My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community
Jon Pretty sounds like a complete creep and yes, based on this account, a predator.<p>That being said, there is a court and criminal justice system for a reason.  While I empathize with the author, and utterly despise the archetype of high-status men who use their status within programming communities as a tool to target women, I find the nature of these kinds of posts to be counterproductive.  Therapeutic to the author?  Likely.  A way to mobilize support? Certainly.  But the method can be abused.  Imagine a letter like this targeted at you one day, except unlike Mr. Pretty, you are innocent.  Ask yourself if that&#x27;s a possibility, and if you think that there is a zero probability of anyone maliciously weaponizing accusations of sexual misconduct.<p>My brother was a victim of a vicious smear by a female colleague, who falsely accused him of stalking her as a result of him calling her out one day for stealing his project and presenting it while he was traveling to the funeral of his wife&#x27;s grandfather.  He was able to show video footage of him picking up his son and daughter at a daycare the very moment the woman claimed he was at her house, but by then, the HR department couldn&#x27;t turn back, and he was fired.  (He was later sent a large gift basket by several of his coworkers who had heard from someone in HR that the charges were false, but &quot;optics&quot; were the reason they had to move forward with his termination.)