Silence Is Poison
Yes, I am going to talk about this. No, I won’t leave it alone. I won’t be silent. Silence is poison.
Go read this sad tale. Here is a corroborating account and another.
I want to know why things got this bad? Why didn’t he acknowledge the situation and apologize? Why didn’t she seek professional help before she became self destructive? They both remained silent and, in these situations, silence is poison.
I was not present for the events Justine describes. I arrived at CodeMash the following day. I’ve spoken about similar issues before because I believe it is productive to have this conversation. I share my thoughts here in an attempt to contribute positively to the public dialogue. It is important that we not let this conversation die. We must not be silent.
I know many amazing women in the developer community. Whenever the issue of gender imbalance in my profession is mentioned, my initial reaction is to think that the issue is overblown because I can quickly think of so many great women in technology. My wife reminds me that I know all the women in my corner of technology so my perspective is skewed. Also, the women I know must be amazing to navigate the forces against them and succeed despite the inequalities they face.
My female developer friends love to have a good time. We frequently drink to excess. We do silly things. We respect one another’s personal boundaries. Most of these friends I only see at conferences so spending time with them is a high priority. Alcohol and mixed company do not naturally lead to misbehavior and abuse. Still, things can get out of hand.
At a conference last year, in a very unusual situation, I witnessed a guy creeping out on a woman and I intervened. In Justine’s account, someone intervened on her behalf but possibly too late. We must train our community to speak up and intervene in similar circumstances when they arise. Intervention doesn’t mean anyone needs to play enforcer. A simple inquiry of “Is everybody having fun” at the right time can keep things from getting out of hand. It is imperative that we take care of one another.
I don’t recall ever meeting Justine but I think she is an incredibly brave person for speaking out publicly. I wish I did know Justine. There are so few vegans in the tech community, it would be great to hang out with another vegan.
I can’t imagine the mental and emotional torture she’s been through. I hope she gets the professional and personal support she needs to recover and move on with her life. It is unfair to second guess someone who is suffering, but it appears that she remained silent too long and let the silence poison her body, her career and her relationships. It is tragic that she couldn’t find an outlet for her pain sooner.
I know women who have been through similar and worse experiences. They managed to move on but the scars are still with them and trust does not come easily. My thoughts are with Justine as she tries to heal. That won’t happen overnight.
I read multiple comments stating that Justine invited Joe’s behavior by lying on the bar and offering a body shot. I find this attitude ridiculous. Adults are free to do silly things and have a good time. Her behavior excuses none of his behavior. If she had been strolling naked around the bar, that wouldn’t give anyone the right to lay hands on her uninvited.
In her blog post, Justine tangentially mentions my good friends, Mike Eaton and Leon Gersing. They are not mentioned critically, but I want to insure that their names do not get sullied by association. Mike Eaton and Leon Gersing are two of the finest people I know. I’ve stayed in their homes. I know their families. They would never participate in, or excuse Joe’s actions, despite their friendship with him. Leon and Mike have my full confidence and I know them both to be men of honor. They are also a hell of a lot of fun to hang out with.
I know Joe O’Brien. We are not close, but I’ve known him for years. I always looked up to him for growing a business that employed great people and treated them like adults. I don’t doubt the veracity of Justine’s account of his actions and I find them disgusting. I can’t imagine what he was thinking to treat another person like that. I also can’t understand why he didn’t do everything he could to take responsibility for his actions and apologize. Why did he remain silent? Why did he allow the poison to spread?
I will not participate in the hate campaign mounted against Joe O’Brien. I don’t believe anything productive can come from hate and fear. I believe that loving support is the way to heal. While my attitude may not be popular, I believe we should extend loving support to both parties. This excuses nothing. We should hold Joe accountable while assisting him to accept responsibility and take public and private steps to heal. My attitude derives from personal experience.
I want to dispel any assumptions that I am taking a position of superiority or practicing hypocrisy. I’ve been in some uncomfortable and potentially inappropriate situations while attending tech conferences. Nothing horrific but I cringe at the recollection of some situations. That excuses nothing. If I don’t put a stop to events before things get weird, it is not the fault of alcohol or the event organizers. I’m a grownup and I’m responsible for checking myself.
When I fuck up, I try to make things right. I don’t know of friendships that I’ve lost as a result of misbehavior at conferences. Still, this excuses nothing. I have had to suck it up and apologize more than once. I do my best to not remain silent and let the poison spread. This was a lesson not easily learned.
About 15 years ago, a friend of my ex-wife, accused me of sexually assaulting her. She did everything she could to assassinate my character. She contacted my friends and even my neighbors to tell them what a piece of shit I was. I’m not sure that what I did merited her actions. I’m not sure my actions qualified as sexual assault. In my mind I made an advance and it was rejected. The situation was unclear to me. Yes, I was very drunk. That excuses nothing.
I felt like a piece of shit. I remained silent. I hid. The poison spread. Prior to these developments, I was, as is my nature, very active in my community of like minded peers and had been a leader of various groups. After this woman’s campaign against me, I shut down. I kept a very low profile. I was silent and silence is poison. It was seven years before I felt confident enough to put myself in front of people again and risk public humiliation.
I am not a piece of shit. I sometimes make shitty choices. I do not believe that my entire character should be defined by any one situation. I believe I was worthy of a second chance and forgiveness. By remaining silent, I made a bad situation worse. I have tried to learn from an awful situation and I believe I have. I’ve certainly not repeated that experience.
I don’t think Joe O’Brien is a piece of shit either. He made some shitty choices, but that doesn’t put him beyond redemption. Joe was obviously unhappy. Happy people don’t treat others that way. I don’t know what his issues were, but he clearly needed help. This excuses nothing.
Through his silence, Joe made a bad situation worse. I’m sure he has suffered beyond the loss of his professional position. This excuses nothing. The suffering Justine experienced is a direct result of his actions and his ensuing silence. Justine has been emotionally damaged by this experience and needs help as well. Her silence was poison too. Nobody got away unscathed.
Conference organizers are responsible for presentation content at their event and the behavior of speakers, who act as representatives of the conference. Organizers can do their best to prevent assault, humiliation and harassment during event activities and after hours but they cannot be nannies to adults. The events Justine describes happened the night before CodeMash 2013 even began. I know the organizers of CodeMash. These are top notch people. I have no doubt that they are as appalled by these revelations as I am. They will take steps to try to prevent future events like this. It won’t work.
Adults are responsible for their own actions. Adults will drink and carry on until late in the evening. The events Justine relates are exceptional in my experience. I do not believe this awful situation should be treated as systemic of the developer community. That excuses nothing. Similar events will occur. We must talk about these issues. We must empower our community to speak up and take steps to intervene to stop such situations before they get out of hand. We must not be silent. Silence is poison.
Take care of one another.
It has been stated to me, by people closer to Joe than i am, that he is legally prevented from speaking about this through some deal with Neo. I don’t know if that’s true. If so, Neo might be more concerned with containing their own legal accountability than addressing the issue.
I don’t think Joe is a monster. I think he made a terrible mistake that’s damaged two lives. I also think an apology is the first part of healing, and thus continued silence, for whatever reason, is toxic.
Can i support Justine, wish that Joe gets help, hope the community heals at the same time?
And a follow up comment. I don’t want to join a lynch mob, but there should be lasting ramifications for this type of behavior. Justine’s life has been seriously damaged. An apology from Joe is a necessary first step, but in no means sufficient. What is the right consequence? Hell if i know. This situation cannot be undone, these people cannot easily be made whole again. And that’s why this is so serious, and so sad.
Thank you for speaking up, and including the ilnks to the other accounts of the event. It’s helpful to get a bigger picture. And people need to remember that we are all complex, none of us is all good or all bad.
I agree that keeping quiet about something like this just makes it worse, though it also takes a ton of courage to speak up. Justine appears to be quite young, and someone in a position of authority to her abused his position of power.
I wonder if it would help for each conference to designate someone that people could go to right away, confidentially, if they are harassed or victimized. We like a short feedback loop in software development. It provides benefits in life, too.
Thanks for writing this, Alan.
Well said, Alan!
My question is (and has been since reading the accounts) why didn’t Justine intervene on her own behalf? Why did she sit there and passively allow someone to touch her in ways in which she wasn’t comfortable without taking any steps whatever to stop him? According to her own account she never even said “no” to him–she just said something like “Don’t you have a wife and kids?” She didn’t slap him; she didn’t throw a drink in his face. She didn’t even say “STOP!” which I’m sure would have drawn the attention of the bystanders. It’s not as if she were dragged into some dark alley somewhere away from others. She seems to believe (if I’m reading her account correctly) that it’s everyone else’s responsibility to figure out that she’s uncomfortable and rescue her when she won’t try to stick up for herself.
You can say I’m blaming the victim; I consider that perhaps she should take some responsibility for defending herself.
I agree with almost everything you’ve said. What happened to Justine was awful. It’s something that’s ok to be angry about. We need to be better at recognizing and stopping situations like this.
But Joe is a person too and needs a chance to heal and make amends. I don’t think there’s anything he could say that would make his actions ok, but maybe there’s something that would help us understand what was going on in his head.
Thank you for speaking up. This is the kind of dialog we need to continue. Justine clearly wanted to start a conversation by speaking out. We shouldn’t be afraid to talk about these issues publicly.
Onorio,
Can you find some actual curiousity in yourself about why Justine didn’t defend herself? Because there are reasons. Many many women can tell you about experiences that have made them learn to hold still and hope it’s over soon. Maybe you could ask some folks, and really listen.
Angela
Good blog. We need to talk at the next DevBeers about this.
Hey Alan,
I disagree with much of your post and some of it makes me angry, but that doesn’t make it less well written or less brave.
One thing to keep in mind is that none of us asked for this. The pain and division in our community. Darby didn’t ask to be put in the position he was on that night, nor did he ask to write the account. I didn’t ask for this to be my first experience at my first conference.
*trigger warnings*
Justine sure as shit didn’t ask for any of this. I don’t know what happened with you, but I suspect that you were not an executive for the company she (the woman in your post) worked at. I hope that you didn’t position your body so that it would be very difficult for her to escape. I hope that she didn’t need to be rescued from you and lead away in tears. I hope that she didn’t spend the next 9 months trying to put her life together. I hope that you didn’t claim to be drugged. I hope that you didn’t spend the next week broadcasting to as many people as would listen that you had blacked out and remembered nothing. I hope that you didn’t write positive blog posts after loosing your job (if you did) and talk about funemployment on a notable podcast.
If the above paragraph is accurate then you, sir, are no Joe.
Speaking only for myself, I just want our spaces to be safe. I never fucking want this to happen at a tech conference again. Talking with woman after woman with similar experiences to Justine’s I’m not sure this is reasonable expectation on my part.
Re-read that last sentence. I’m not sure if I could ever guarantee to a woman that she wouldn’t be assaulted at a conference.
While I appreciate that you’re concerned about the pain caused to himself over “some shitty choices,” I’m a little more concerned about stopping the sexual assaults.
I hope these are not mutually exclusive, but I only have room in my life to optimize for one. Apologies in advance if this takes on the appearance of a hate campaign.
-Zach Briggs
Zach,
Thanks for taking the time to reply. If my words anger you, then they at least promote a proper, public airing of this issue and that was my core intent.
This piece is not comprehensive. There is a great deal more that I wanted to say that was removed in the editing process. I had several peers whom I trust completely assist me in shaping a narrative that would hit hard without the central message being watered down or lost in the melee.
You obviously have information that I lack. Others have emailed me privately to offer background that is missing from this piece. So far, I have not learned anything that leads me to amend the piece. Feel free to use the contact form if you believe it would be helpful to fill in my understanding.
I believe anger is the proper response to these events. If there is no anger, then there is no compassion. I am angry at Joe. If that did not come through in what I wrote, I am sorry for being unclear. We should all feel a primal need to protect the helpless in our tribe.
After my first piece on sexual harassment I heard many, Many, MANY stories that broke my heart. As a man, I can never be as aware of this issue as the women involved, but I believe I am as aware and on guard against harassment as I am able. I want everyone to be safe. I want our community to be a safe, fertile ground for everyone to benefit.
I just don’t see an endgame where vengeance helps anyone. I understand the impulse but I can’t join the mob. If there were a path to healing that led through vengeance, then I would gladly walk that path.
Justine needs healing. Joe needs healing. You need healing. I need healing. We are all hurt and in pain to varying degrees. I published these words because I believed they were a small step toward healing for Justine and our entire community. I still believe that and so do many others. If you can convince me that there is a better approach, I will take it.
This is the best I could come up with. I poured my entire heart into it. It scared me shitless to say some of these things publicly. I’m sorry if it was not enough.
Warm regards,
++Alan
Thank you Alan. I’ve been trying to find similar words, but yours will do just fine. This is horrible all around. Like you, I know Mike, Leon and Joe. Honestly, when I saw Joe’s name in Jusine’s post, I would have bet he was to play a very different role in the story.
Like Seth said above, I’m horrified for Justine and hope she can find the right help and heal. I hope Joe gets the help he needs also. I think body shots and hugs and kisses imply less of a closeness to a 25 year old than a 45 year old, and I’m a little concerned that as more and more millennials enter the workforce this generation gap is going to bring about more incidents.
I can’t join a lynch mob, and if I excluded going to places where bad things happened or someone did something dumb, I’d have very few places to venture in this world. But I can continue to look out for the people around me, and treat everyone with the greatest of respect.
Gotta talk about it. We are complex beings individually, never mind socially. There is no good or evil, just the space in between. We are all sensitive beings, and we should all try to articulate our points of view. And live by them. Misreading a social situation could be excused, but it needs to be corrected as soon as possible by the others present. Silence is indeed poison.
Dragging people through mud only makes things dirtier. It doesn’t move us forward. It is silence’s poison gone viral. It is an-eye-for-an-eye making everyone blind.
Great post; thank you for it.