I keep seeing this response, and it doesn't make a lot of sense. If Stallman's past behavior was unacceptable, then he should have been fired for that.

The fact is, the reporting around the event that actually did get him fired was beyond awful and disingenuous. By throwing up your hands and saying "yeah maybe those articles were a crock of lies, but that's fine because he actually did do some shitty stuff before too" you're contributing to an environment in which it's that much harder to distinguish honest reporting from fabricated character assassination.

I think this [0] comment from Reddit does a good job refuting the "straw that broke the camel's back" argument:

"""

Amazing how much damage dishonest media coverage can do, even though it's both trivial to prove their misquotes false and we now have an witness further supporting Stallman's original argument. Summary of events:

In a recently unsealed deposition a woman testified that, at the age of 17, Epstein told her to have sex with Marvin Minsky. Minsky was a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and pioneer in A.I. who died in 2016. Stallman argued on a mailing list (in response to a statement from a protest organizer accusing Minsky of sexual assault) that, while he condemned Epstein, Minsky likely did not know she was being coerced:

> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.

Someone wrote a Medium blogpost called "Remove Richard Stallman" quoting the argument. Media outlets like Vice and The Daily Beast then lied and misquoted Stallman as saying that the woman was "entirely willing" (rather than pretending to be) and as "defending Epstein". Note the deposition doesn't say she had sex with Minsky, only that Epstein told her to do so. Since then physicist Greg Benford, who was present at the time, has stated that she propositioned Minsky and he turned her down:

> I know; I was there. Minsky turned her down. Told me about it. She saw us talking and didn’t approach me.

This seems like a complete validation of the distinction Stallman was making. If what Minsky knew doesn't matter, if there's no difference between "Minsky sexually assaulted a woman" and "Epstein told a 17-year-old to have sex with Minsky without his knowledge or consent", then why did he turn her down? We're supposed to consider a dead man a rapist for sex he didn't have because of something Epstein did without his knowledge, possibly even in a failed attempt to create blackmail material against him?

Despite this, Stallman has now been pressured to resign not just from MIT but from the Free Software Foundation that he founded. Despite (and sometimes because of) his eccentricities, I think Stallman was a very valuable voice in free-software, particularly as someone whose dedication to it as an ideal helped counterbalance corporate influence and the like. But if some journalists decide he should be out and are willing to tell lies about it, then apparently that's enough for him to be pushed out.

"""

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/d59efr/computer...