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'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'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'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 "optics" were the reason they had to move forward with his termination.)