> My team and I were contacted by different people to warn us that they were uncomfortable with the participation of a speaker and her boyfriend in our conference. They told the organization of the conference that this couple had caused problems to women in the community.
> Several people who knew both of them confirmed that they had had problems with them in the past. We also talked with the organizers of other conferences and with dev that are part of gender groups focalized in technology and all of them recommended us to take distance from them.
The author's attorneys are preventing them from being specific enough to identify the people involved. Others in the industry, independent of each other, confirmed it was a bad idea, and the reactionary behavior of the speaker just further proved it.
In any case, even if the reason behind removing them from the conference was moot, do you think the behavior of the speaker was justified?
To be fair, most of the harassment allegations were vague and not even alleged to be perpetrated by the woman who was disinvited (like “a famous hacker knows her, and my Signal started doing weird things”).
There's a puzzling detail: that it's a couple who were causing problems to women. If it was a man, little imagination is needed to conjecture that the problem could be something related to sexual harrasement, even if mild.
A woman alone, well, it could be the same if she's homosexual.
A couple? No problem figuring out they behave like idiots with everyone, as the article describes they did with the autor. But he says that they make women unconfortable specifically.
I'm not implying that this detail is suspicious, just that it stands out when you have incomplete information. Of course you can't ask jerks not to be weird :)
> Several people who knew both of them confirmed that they had had problems with them in the past. We also talked with the organizers of other conferences and with dev that are part of gender groups focalized in technology and all of them recommended us to take distance from them.