> Do they sound to you like people whose lives weren't torn apart by the experience?
I was talking about the experience of making the accusation, not the (clearly harrowing if true) experiences they had leading up to that.
I remind you that almost the entire community immediately sided with them, despite the person they accused being prominent in the community.
I'm afraid I don't accept that you can split this into "experiencing something traumatic" and "making the accusation that you have experienced something traumatic".
The claim that "almost the entire community immediately sided with them" is accepting the accused's account of what happened in favour of the accusers. At least one of the victims started to raise concerns in the community several years beforehand and their concerns were not taken seriously:
"I have reported all of my experience to the ScalaCenter in 2019. I was hoping to see concrete actions, such as building a reporting mechanism, to protect minorities in the community. Unfortunately, I am not aware of such actions taken."
I'd also be very, very deeply skeptical that two public claims were the only claims made. We should bear that in mind. If the accusations are true, the public ones are usually the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
I doubt the Scala open source community had an HR department or lawyers on hand to investigate and take action on behalf of the community as a whole.
And I'm not sure some random software engineers contributing to open source projects have the proper expertise to build a sexual harassment reporting mechanism and a mechanism for fairly enforcing consequences.
Do we need to make sure there all those kinds of structures are in place for every permutation of human interaction?