It’s a pick your poison situation. Reputation may have been damaged (who knows really, masses seem to forget rather quickly nowadays) but the alternative might just have caused a lot more trouble.
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. Reputation is built from patterns. There was no pattern there. It was a single isolated event. And people choose to keep bringing it up.
I would equate this with a form of extreme slander, so your inference is wrong. They aren't a problem because they are real, they are a problem because they can be passed off as real, and the issue is in the reputational damage. I'm not saying there's a good solution but I don't think the problem should be dismissed so easily.
What most people don't see yet is that when enough of these counter-examples to allegations of abuse surface, people won't believe the allegations any more.
Reputation and reputation destruction is a dynamic system that will find equilibrium in a place different from where we are right now.
It seems like it shouldn't be so hard to solve, either. Someone should not become a public figure without demonstrating some kind of intent. If they are not pushing a narrative, trying to influence public opinion, etc, then they do not lose protection. We cannot let the defamers be the ones controlling the definition.
Given that the results of said techniques have become public knowledge, I'm not sure how you can argue that no harm was done to an innocent party's reputation by the fact that it wasn't done in public initially.
They can still recover from this reputationally very easily assuming egos are not in the way.
Accept it happened and make amends and make those things very public and move forward to making an official announcement together with the so called 'rogue' author (in my opinion he did the world a favour).
> This is a top-of-the-front-page, well-researched article in a leading newspaper -- it's the kind of coverage that destroys hard-earned reputations built over decades.
It's the kind of thing that _should_ destroy reputations. But that doesn't happen all that much anymore.
We're in a weird place with information and communication where shameful acts are accepted either in ambivalence, apathy, or bullheadedness.
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