They’ve caused so much damage to the Scala community. Absolutely toxic. As a bystander to all of this back in the 2010s whilst I was involved with the language, watching the non stop “drama” between members of the community was exhausting and cringe inducing. Glad I left.
Seeing from a distant place and not having a horse in this race, I see several lessons to unpack:
1. The borderless and ambiguous relationships in technical communities is officially over, and everyone trying to do the opposite is just risking him/herself in terms of reputation.
2. Do the “I condemn X, let put my name in a public letter” nowadays in that kind of dispute without have access to all information it’s just a dangerous way to gain clout. You do not condemn anything, your 7K followers in twitter and 250 followers does not transform you in a public celebrity that put you in a position to condemn someone.
3. The side that settled with the person that committed the allegedly behaviour should celebrate the outcome because it was way light in comparison with other jurisdictions where it could converge to criminal charges.
4. More or less like aviation, you will not train to fly in the clouds in visual flight, but you will train to not enter in that situation in the first place. What I mean by that is everyone needs to operate defensively and cautiously when the social borders are not totally explicitly displayed. Questions like “Should I engage in that behaviour that can be misinterpreted?”, “is something goes south can I suffer reputational damage?”, “do I have the disposition and resources to defend myself and my position in court?” needs to be answered before engage in open letters and in interpersonal relationships in communities.
He did not "win in court", a consent order means both parties agreed to a mutual resolution prior to a judgement occurring. If I had to guess it was settled this way because of the time, misery and tremendous cost that would otherwise be involved for all parties. "Wins in court" suggests some thorough process leading up to a final evidential determination made by a judge. That is not what happened here, it'd probably be more accurate to say the parties were motivated to cooperate via their solicitors under looming threat of enduring that process.
No skin in this game, but looking at it from the respondents' perspective, 20k split between 4 is incredibly attractive: 5k and an apology to put an end to any threat relating to the issue, given the alternative of potentially unbounded costs to demonstrate innocence with a tortuous and uncertain outcome. From the claimant's perspective it is more confusing, triggering such a heavyweight process then settling for so little given the claimed harms suggests all kinds of things, not least including the kind of advice he may have received given the strength of the case as his solicitors understood it.
I am not against having the title changed if mods want to do it, and if there are enough people who think that it should be changed.
In my opinion, he did win. The document clearly favours Jon as the other side admitted they have no evidence and made baseless claims - stuck their nose where they shouldn’t have.
Make no mistake that this was a serious character assassination based on zero proof or involvement from authorities.
This was not a bunch of IRC friends doing a prank for the lolz but an open letter with signatures from prominent community members.
I can understand why someone would feel inclined to do something like that, but you ought to consider the repercussions of your actions when it comes to attacking a person based on “word of mouth” evidence.
He may have won, depending on what he was seeking through the action and what he received in the consent order. But he did not win in court. He won out of court, and used the court as a mechanism to record and eventually enforce what he won.
When I read the initial post I chalked it up to there's always another side of the story. The problem is while we want to really punish rapists we can't just do witch hunts based on hearsay and throw innocent people under the bus.
Also the importance given to 21 and 35 seems indirectly to imply something shady which is not the case, it can be a relationship of 2 consenting adults.
I wish all the best and may you even further clear your name. You went through a horrible ordeal.
This was absolutely not based on hearsay. We made our decision to sign the letter based on direct evidence, not hearsay. The open letter links directly to evidence which is not hearsay.
> The open letter links directly to evidence which is not hearsay.
If you're referring to the two blog posts, that is testimonial evidence only. While it /is/ possible to convict on the basis of only testimony, it's very rare, as testimony usually needs to corroborated by documentary or physical evidence, or at minimum be supported by a preponderance of other types of evidence which makes the claims against a defendant more likely to be true than that they are false.
I am not you, I don't know you, and I don't have any particularly strong opinion about this situation. That said, you're all over the comments here, trying to defend the contents of the open letter. If you believe in this so strongly, I'd advise that you provide stronger evidence to support your position. Simply believing someone else who told you something is not substantial or corroborative.
So if I got this right it's the open letter (second link) that was deemed defamatory, and not the story from the first link?
> The Defendants accept that they have never had any evidence to support the allegations apart from the two unverified claims published in coordination with the Open Letter. They were never in a position to make any informed judgement on the truth of the allegations, and did not seek clarification on any of the allegations from the Claimant.
To be exactly correct, he sued for defamation four (4) of the signatories of the open letter, because the open letter was the explicit call to action to cancel him. He can only file suit against persons within the jurisdiction of his home court in the UK, the majority of the signatories, as well as the two accusers are not UK persons and cannot be sued in that context.
Whether or not that vindicates him is an exercise to the reader.
I make no claims or judgement either way. I just acknowledge that information asymmetry exists as do jurisdictional limits. It's not possible in this case for him to ever be fully vindicated due to the limits of the legal system, but whether it's enough to vindicate him for you is up to you.
In the US, getting someone convicted of libel or settling for it is pretty solid proof. It means the person being libeled likely could prove that the person making the claims knew they were false and maliciously spread them anyways.
In the UK, it's more akin to an allegation. It provides us substantially less information than a similar proceeding in the US would.
> In the US, getting someone convicted of libel or settling for it is pretty solid proof. It means the person being libeled likely could prove that the person making the claims knew they were false and maliciously spread them anyways.
Proving actual malice is only a requirement if the plaintiff is a public figure per New York Times v Sullivan. People who are not public figures have a lower burden of proof, though it is still substantially more stringent than in the UK.
> People who are not public figures have a lower burden of proof, though it is still substantially more stringent than in the UK.
While state rules for private figures differ, the Constitutional limit (as articulated in Gertz v. Welch) prohibits liability without fault, that is, there must be at least negligence even if the statement is factually false, and also prohibits punitive damages without actual malice.
In the UK, defamation is strict liability (there is no fault requirement) in addition to truth being an affirmative defense rather than falsity being an element of the tort.
Negligence is a significantly lower standard than actual malice, and presumably a person who has been defamed would be seeking significant actual damages anyway (the sum of lost wages for a SWE following a false SA allegation, for example, would be quite large even in the absence of punitive damages).
They (can) have different, less stringent elements, not fewer (state rules vary, but there can be a less stringent fault element than actual malice, though there must still be fault — defamation cannot be strict liability in the US.)
Both Weinstein and Cosby provide good examples of where hard evidence was extraordinarily difficult to come by. Much of the evidentiary value comes from the large volume of credible (time, place, access, similar stories, etc.) accusations; those accusations largely required an initial few to be brave enough to come out with their stories for the rest to come forward.
The UK's setup permits such abusers to prevent press coverage of these initial victims, and to significantly chill the climate for subsequent accusers.
Both setups have their upsides and downsides, but I'm less a fan of the one that lets serial predators evolve their strategies to be more and more immune from consequence.
In the UK, you can be held liable for stating a reasonable conclusion based on the facts available to you after reasonable investigation that turns out to be (viewed by a court as) false, while in the US there must in any defamation case be some degree of fault as well as falsity.
Which can mean, sometimes, that the perpetrator is good at covering their tracks and selects victims who can't sustain a prolonged legal and public opinion battle trying to prove their case.
They need only allege that someone libeled them to impose significant legal costs on that person, costs that for many are not feasible. You don't get a public defender.
If you read the document, the allegation that they made false statements remains unproven. They admit only to not being able to support the claims with evidence other than the original allegations.
The original source of the accusations that they were supporting in the open letter is also notably not named in the suit.
In most court proceedings, it must be positively proven ("beyond a reasonable doubt" in some cases, "by the preponderance of the evidence" in others) that you committed the crime or tort in question. That's a good requirement, and English defamation law is a glaring exception.
So you believe it's possible that at the time they had evidence to prove the allegations, and thus acted in good faith, and now suddenly they don't have any memory of said evidence? That's an interesting case that I expect we'll be seeing medical papers written about soon!
Good faith (that is, having evidence from which one would reasonably believe the truth of the statement at the time it was made) is not a defense to libel in British law.
Libel in the UK is a strict liability tort, the statement can be 100% justified based on the information in hand when it is made, and even if the court would agree with that were it permitted to consider it, if the court finds it is false based on information that the defendant did not have (or even could not possibly have had, no matter how hard they sought it) at the time of the statement, the defendant will still be liable.
EDIT: while the NY Times v. Sullivan rules for public officials (extended by other cases to public figures) get more attention, the Gertz v. Welch rule that, as a matter of Constitutional law, requires fault for defamation liability for private figures is arguably more fundamental difference between the US and UK on defamation law.
The claims in https://scala-open-letter.github.io/ are that the signers "have become aware" "based on multiple, independent, well-substantiated reports showing a systematic pattern of behavior over an extended period" of harrassment, and links those very multiple, independent reports (of which the second is indeed a substantiation of the first).
> everyone involved in the dissemination of the defamation is liable as having published it
(That wouldn't fly here; retweeting a false claim, barring unusual circumstances, tends not to be actionable.)
The actual allegations weren't litigated in this case, it's a settlement, and I don't doubt it made more sense to say "sorry" and pay £5k/person than to spend years in court litigating a crime that is typically done in a way that leaves little physical evidence that someone else asserted happened.
> It's hard to see how any of this is false under the US standards.
You are taking their claims at face value. It doesn't matter what standards you apply other than truthfulness, and these claims could still be false. There's no substantiation provided, merely the claim that such exists. A court case in the US would still require them to provide that substantiation, otherwise their claims could be considered libel. While the libel laws in the US and UK differ, it is not legal either in the US to defame someone either knowingly or negligently.
They are entitled to that presumption until evidence emerges otherwise. (This is not the case in the UK!)
> A court case in the US would still require them to provide that substantiation, otherwise their claims could be considered libel.
No. A court case in the US would require Pretty to show evidence they had reason to believe the information was false for them to be liable for defamation.
> They are entitled to that presumption until evidence emerges otherwise.
Why is only one side “entitled to that presumption”? In most common law countries, including both the US and UK, there is a presumption of innocence when someone faces an accusation, their guilt must be proven with evidence.
You are providing heavier weight and benefit to one claim over the other, and that weight is going towards an accusation that presents no substantive evidence. That’s your prerogative, but it is philosophically misaligned with a fact-based approach to the law.
You are mistaken that this was not libel in the US. Even in the US, the law and precedent is clear, you cannot go around claiming someone is guilty of a crime they’re not convicted of, actively seek to prevent them from being employed, and explicitly cause their dismissal from their means of livelihood. That establishes clear damages, and if you have no evidence to support your claim, not even the lower burden of proof that would prevail in a civil matter, you would lose if sued for libel and defamation. Once damages and either willful disregard, negligence, or malice are established, all elements are present.
> Why is only one side “entitled to that presumption”? In most common law countries, including both the US and UK, there is a presumption of innocence when someone faces an accusation, their guilt must be proven with evidence.
In the legal system, yes.
Outside it, no. I don’t have to hold a court proceeding to ground my kid or tell people my neighbor is a dick. There isn’t any right to due process in the court of public opinion; there never has been.
In the UK, defamation law DOES NOT PROVIDE A PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE. That is the precise problem. It is highly unusual in that regard. The burden of proof is on the DEFENDANT.
> Even in the US, the law and precedent is clear, you cannot go around claiming someone is guilty of a crime they’re not convicted of, actively seek to prevent them from being employed, and explicitly cause their dismissal from their means of livelihood.
You absolutely can. People can call OJ a murderer. Claiming he was convicted of it might rise to libel.
Nothing in the open letter asserts he was convicted of a crime. If it were libel to assert someone committed a crime before their conviction for it, prosecutors would… be in trouble.
Because sometimes people do bad things in ways that are hard to prove, but they still happen.
The Catholic priest makes sure he and the altar boy are the only ones in the church. The coworker who makes unwelcome advances is careful to do it verbally when there aren’t witnesses. The abusive spouse leverages psychological traumas to make their partner feel crazy.
And how do you pick whose lives to ruin without evidence? What do you do about the ones who are wrongly accused? How many innocent lives are you willing to destroy?
That question cuts both ways. How many lives did Weinstein and Cosby and Savile destroy? (And look how tough it was to nail them, and keep it that way.) What about the victims whose attackers are good at avoiding hard evidence?
The basic legal standard is crimes/torts in court have to be proven. English law violates it in defamation cases.
It's possible that we no longer remember ALL of the evidence we had when we drafted this letter, but the letter links to two first hand accounts of wrongdoing. I also have also talked to multiple other women in the community that say that Jon was someone that women generally knew to warn each other about since there were enough believable accounts of his wrongdoing.
- He did not sue his accuser. He sued people who trusted her word and amplified her allegations. England's (draconian) libel laws would require them to prove that the allegations were true. That's obviously very difficult.
- He lives in Germany, but he chose to sue in England. Germany has more typical libel laws that would require him to prove that he was defamed.
Proving the Holocaust happened in a UK libel proceeding required two years and millions of dollars of litigation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd ; a US court would've likely summarily dismissed it on day one.
You'd likely need a lot more than raw text logs in defense.
The case was not about whether the Holocaust happened or not. If you read the link you posted, "Irving claimed to have been libelled on the grounds that Lipstadt had falsely labelled him a Holocaust denier and falsely claimed that he had falsified evidence or deliberately misinterpreted it".
There is no law in England that forbids somebody being a Holocaust denier (unlike in France and Germany). And Nobody was "[p]roving the Holocaust happened in a UK libel proceeding". I have no idea why you keep posting that.
The Irving case was based on him not liking Lipstadt calling him a denier and accusing him as a historian of faking data. Since the court accepted that he was indeed a denier and was using dodgy data, they ruled for Lipstadt.
Now, back to Pretty. The defendants have apologised so I don't see what there is to debate. Dude, the case is over. Let it go.
I honestly don't know how Jon survived this saga without killing himself.
The kangaroo court, featuring many prominent members of the "community" was brutal in its rush to judgement. It delivered summary justice to a member of the community and ruined his life in a matter of hours.
I was an observer at the time and whilst I didn't know Jon, I was aware of his contributions to the Scala ecosystem. I arranged a video call with him to see how he was holding up, and to try to understand things from his perspective.
The man I spoke to was visibly shellshocked and blindsided by the whole experience. He had a brief, consensual relationship with Yifan, and vehemently denies the wrongdoing that she insinuated in her blogpost.
But the community apparently knew better.
I was already aware of dark political maneuvours in the Scala community thanks to the well published exploits of Travis Brown (who was himself cancelled when the nature of his actions became apparent). Brown didn't just habitually engage in cancel culture. He actually SYSTEMISED it. He wrote tools, published on his github profile to maintain lists of people within the Scala community whose politics he disagreed with, and then he used those lists to attempt to smear those people by association and damage their careers.
One of the two accusers of Jon Pretty happened to be Victoria Leontieva (AKA killnicole), Travis's girlfriend at the time.
And the other accuser, Yifan Xing, is Travis's new girlfriend now.
I'm sure it's all just a coincidence....
While Travis was eventually himself cancelled from the Scala community, it seems his legacy lives on.
The whole witchhunt brought deep shame on the community. I think even the founder of the language, Martin Odersky, tacitly endorsed the open letter. That's a terrible way to lead.
An ethical leader would have called for an end to the emotionally-charged witch-hunt, and would have called for due process instead.
Jon - I hope this vindication gives you the personal closure that you need on the matter. Obviously, I can't imagine you wanting to return to the Scala "community," but please know that the community wasn't united against you at the time. There were many people like me who could see what was happening, and who knew you deserved better than the treatment you received.
> English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defendant, and does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood. For that reason, it has been considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world. In many cases of libel tourism, plaintiffs sued in England to censor critical works when their home countries would reject the case outright.
Counterpoint: when the burden of proof is on the plaintiff, people can lie about terrible things with little to no consequence.
I personally have been at the receiving end of some particularly heinous lies by an individual who is unfortunately not getting the mental assistance they need. It was hard enough to secure a restraining order but my lawyer said there was pretty much nothing I could do about the whoppers being blasted over social media. Fortunately nobody believed the crazy person’s crazy lies but if they had I could have been put in a really bad situation.
I think they have sufficient evidence to win the suit in the US. From the court:
The Defendants accept that they have never had any evidence to support the allegations apart from the two unverified claims published in coordination with the Open Letter. They were never in a position to make any informed judgement on the truth of the allegations, and did not seek clarification on any of the allegations from the Claimant.
Most likely not. There are two parts of US case law that would be at issue here, but the key is actual malice [1]. The defendants here believed the claims they were repeating, even if they themselves hadn't seen the evidence. That isn't defamation.
"actual malice" means either they knew it was untrue or they published it with reckless disregard for the truth. That would be the test he would attempt to prove they failed.
Actual malice (which, reckless disregard isn't all that hard to get) it's only required if a person is a public figure. For most people, you only have to show negligence.
> > British defamation law is notoriously friendly to plaintiffs.
> English defamation law... does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood.
That's not 'notoriously friendly to plaintiffs'. It's simply reasonable behaviour: if someone says something horrible about someone else, the person saying it must be able to prove it was true.
It is completely unreasonable that you are not allowed to speak factually about events that you personally experienced simply because you are not able to conclusively prove that they happened.
The UK's system required a historian to spend two years and millions defending against a libel claim from calling someone a prominent Holocaust denier a Holocaust denier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd
That's to argue one of the most clearly documented historical facts we have.
Allegations - testimony - are evidence. Multiple people alledging something is evidence. Even under US libel law, accusing someone like Cosby or Weinstein of misconduct is risky enough; in the UK, it led to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile being untouchable.
Nothing you have written refutes the item you have quoted. Someone was able to prove that David Irving said the holocaust did not happen, but it did happen, and David Irving lost. Good. The court being slow and expensive is orthogonal and applies across all of law.
This is the absolute best case scenario - the easiest of wins, on a factual level - and it was still hugely expensive in time and money. (He went bankrupt, too, so they didn't even get to recoup those fees.)
If you're one of the kids Jimmy Savile raped, do you think they've got those resources to fight a multi-year court battle with someone who's been covering their tracks successfully for over sixty years? The BBC won't risk talking about it, what hope do you have?
Note that once he died and libel suits couldn't be raised any longer, hundreds of victims came out within the year.
It's a big part of why Jimmy Savile got away with it despite everyone apparently knowing what he was up to, nobody wanted to run the story because they anticipated it would get shot down as libel. The BBC greenlit an investigation into the allegations immediately after he died, they knew full well there was dirt there but they wouldn't touch it until he was in the ground.
Agreed. I know absolutely nothing about this particular case so I'm not passing judgement on it specifically. But as a British person I've learned over the years (and the endless court cases by football players etc) to pretty much totally disregard the outcome of these kind of cases.
Well in the case of defamation the damage has already been done, necessarily. So the defendant is really a prosector, and they are asked for their evidence. See,
eg., this case.
Also,...
> The court ruled that Irving's claim of libel relating to Holocaust denial was not valid under English defamation law
> My [Lord/Lady], on behalf of the Defendants Miles Sabin, Zainab
Ali, Noel Welsh and Bodil Stokke, I wish to associate myself with everything that has been said
by Counsel for the Claimant. They wish to apologise unreservedly for the damage and distress
caused to the Claimant and for any damage to his reputation by their publications and express
their profound and unreserved regret for all of the harm for which they are responsible.
calylex on April 27, 2021 | unvote | next [–]
You have no evidence to be smearing someone's name
and defaming them on HN in this way. Stop this behavior
until there is legal grounds for doing so.
rodgerd on April 28, 2021 | parent | next [–]
It's not defamation if it hasn't been judged
so in a court of law.
I guess it is now, but 3 years later seems damage has been done.
A quick bit of math on the age/score of this story vs. others on the home page shows that this story has been deliberately buried.
Probably by flags as opposed to human moderation, but in fairness to Jon Pretty, the moderators should step in and ensure this story gets equal access to the home page as the original witch hunt against Jon Pretty got.
Probably a more accurate statement would be: "So they got scared and jumped the gun and in so doing risked ruining someones life in an attempt to protect the Scala community."
Does anyone ever recover fully from years of income loss? "Time in the market beats timing the market" and time is our most precious resource. It doesn't sound like this settlement (based on the attached court order) makes him whole financially in any way from the impact.
Not to protect the scala community. To tank a rival. Miles Sabin (the accuser and organizer or the letter) runs a competing consulting service that directly competes (competed?) with Jon Petty, who ran another consulting service also in the UK.
I don't think it was out of competition. To borrow some language from the aforementioned open letter: This is very much a "pattern of behaviour" with these people, directed against anyone and everyone that makes a compelling political target. Travis Brown must be the worst of them, who isn't even really a part of the "Scala community" anymore since he dedicates 100% of his time not on Scala development but on coordinating lynch mobs against his personal enemies within the Scala community. Coincidentally, he is also the new boyfriend of Yifan Xing (the accuser) and a sworn enemy of Jon Pretty.
Pieces of the puzzle are now falling neatly into place. There were two blogposts written about Jon Pretty, insinuating bad behaviour on his part towards woman.
One by Yifan. One by Victoria Leontieva (AKA killnicole).
Travis Brown worked for Twitter and almost certainly had access to personally-identifying information on @libsoftiktok that he used to dox her.
You might think he's a hero, but I'm not sure you'd like it if the situation were reversed, and rightwing tech workers abused their position to expose your online identities because they disagreed with your political opinions.
it was way after he left and he showed how it was done. i dont remember the details but there was a clear public trail of breadcrumbs. zero inside knowledge needed.
you should do your research before making such wild claims.
i would never post inflammatory hate speech anonymously so the reversal isn't possible.
Yes, you’re right. At that point the videos were simply reposted without comment (which achieved her political aims all the more powerfully). She does provide commentary now her account has been restored to Twitter but I wouldn’t describe the commentary as hateful or inciteful.
I think the people she shines a light on are the ones we need to worry about as a society.
we absolutely did this to protect the scala community and we weren't scared and didn't jump the gun. People had been talking about him as being problematic for years before the open letter
Looking at the history here on HN, it seems he’s been accused by multiple women. Regardless of him winning this case, as a woman I’d avoid being alone with this guy at all costs and warn other women to do the same.
So, once accused, one can never be exonerated, even if innocent? Because that sure sounds unfair and undefendable.
I wouldn't want to be alone with you either, in that case, and I'd warn other men to do the same, given that they may evidently be accused for... having previously been accused?
I'm the last person to defend anyone who has laid a finger on or harassed anyone without their consent. But I also believe that anyone can accuse anyone of anything, since that's quite literally what rumors are.
The law has strict standards for fairness, for good reason. It excludes things like rumor, for good reason. But when you as a private person are deciding how to act, you make the best decision available to you with the information you have. The information we have is fairly compelling: multiple women have deeply regretted their interactions with him, enough to risk lawsuits to publish their regret publicly. Why interact with him unless absolutely necessary?
Because multiple people accusing a single person does not make them guilty and is not compelling evidence.
Many people accused women in Salem of being witches. Literally zero of them were guilty. But they were made pariahs, ostracized, and then killed, nonetheless.
As a private individual you can do anything you’d like; but that doesn’t mean anything you’d like to do will be fair or right.
People of all genders do this all the time, group up and rat-fuck the reputation of someone they don't like for all sorts of reasons, not all of them particularly good.
Throw in a bit of bandwagoning during the height of #metoo when we decided that having a bad date where the wrong kind of wine was ordered with Asis Ansari or having a jokey boob photo from 30 years ago with Al Franken was somehow worthy of Thou Shalt Never Work Again, and I can totally understand how all this went down.
I signed the letter and I fully stand by everything it says. I have talked to Yifan and I feel sorry for her and believe her.
It was well known, and well discussed that women in the scala community knew to warn other women about Jon Pretty. I have heard this both directly and indirectly from multiple prominent women in the Scala community.
Could you clarify this for me? How does speaking to those who claim to have been harmed by him serve as proof that he indeed committed these harmful acts?
Additionally, if these individuals were harmed - why didn't they report it to the police?
Is there any evidence that corroborates these claims? Additionally, do you or any of the other signatories possess a legal background that would enable you to review this evidence and confirm its credibility and the truthfulness of the claims?
If such evidence exists, why haven't these individuals pursued legal action, and why hasn't Jon been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law?
Whereas Typelevel, on the other hand, were only too happy to join the mob, and then to stick the knife in with their own lynching-by-blog post: https://typelevel.org/blog/2021/04/27/community-safety.html
Which they still haven't retracted.
The legacy of Travis Brown lives on at Typelevel.
They're a political organisation masquerading as a technical organisation.
2. Do the “I condemn X, let put my name in a public letter” nowadays in that kind of dispute without have access to all information it’s just a dangerous way to gain clout. You do not condemn anything, your 7K followers in twitter and 250 followers does not transform you in a public celebrity that put you in a position to condemn someone.
3. The side that settled with the person that committed the allegedly behaviour should celebrate the outcome because it was way light in comparison with other jurisdictions where it could converge to criminal charges.
4. More or less like aviation, you will not train to fly in the clouds in visual flight, but you will train to not enter in that situation in the first place. What I mean by that is everyone needs to operate defensively and cautiously when the social borders are not totally explicitly displayed. Questions like “Should I engage in that behaviour that can be misinterpreted?”, “is something goes south can I suffer reputational damage?”, “do I have the disposition and resources to defend myself and my position in court?” needs to be answered before engage in open letters and in interpersonal relationships in communities.
Don’t participate in the economic ruin of someone just because of some jilted party
No skin in this game, but looking at it from the respondents' perspective, 20k split between 4 is incredibly attractive: 5k and an apology to put an end to any threat relating to the issue, given the alternative of potentially unbounded costs to demonstrate innocence with a tortuous and uncertain outcome. From the claimant's perspective it is more confusing, triggering such a heavyweight process then settling for so little given the claimed harms suggests all kinds of things, not least including the kind of advice he may have received given the strength of the case as his solicitors understood it.
In my opinion, he did win. The document clearly favours Jon as the other side admitted they have no evidence and made baseless claims - stuck their nose where they shouldn’t have.
Make no mistake that this was a serious character assassination based on zero proof or involvement from authorities.
This was not a bunch of IRC friends doing a prank for the lolz but an open letter with signatures from prominent community members.
I can understand why someone would feel inclined to do something like that, but you ought to consider the repercussions of your actions when it comes to attacking a person based on “word of mouth” evidence.
Everyone gets hurt in the process.
Also the importance given to 21 and 35 seems indirectly to imply something shady which is not the case, it can be a relationship of 2 consenting adults.
I wish all the best and may you even further clear your name. You went through a horrible ordeal.
If you're referring to the two blog posts, that is testimonial evidence only. While it /is/ possible to convict on the basis of only testimony, it's very rare, as testimony usually needs to corroborated by documentary or physical evidence, or at minimum be supported by a preponderance of other types of evidence which makes the claims against a defendant more likely to be true than that they are false.
I am not you, I don't know you, and I don't have any particularly strong opinion about this situation. That said, you're all over the comments here, trying to defend the contents of the open letter. If you believe in this so strongly, I'd advise that you provide stronger evidence to support your position. Simply believing someone else who told you something is not substantial or corroborative.
https://medium.com/@yifanxing/my-experience-with-sexual-hara...
https://scala-open-letter.github.io/
> The Defendants accept that they have never had any evidence to support the allegations apart from the two unverified claims published in coordination with the Open Letter. They were never in a position to make any informed judgement on the truth of the allegations, and did not seek clarification on any of the allegations from the Claimant.
How does this vindicate him?
Whether or not that vindicates him is an exercise to the reader.
This is true in all countries that have the rule of law, not just the UK.
In the US, getting someone convicted of libel or settling for it is pretty solid proof. It means the person being libeled likely could prove that the person making the claims knew they were false and maliciously spread them anyways.
In the UK, it's more akin to an allegation. It provides us substantially less information than a similar proceeding in the US would.
Proving actual malice is only a requirement if the plaintiff is a public figure per New York Times v Sullivan. People who are not public figures have a lower burden of proof, though it is still substantially more stringent than in the UK.
While state rules for private figures differ, the Constitutional limit (as articulated in Gertz v. Welch) prohibits liability without fault, that is, there must be at least negligence even if the statement is factually false, and also prohibits punitive damages without actual malice.
In the UK, defamation is strict liability (there is no fault requirement) in addition to truth being an affirmative defense rather than falsity being an element of the tort.
That's the only point I was making.
The UK's setup permits such abusers to prevent press coverage of these initial victims, and to significantly chill the climate for subsequent accusers.
Both setups have their upsides and downsides, but I'm less a fan of the one that lets serial predators evolve their strategies to be more and more immune from consequence.
No. It means the libeller couldn't prove what they were saying.
Which can mean, sometimes, that the perpetrator is good at covering their tracks and selects victims who can't sustain a prolonged legal and public opinion battle trying to prove their case.
They need only allege that someone libeled them to impose significant legal costs on that person, costs that for many are not feasible. You don't get a public defender.
The original source of the accusations that they were supporting in the open letter is also notably not named in the suit.
In most court proceedings, it must be positively proven ("beyond a reasonable doubt" in some cases, "by the preponderance of the evidence" in others) that you committed the crime or tort in question. That's a good requirement, and English defamation law is a glaring exception.
Libel in the UK is a strict liability tort, the statement can be 100% justified based on the information in hand when it is made, and even if the court would agree with that were it permitted to consider it, if the court finds it is false based on information that the defendant did not have (or even could not possibly have had, no matter how hard they sought it) at the time of the statement, the defendant will still be liable.
EDIT: while the NY Times v. Sullivan rules for public officials (extended by other cases to public figures) get more attention, the Gertz v. Welch rule that, as a matter of Constitutional law, requires fault for defamation liability for private figures is arguably more fundamental difference between the US and UK on defamation law.
It's hard to see how any of this is false under the US standards. In the UK, though... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law
> everyone involved in the dissemination of the defamation is liable as having published it
(That wouldn't fly here; retweeting a false claim, barring unusual circumstances, tends not to be actionable.)
The actual allegations weren't litigated in this case, it's a settlement, and I don't doubt it made more sense to say "sorry" and pay £5k/person than to spend years in court litigating a crime that is typically done in a way that leaves little physical evidence that someone else asserted happened.
Even when you win, you lose! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd Millions in legal fees, two years spent proving the case, and he declares bankruptcy when fees are awarded.
You are taking their claims at face value. It doesn't matter what standards you apply other than truthfulness, and these claims could still be false. There's no substantiation provided, merely the claim that such exists. A court case in the US would still require them to provide that substantiation, otherwise their claims could be considered libel. While the libel laws in the US and UK differ, it is not legal either in the US to defame someone either knowingly or negligently.
They are entitled to that presumption until evidence emerges otherwise. (This is not the case in the UK!)
> A court case in the US would still require them to provide that substantiation, otherwise their claims could be considered libel.
No. A court case in the US would require Pretty to show evidence they had reason to believe the information was false for them to be liable for defamation.
Why is only one side “entitled to that presumption”? In most common law countries, including both the US and UK, there is a presumption of innocence when someone faces an accusation, their guilt must be proven with evidence.
You are providing heavier weight and benefit to one claim over the other, and that weight is going towards an accusation that presents no substantive evidence. That’s your prerogative, but it is philosophically misaligned with a fact-based approach to the law.
You are mistaken that this was not libel in the US. Even in the US, the law and precedent is clear, you cannot go around claiming someone is guilty of a crime they’re not convicted of, actively seek to prevent them from being employed, and explicitly cause their dismissal from their means of livelihood. That establishes clear damages, and if you have no evidence to support your claim, not even the lower burden of proof that would prevail in a civil matter, you would lose if sued for libel and defamation. Once damages and either willful disregard, negligence, or malice are established, all elements are present.
In the legal system, yes.
Outside it, no. I don’t have to hold a court proceeding to ground my kid or tell people my neighbor is a dick. There isn’t any right to due process in the court of public opinion; there never has been.
In the UK, defamation law DOES NOT PROVIDE A PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE. That is the precise problem. It is highly unusual in that regard. The burden of proof is on the DEFENDANT.
> Even in the US, the law and precedent is clear, you cannot go around claiming someone is guilty of a crime they’re not convicted of, actively seek to prevent them from being employed, and explicitly cause their dismissal from their means of livelihood.
You absolutely can. People can call OJ a murderer. Claiming he was convicted of it might rise to libel.
Nothing in the open letter asserts he was convicted of a crime. If it were libel to assert someone committed a crime before their conviction for it, prosecutors would… be in trouble.
The Catholic priest makes sure he and the altar boy are the only ones in the church. The coworker who makes unwelcome advances is careful to do it verbally when there aren’t witnesses. The abusive spouse leverages psychological traumas to make their partner feel crazy.
The basic legal standard is crimes/torts in court have to be proven. English law violates it in defamation cases.
- Actions have consequences
- I can say things that may break a law in my country without consequences.
Death penalty for littering, for example, can be opposed even by those who feel it should be punished in some way.
https://killnicole.github.io/statement/
- He did not sue his accuser. He sued people who trusted her word and amplified her allegations. England's (draconian) libel laws would require them to prove that the allegations were true. That's obviously very difficult.
- He lives in Germany, but he chose to sue in England. Germany has more typical libel laws that would require him to prove that he was defamed.
If you look at the accused, he also owned a UK Scala consultancy that directly competed with Miles Sabin.
His MO seemed to be finding people who would support his public accusations to ruin reputations.
He tried to get me to do it as well. It was weird.
> He tried to get me to do it as well. It was weird.
Responding to a post about a libel case based on he-said-she-said allegations… by making your own potentially libelous allegations? Careful!
You'd likely need a lot more than raw text logs in defense.
There is no law in England that forbids somebody being a Holocaust denier (unlike in France and Germany). And Nobody was "[p]roving the Holocaust happened in a UK libel proceeding". I have no idea why you keep posting that.
The Irving case was based on him not liking Lipstadt calling him a denier and accusing him as a historian of faking data. Since the court accepted that he was indeed a denier and was using dodgy data, they ruled for Lipstadt.
Now, back to Pretty. The defendants have apologised so I don't see what there is to debate. Dude, the case is over. Let it go.
The kangaroo court, featuring many prominent members of the "community" was brutal in its rush to judgement. It delivered summary justice to a member of the community and ruined his life in a matter of hours.
I was an observer at the time and whilst I didn't know Jon, I was aware of his contributions to the Scala ecosystem. I arranged a video call with him to see how he was holding up, and to try to understand things from his perspective.
The man I spoke to was visibly shellshocked and blindsided by the whole experience. He had a brief, consensual relationship with Yifan, and vehemently denies the wrongdoing that she insinuated in her blogpost.
But the community apparently knew better.
I was already aware of dark political maneuvours in the Scala community thanks to the well published exploits of Travis Brown (who was himself cancelled when the nature of his actions became apparent). Brown didn't just habitually engage in cancel culture. He actually SYSTEMISED it. He wrote tools, published on his github profile to maintain lists of people within the Scala community whose politics he disagreed with, and then he used those lists to attempt to smear those people by association and damage their careers.
One of the two accusers of Jon Pretty happened to be Victoria Leontieva (AKA killnicole), Travis's girlfriend at the time.
And the other accuser, Yifan Xing, is Travis's new girlfriend now.
I'm sure it's all just a coincidence....
While Travis was eventually himself cancelled from the Scala community, it seems his legacy lives on.
The whole witchhunt brought deep shame on the community. I think even the founder of the language, Martin Odersky, tacitly endorsed the open letter. That's a terrible way to lead.
An ethical leader would have called for an end to the emotionally-charged witch-hunt, and would have called for due process instead.
Jon - I hope this vindication gives you the personal closure that you need on the matter. Obviously, I can't imagine you wanting to return to the Scala "community," but please know that the community wasn't united against you at the time. There were many people like me who could see what was happening, and who knew you deserved better than the treatment you received.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law
> English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defendant, and does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood. For that reason, it has been considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world. In many cases of libel tourism, plaintiffs sued in England to censor critical works when their home countries would reject the case outright.
I personally have been at the receiving end of some particularly heinous lies by an individual who is unfortunately not getting the mental assistance they need. It was hard enough to secure a restraining order but my lawyer said there was pretty much nothing I could do about the whoppers being blasted over social media. Fortunately nobody believed the crazy person’s crazy lies but if they had I could have been put in a really bad situation.
The Defendants accept that they have never had any evidence to support the allegations apart from the two unverified claims published in coordination with the Open Letter. They were never in a position to make any informed judgement on the truth of the allegations, and did not seek clarification on any of the allegations from the Claimant.
[1] https://reason.com/volokh/2018/11/07/is-accurately-repeating...
> English defamation law... does not require the plaintiff to prove falsehood.
That's not 'notoriously friendly to plaintiffs'. It's simply reasonable behaviour: if someone says something horrible about someone else, the person saying it must be able to prove it was true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel_tourism
The UK's system required a historian to spend two years and millions defending against a libel claim from calling someone a prominent Holocaust denier a Holocaust denier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd
That's to argue one of the most clearly documented historical facts we have.
Allegations - testimony - are evidence. Multiple people alledging something is evidence. Even under US libel law, accusing someone like Cosby or Weinstein of misconduct is risky enough; in the UK, it led to things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile being untouchable.
If you're one of the kids Jimmy Savile raped, do you think they've got those resources to fight a multi-year court battle with someone who's been covering their tracks successfully for over sixty years? The BBC won't risk talking about it, what hope do you have?
Note that once he died and libel suits couldn't be raised any longer, hundreds of victims came out within the year.
Also,... > The court ruled that Irving's claim of libel relating to Holocaust denial was not valid under English defamation law
Getting this ruling on one of the most heavily documented historical facts in existence cost millions and two years of litigation.
That has an obvious chilling effects to alleging misconduct that isn't documented in a few thousand scholarly books.
https://pretty.direct/consentorder.pdf
> My [Lord/Lady], on behalf of the Defendants Miles Sabin, Zainab Ali, Noel Welsh and Bodil Stokke, I wish to associate myself with everything that has been said by Counsel for the Claimant. They wish to apologise unreservedly for the damage and distress caused to the Claimant and for any damage to his reputation by their publications and express their profound and unreserved regret for all of the harm for which they are responsible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26967283
Google seems to remember several threads on this debacle. HN seems to have memory holed them. Complete empty pages.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961595
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26967283
What's going on, dang?
Probably by flags as opposed to human moderation, but in fairness to Jon Pretty, the moderators should step in and ensure this story gets equal access to the home page as the original witch hunt against Jon Pretty got.
I meant in the way of recovering his social image because this is brutal.
Pieces of the puzzle are now falling neatly into place. There were two blogposts written about Jon Pretty, insinuating bad behaviour on his part towards woman.
One by Yifan. One by Victoria Leontieva (AKA killnicole).
Victoria was Travis's girlfriend too.
So, both Victoria and Yifan dated Travis. That's way too coincidental to be coincidence, especially when Travis was known for systematically cancelling people based on his perception of their political opinions (e.g. https://github.com/travisbrown/cancel-culture, https://github.com/travisbrown/twitter-watch)
I can see how a certain type of person would hate him, but i think he's a hero.
You might think he's a hero, but I'm not sure you'd like it if the situation were reversed, and rightwing tech workers abused their position to expose your online identities because they disagreed with your political opinions.
i would never post inflammatory hate speech anonymously so the reversal isn't possible.
So I'm not sure how that's hate speech. Did they later resort to calling names or something?
I think the people she shines a light on are the ones we need to worry about as a society.
bravo on the careful word choice, good luck on avoiding another libel suit
I wouldn't want to be alone with you either, in that case, and I'd warn other men to do the same, given that they may evidently be accused for... having previously been accused?
I'm the last person to defend anyone who has laid a finger on or harassed anyone without their consent. But I also believe that anyone can accuse anyone of anything, since that's quite literally what rumors are.
Many people accused women in Salem of being witches. Literally zero of them were guilty. But they were made pariahs, ostracized, and then killed, nonetheless.
As a private individual you can do anything you’d like; but that doesn’t mean anything you’d like to do will be fair or right.
People of all genders do this all the time, group up and rat-fuck the reputation of someone they don't like for all sorts of reasons, not all of them particularly good.
Throw in a bit of bandwagoning during the height of #metoo when we decided that having a bad date where the wrong kind of wine was ordered with Asis Ansari or having a jokey boob photo from 30 years ago with Al Franken was somehow worthy of Thou Shalt Never Work Again, and I can totally understand how all this went down.
It was well known, and well discussed that women in the scala community knew to warn other women about Jon Pretty. I have heard this both directly and indirectly from multiple prominent women in the Scala community.
Additionally, if these individuals were harmed - why didn't they report it to the police?
Is there any evidence that corroborates these claims? Additionally, do you or any of the other signatories possess a legal background that would enable you to review this evidence and confirm its credibility and the truthfulness of the claims?
If such evidence exists, why haven't these individuals pursued legal action, and why hasn't Jon been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law?