Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney.
There was also accusation by rumor mill, which might or might not ever lead to a public accusation.
I've seen both modes with sexual harassment claims. Indeed it is not infrequent that, as with this case, the public claims only emerge after someone has been tarred and feathered by anonymous accusations in the rumor mill.
They were also largely used as a weapon against the weak and unconnected - people without the resources, or even awareness necessary to fight back against secret blacklists.
Most of the people caught up had little actual power. The same is true today by virtue of the simple fact that most of us have very little actual power. But there were very prominent people affected of accusations of being communists, such as Charlie Chaplin and Aaron Copeland. Which is again no different than today.
Furthermore the THREAT of being called a communist was used against very prominent people. That was the heart of Joseph McCarthy's power - powerful people were sincerely afraid of him.
Not to mention that there is a colossal distinction between blackballing people for being communists, and blackballing them for being sexual harassers.
There is a distinction, but I suspect that it goes the other way from what you think.
Communists stood accused of being covert agents of a hostile foreign power that we were at undeclared war with. Their purported aim was to undermine and destroy our country to ensure the victory of said foreign power. And there really were such covert agents. For example Harold Ware, Julius Rosenberg, and Aldrich Ames - all real people and all actually agents of the USSR who worked to undermine the security of the USA.
Sexual harassers stand accused of a personal crime whose legal status is not dissimilar to burglary or arson. They are clearly bad people but not an existential threat to our country.
Which accusation sounds worse?
And besides, if history's any indication, the latter don't have problem making a living. There's always someone willing to take a chance.
Can you provide stories of accused communists starving to death due to the blacklist?
> claim of sexual harassment is as equally damaging now as being called a communist was in the 50's
I dispute this very much. For example, you have people like Chris Brown that can turn their girlfriend into a human punching bag... and nothing happens to them. They just say that they are sorry, and keep in making money hand over fist (and even get women on Twitter saying things like "he can punch me any day").
It is documented that he was beating the crap out her, and he has suffered no ill consequences, or lack of popularity. I'm pretty sure that this does not match up with being called a communist in 1950's America.
> No, I don't. But do you think it's reasonable to crucify him before any investigation happens?
He has come out with a statement basically admitting to it after completely denying it.
> But do you think it's reasonable to crucify him before any investigation happens?
No, and if you see anyone hauling an actual, physical tree around to nail him to, you can tell them I said that.
But commenting based on one's perception of the facts based on the published allegations and responses is not, even remotely, analogous to crucifixion.
> Do you think it's reasonable to destroy his reputation before an investigation has occurred?
I think people should be conscious of the uncertainty in the facts when commenting based on limited information, but that he is entitled to no more deference from private actors than, essentially, avoiding libelous statements (those known to be false or made with with reckless disregard for truth.)
General private commentary is not, morally or ethically, dependent on an investigation.
And, in any case, an investigation has occurred, preceding publication of the story.
Any ideas for recognizing situations where a bit of skepticism is warranted vs situations like this? In this case, I'm a little saddened that my comments caused some more stress for the founders. One of them personally came to correct me upthread.
I think it's still important in general to reserve judgement and to wait for due process, but is there much reason to hold so fast to those views anymore? The speed at which accusations can be confirmed or denied seems to have increased to the point where it might not be so bad to just assume that the truth will usually come out. I don't know.
Since you're asking seriously, I have a hypothesis that probably applies to a lot of the well-meaning skeptical responses in this thread:
Most of the men replying in this thread have an incorrect "prior" (in the statistical sense) of the odds that a woman will experience serious sexual harassment in the workplace. This prior emerges, one presumes, because we look at ourselves as the model for estimating that behavior, think "there's no way in hell I'd behave that way, so this must be really rare", and assign a relatively low probability to the occurrence.
That prior is incorrect. There are enough harassers out there, each of whom harms multiple people, that, in fact, the average experience is of having been inappropriately approached, harassed, or outright assaulted, to the point where [1] a woman has a lifetime 1 in 6 chance of being the victim of rape or attempted rape, and in one survey, 1 in 3 women reported having experienced workplace sexual harassment. [2] Those numbers may be wrong a bit in either direction, but the decimal point is probably in the right place.
When we hear a claim like "X was sexually harassed by Y", we evaluate the likelihood of that statement in light of our own experience and prior - and assign to it a much lower likelihood of it being true than the true probability. In other words, you mentally calculate: P(harassed | X says harassed). By bayes rule, that's equal to P(X says harassed | harassed) * P(harassed) / P(X says harassed). So when our mental model of P(harassed) is too low, our estimate of P(harassed | X says harassed) is too low. And thus arises excessive disbelief in claims that are more likely to be true.
So, my very geeky suggestion for this is: Be very precise about the question you're asking about and the assumptions that go into it. You can often find a way to validate those assumptions to check what you're asking about.
pdf page 15 (document internal page 8): "Based on testimony to the Select Task Force and various academic articles, we learned that
anywhere from 25% to 85% of women report having experienced sexual harassment in the
workplace.
...
We found that when employees were asked, in surveys using a randomly representative sample
(called a “probability sample”), if they had experienced “sexual harassment,” without that term
being defined in the survey, approximately one in four women (25%) reported experiencing
“sexual harassment” in the workplace. This percentage was remarkably consistent across
probability surveys. When employees were asked the same question in surveys using
convenience samples (in lay terms, a convenience sample is not randomly representative because
it uses respondents that are convenient to the researcher (e.g., student volunteers or respondents
from one organization)), with sexual harassment not being defined, the rate rose to 50% of
women reporting they had been sexually harassed."
The cited EEOC report has fairly extensive citations backing up its claims.
As I said - I have no specific numbers I believe are The One True Answer, but it's fairly clear from a variety of sources that the decimal points are in approximately the right place. For the purpose of what I was discussing, 25% and 85% are approximately the same ("Very much higher than one might guess if we use our own behavior as a model").
> Any ideas for recognizing situations where a bit of skepticism is warranted vs situations like this?
Skepticism is always warranted, this situation was no exception (even though the admission that has since emerged seems to implicitly confirm the reports.)
But skepticism doesn't mean don't form and express a view on the facts based on what information you do have, it means be aware that you don't have the whole picture and refrain from action that is too extreme for the information you have, and remain willing to revise your opinion as more information becomes available.
The last bit takes active effort to counter confirmation bias and the desire to avoid having to admit error.
> I think it's still important in general to reserve judgement and to wait for due process,
Even in government, “due process” isn't a binary thing; what process is due varies based on the action being taken and other elements of context. Even if we extend the concept to include private action, things like posting a comment expressing concern would have much less process due than any substantive government action.
Even a government agent acting in their official capacity doesn't have to wait for a conviction to say that they believe someone is guilty.
What due process are you looking for, precisely? Is it a practical standard to apply? Sexual harassment is not itself a crime, so it's unlikely he'll be indicted and tried. Also, "due process" has a broad meaning that goes beyond "jury trial". A good faith investigation by a journalist with six sources, three on the record, could certainly be viewed as due process.
> A good faith investigation by a journalist with six sources, three on the record, could certainly be viewed as due process.
But @sillysaurus3 basically said that there is no amount of evidence that could satisfy "reasonable doubt" with this statement:
> When it involves rich or powerful people, the ability to get many she-said's becomes easier.
This statement basically says that gathering multiple claims and multiple accounts/allegations cannot be proof against a rich or powerful person because of some inherent propensity of women to come out of the woodwork to lodge harassment/assault claims against rich/powerful/famous people. So once you are rich and powerful you immediately win all he-said/she-said situations because people have to give you the "benefit of the doubt." (not that I agree with this statement)
No, it had nothing to do with women, and I resent that implication. I notice you saw the subthread where I articulated that it had nothing to do with women yet still posted a comment insinuating it does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14621640
It's not a controversial observation that rich and powerful people can acquire enemies, and some of them have been slandered by the press.
It was difficult to separate that situation from this one. I assure you, I'm a reasonable and thoughtful person and it's not fair to say that I basically said there's no amount of evidence that can satisfy a claim against a powerful person.
The original comment was "Maybe we should wait to see how this plays out before making any judgements." Nothing more.
This whole conversation was a request for more information, so if you're going to throw me under the bus for it, you'll just push those who want to ask harmless questions further into the camp of "I shouldn't say a word." And when people have beliefs that seem reasonable to them, this can be a harmful situation when those beliefs are false.
For example, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that a journalist shouldn't wield the power to destroy someone's reputation without any independent oversight. It's a simple proposition with simple, obvious consequences. But pointing out that no investigation is going to occur helped me realize that it's an absurd standard.
EDIT: Also, most of my comments received around 8 upvotes. They've been bouncing up and down, but the point is, clearly a lot of people felt similarly. So by voicing these concerns, it probably changed a lot more minds than my own. Talking this out and being open with it seems like a good thing.
Apologies, but I'm not claiming that you think that there is no amount of evidence that can satisfy a claim against a powerful person. My issue was that the claim:
> When it involves rich or powerful people, the ability to get many she-said's becomes easier.
when taken at face value is implying (indirectly) that it takes more "she-saids" to make a claim against a rich/powerful person believable than it would for a "normal" person.
It doesn't even have to have anything to do with women. It just implies that even multiple claims by separate parties might not be enough when the target is someone rich or powerful (or famous) if it's a "my word against yours" type situation. From my point of view, that's just giving more power to the rich or powerful.
If the sea change we observe as a result of these allegations is VC's and tech executives being scrupulously professional in their interactions with female founders and employees, to prevent even a whiff of impropriety, I think we'd all be better off.
If this guy could say "I was never even alone in the same conference room with any of these women, let alone at a bar where any impropriety is a matter of their word against mine" I think this story wouldn't have run.
Seriously guys, when you're at work, just fucking work and all this bullshit magically goes away. No dating, no uncomfortable discussions of race or politics or sex, just do your job and go home. Talk about tabs versus spaces if you need to spice up a Friday afternoon lull.
Yes, it is the very definition of reasonable in this case. I believe a reasonable person, given the information available one or two clicks hence, would be completely unsurprised to learn that these 6 women are reporting events that happened, and extremely surprised to learn it was a conspiracy or series of unusually unfortunate misunderstandings.
What "investigation" are you planning to wait for? Who's doing it? What URL will the final report be published at?
Do you apply this standard in other areas? If someone tells you they had chicken for lunch, do you say, "Hold on, let's wait for the investigation to determine what you actually had for lunch"? Or if six people told you they had chicken for lunch?
>They have fucking text messages to back their story up. Are those easy to fabricate too, when it comes to rich and powerful people?
I believe you are wrong about this. Text messages are easier to fabricate than other forms of digital evidence, and less risky than something like paying people to pretend to be witnesses.
Why are you talking about due process when there's no crime that has been committed?
This is about calling out shitty but legal behavior. The VC didn't even deny he was lecherous, just that he didn't do anything illegal. That's tacit confirmation that it did happen.
Except that people who "she said" often have a lot more to lose than the person they're accusing, and even if they're speaking the absolute truth they end up damaging their careers, reputations, and general well-being. The media scruitiny alone would destroy many people.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but due process exists for a reason. We should reserve judgement until the investigation progresses further.