
The accusations were lies, but could we prove it? - laurex
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/magazine/title-ix-sexual-harassment-accusations.html
======
overgard
This is why the idea that it's never ok to question an accuser is really
dangerous. "J" obviously discovered something that way too many people have
now discovered: if you drape yourself in the cloak of the victim, you make
yourself socially impervious to any critical inquiry. We can and should be
disgusted by "J", but it's less about an individual and more about a
vulnerability in our system: mob justice and crucifying people outside of the
legal system is a very very bad idea. And no, I'm not suggesting we should
never take victims seriously, since in discussions of this nature people
always want to create strawmen. But I don't think we should just take
anonymous commentary with no contact with actual law enforcement seriously.

There's a really good reason we have an innocent-until-proven-guilty system.
False accusations can be just as harmful as actual crimes.

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
_if you drape yourself in the cloak of the victim, you make yourself socially
impervious to any critical inquiry_

You seem to live in a parallel reality. Susan Fowler's career was destroyed
twice when she came out with accusations.

For the victim, it's not even an uphill battle, in most of the cases it's a
guaranteed losing battle.

~~~
voxic11
I read up on Fowler and Wikipedia says this which is very very different from
your take.

> Fowler's role in changing Uber made her into a business world celebrity. She
> has received book and Hollywood film deals and continues to work towards
> legislation and workplace protections for women.

How is that "getting her career destroyed"?

~~~
HarryHirsch
Good for her that she got a book deal out of the experience and got on the
speaking circuit. For most people it doesn't work like that. (The other
problem is that labour rights in the US would be a nice to have and Title IX
is the only law with teeth.)

~~~
EamonnMR
I can't imagine most posters here would rather do a speaking circuit then
program.

~~~
manfredo
You keep stating that Susan Fowler can no longer be an engineer. This is not
substantiated. Can you provide examples where she is being denied employment?
From what I can tell, she was hired by Stripe after leaving google. Did Stripe
fire her as for sharing her experience at Uber?

------
SilasX
This was submitted a few days ago, and thaumasiotes linked this article[1],
which I endorse as being _much_ more information-dense. The NY Times one is
one of the usual droning long-form pieces that takes way too long to say
anything relevant.

[1] [https://reason.com/2020/03/18/title-ix-arizona-state-
univers...](https://reason.com/2020/03/18/title-ix-arizona-state-university-
viren-tecedor/)

------
at_a_remove
Title IX has always had these problems and has had these abuses since
inception. Numerous lawsuits have been brought about this kind of thing and
even won. Why is this case different?

No, really, I am asking. Why is the New York Times writing about it _now_? Why
for these people?

~~~
MrStonedOne
Women were victimized by a system that was designed to help women. In this
case it's even more juicy because its gay women. Even better because its a gay
man as the perpetrator.

This gets reads, this gets people's attention, and its less common then the
typical case of abuse, making it _interesting_. It helps that they have more
concrete proof the accusations were a lie, so the news paper doesn't have to
worry about being on the wrong side of a sensitive topic.

but don't forget about the empathy gap. Not in the news paper, but in society
at large. The idea of an innocent man getting caught up in the system is
uncomfortable, but people push that thought to the back of their mind and
subconsciously rationalise it away as a necessary evil to protect women (and
some men) because they can't think of a way to protect the falsely accused
that doesn't make it easier to get away with abusing women. In this view the
potentially abused women gets more empathy over the potentially innocent man.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> In this case it's even more juicy because its gay women.

I think in this kind of story, where the accused are women, they're pretty
much always going to be gay women.

Not for reasons of any particular animus, but because that means the putative
victims are female, which people will take a lot more seriously.

------
ivalm
There is a twitter thread that looked into public court documents:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/chick_in_kiev/status/124049711317...](https://mobile.twitter.com/chick_in_kiev/status/1240497113177391104)

~~~
michaelmrose
Firstly these court documents are exactly as described on twitter.

[http://www.superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/docket/CivilCourtCases...](http://www.superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/docket/CivilCourtCases/caseInfo.asp?caseNumber=CV2019-003027)

Second I submitted a complaint to university where the perp teaches. No
response so far.

~~~
netsharc
Looking around Twitter, someone tweeted his faculty page got taken down, so
the university is presumably aware of what's happening.

------
michaelmrose
As our founders knew there is no way to reconcile justice with anonymity. Any
accusation that is to be taken as credible must necessarily provide the
information needed to obtain physical evidence or names of individuals who can
be questioned.

Without a way to credibly proceed such investigations should be expeditiously
closed and sealed. With an avenue to proceed they should be investigated with
intelligence and diligence.

With that said although author isn't allowed to name J I suggest that the
populace is under no such constraint. I will not herein speculate nor suggest
such but I have to hope that the interests of justice will be better served in
the future than they are presently.

------
virtuous_signal
How easily could this story* happen in other fields besides University
faculties? Could this all be avoided by just not telling anyone that you are
in the running for a job, until you have the written offer in hand?

*(1:frenemy finds out you are a candidate for a job; 2: frenemy anonymously send unsubstantiated rumors to decisionmakers; 3: decisionmakers take the rumors seriously)

~~~
fennecfoxen
Private individuals at businesses have incentives and the opportunity to
exercise basic judgment, ask the accuser for more facts, or ask the accused
for his or her side of the story.

On the other hand, from 2011-2017, most schools reading the federal Title IX
guidance were not only discouraged from listening to the defendant, they found
themselves discouraged from listening to the _victim_. Thus you see a black
athlete Grant Neal who was expelled from Colorado State University-Pueblo for
raping a trainer, despite the trainer saying that she was fine and not at all
raped. (You can't believe her! She's a battered woman.)

Of course, when Betsy DeVos announced changes in 2014, all the commentary you
could find was "this is rape culture at work!" but if you're willing to
actually look at the cases she cited, I can point you at
[https://reason.com/2017/09/07/devos-title-ix-example-
cases-r...](https://reason.com/2017/09/07/devos-title-ix-example-cases-rape/)

------
Barrin92
Lots of people commentating on the innocent/guilt dilemma and who to believe,
but what I have noticed that a lot of these cases that are incindiary, in
particular in the United States seem to emerge from the university system and
I don't think this is an accident.

It seems outright byzantine to me. There appears to be a parallel justice
system at work where complaints about serious crimes are brought to faculty or
peers or title IX compliance officers rather than state authority directly.
There are countless of informal relationships between students and teachers
and people who are economically dependent in ways that are ripe for abuse.
There appears to be a culture of brushing serious crimes under the carpet on
one hand and a reaction of vigilante justice as a response.

------
oh_sigh
> And as part of a settlement, they are prohibited from publicly naming him.

That would be a non-starter for me. I think I would burn about half my net
worth to let the world know about a scumbag on the level of "J".

~~~
awinder
I’m a bit ratted by their inability to press criminal charges. They got a lot
of hard evidence and I’d be really amazed if someone crazed enough to do this
is going to be an outstanding citizen for the rest of their life. There’s a
public interest in that person being named, having this history attached to
their name, and restitution to be paid.

~~~
DangitBobby
I was just thinking... the state pays ungodly amounts of money to put away
criminals. How is this different? Why are these two financially on the hook
for justice to be served?

------
Causality1
Fucking amazing that a "credible accusation" can be made under a provably
false name. I know more than one person whose life has been destroyed by
baseless accusations of campus sexual misconduct. The only difference was that
the people I knew weren't respected faculty members with the financial
resources to hire a lawyer and the connections to speak personally with the
president of the university, and they lost a lot more than a single job offer.

~~~
mtnygard
It's an odd definition of "credible" isn't it?

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/oZhy4](https://archive.md/oZhy4)

------
jedharris
Could the university investigation subpoena the information behind the email
accounts? If not, why not? This seems like a basic investigative move, and
unless they are not allowed to do it, makes me doubt very much that they were
serious about the investigation.

------
captncraig
I would love to read this, but keep getting blocked by paywalls.

~~~
throwaway894345
Same here. If someone could summarize instead of downvoting, it would be
helpful.

~~~
dang
If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the
thread.

This is in the FAQ at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
and there's more explanation here:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20paywalls&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

~~~
throwaway894345
Sorry for the confusion. I didn’t mean to suggest the post violated the rules;
I was only trying to request more information (my comment was the second in
this thread—no one had posted a summary or workaround at the time).

Thanks to everyone who summarized or referred me elsewhere.

------
alexandercrohde
Unfortunate that a bad investigator made a professor's life difficult. I liken
it to a bad boss who can make one ultimately lose one's job for entirely
unclear reasons.

Without any evidence that this is a systemic problem, I wonder why it would
justify my attention.

~~~
virtuous_signal
The author makes the point that the investigator was sympathetic, but had to
follow policy. It's the policy that is defective:

>Melanie also hadn’t been able to locate a current student named Rebecca James
in Marta’s department, but she said that the name could always be an alias,
and she was still obligated to investigate Marta now that a “credible”
accusation had been made.

>“Good question,” Melanie responded, her voice bright again. “Because of the
funding that we receive through Title IX, we’re required to investigate
everything. And with that we want to really run everything to the ground.”

~~~
Chris2048
Yet, all of a sudden:

> in the future, anonymous accusations would be fact-checked before new
> investigations were opened

policy allowed for this..

------
pstuart
My understanding is this is being used to try to dismantle Title IX (Devos and
company are against it).

The article shows a very troubling abuse of the system, but it should be a
prompt to fix it rather than destroy it.

~~~
downerending
Why? Universities don't really want to act as a parallel judicial system, and
it turns out that they're not very good at it.

We have real laws and courts. Let them work.

~~~
HarryHirsch
Good luck with that. We had an attempted rape on campus. The suspect was from
a well-connected local family and consequently the charges were dismissed. The
local fishwrapper even published a correction to the weekly police report.
Thankfully we have the parallel system and don't have to deal with that
student any longer.

~~~
nitwit005
Then the "success" is that they are now raping people off campus, rather than
on it.

~~~
michaelmrose
Isn't this still better than nothing?

~~~
downerending
Is it? The goal ought to be _reducing the number of these crimes_ , not
shifting their location. Or worse yet, shifting them to communities of poor
and downtrodden, where they can be conveniently ignored.

~~~
michaelmrose
We all have a scope of control we can exercise. If you are part of the
university system kicking the problem out of your sphere of control is
rational and effective.

This isn't the best of all possible worlds obviously.

~~~
downerending
You're not wrong. I can't fix homelessness and abject poverty, but I don't
want it in my neighborhood.

(You see my point.)

