Saturday, November 6, 2010

TechCrunch takes down Google/Twitter sexual assault story--any idea why?

Anyone venture to guess why TechCrunch took this story down? 

Googler Accuses Twitter Engineer Of Sexual Assault, Trial By Twitter Commences
 Mike Rundle @flyosity
Mike Rundle 
Twitter engineer @flo sexually assaults female geek @noirins at Apache Con? Wow. Not good. http://cl.ly/389H

about 2 hours ago via webRetweet

Google technical writer Noirin Shirley wrote a blog post earlier this evening entitled “A hell of a time,” describing her experiences last night at ApacheCon in Atlanta. Shirley recounts a drunken post-conference party she organized in her hotel room and describes a rather disturbing (if true)  interaction with Twitter engineer Florian Leibert;

“He brought me in to the snug, and sat up on a stool. He grabbed me, pulled me in to him, and kissed me. I tried to push him off, and told him I wasn’t interested (I may have been less eloquent, but I don’t think I was less clear). He responded by jamming his hand into my underwear and fumbling.”

With such incendiary subject matter it was no surprise that the post rose to the top of HackerNews in a matter of hours. What’s even more interesting is that the accusations have been taken to Quora and Twitter with people @ replying both Leibert and Shirley with the post.

“It’s not the first time something like this has happened to me, at all. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me at a tech conference. But it is the first time I’ve spoken out about it in this way, because I’m tired of the sense that some idiot can ruin my day and never have to answer for it.”

It is notable that alleged wrongdoing now has a realtime venue to play out, primarily because of the prominence of the players of this drama in the tech community and the fact that both people involved are on Twitter.

Neither Leibert or Shirley have tweeted anything since the recounting of the incident was published and Shirley makes no indication she has filed any formal complaint.

Jason on Twitter Mahalo.com This Week in Startups

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