quote:

I'm not going to root through everything in there and give a line by line analysis, but I'll say that enough of the allegations are extremely plausible and just about all of it we've corroborated with other sources. I'm not going to list those out here, this isn't a trial, and we don't /owe/ the internet a comprehensive accounting of why so many people who have known Alec for years have looked at the accusations and believed them.
Seriously, what you see on twitter isn't representative of real life. It's just what makes it into posts. When people who have years-long real life experience with the guy, people who knew him in different situations, locations, ages, and contexts, all say the same thing, you can assume there's more to this than you'd know from outside the situation, taking it in 280 characters at a time.

Whatever happened years ago, this week a contractor working for Alec, whom we know and trust, has come forward with her own experiences with Alec.Others have talked about how Alec's conduct towards women was something whispered around at game events. A woman I've known for a while got in touch with us this week talking about how she's been told many times not to be alone in a room with him. Men have gotten in touch about working with Alec and the things that happened to them there. There are other things, things from people we trust, things you'll probably never hear about. But honestly just being a really lovely boss, as detailed by Albertine, is probably enough for us to separate from him alone. To say nothing of the far more serious allegations out there. Multiple people are afraid to run into the guy at different conferences. We were with him at some of those conferences. Now knowing that people were afraid to approach us and say hello eats at me.

The things that Alec did during the bad times were worse than we knew, and he's still being abusive in other ways to those around him. We didn't know. We feel like idiots. We feel betrayed. We're sad and angry. We put in the work with him during those really bad times. It's hard to talk about, and everyone really wants us to talk about it. They want detailed accountings of every aspect. Some people want to know exactly what we knew and when so they can figure out who around him is most complicit. Some people want us to give them hard evidence, as if such a thing was even possible, or as if it would appropriate to give them in the first place. Some people randomly doubt all of this because nobody had Alec arrested, which shows a weird understanding of the reality of human relationships and abuse that I can only assume comes from experience of the world via online chatter and a list of how things should work. The idea that there's a foolproof system in place that can stop this, can riddle it out, can tell us exactly who is and isn't guilty, a system which can set all this right. But it doesn't work like that in real life. Some of the demand for more info stems from the idea that if something is put out in public then any interested party is owed as much information as they want to work out their own stance and to judge ours. But at least for us the only reason we're working this out in public is because we have to. It was out there, and we've had to respond to it. Like we have to tell you now. And it's been like stabbing myself in the stomach every day to have to type words like this. To sum up- this isn't some "guilty til proven innocent" or "social media mob" thing for us. There's years of real life context to this, involving lots of people who aren't even online or public about this, and the fact that some folks just found out about it this week doesn't mean it began there. It's just when it became public.