Tumbleweeds.

She can’t do anything until he does something. He’s done nothing. Statute of limitations runs out in maybe a year (depending on what state has jurisdiction).

Why do you assume I am convinced of anything? I do agree the evidence strongly favors one party. But that’s not the same thing as being 100% certain of it. Not all evidence is on the table. My article here is about helping a woman not be coerced into yielding by money, in other words, allowing fair justice to occur. If she loses (and is proven to have been in the wrong), justice will have been done. And I will sleep soundly knowing it wasn’t because she lacked equal access to our system of justice, but it was because of the merits (assuming the court rules justly, but we can’t assess that until it happens). Certainly, if I thought the evidence strongly favored Radford, I wouldn’t endorse donating to Stollznow. But as long as it’s unclear, or favors her, money shouldn’t decide the outcome.

Meanwhile, it would only make sense to donate to Radford’s fund if you actually think he is telling the truth. Because he can easily reduce his expenses to zero: don’t file a lawsuit. Stollznow doesn’t have that luxury. Remember, he is the legal aggressor here. He chose to do this. She did not. All she did was exercise her freedom of speech. He could simply match speech with speech and be done with it. Instead, he is trying to use money as a lever of power. She is not. That creates an imbalance. A balanced response would be to simply refute what she said (which, as I noted, he has still not done…so it’s unlikely he can do so in court, so it does not seem likely this case will go well for him).

If, however, you are persuaded he is probably telling the truth, then his lawsuit makes sense and deserves your donation. Otherwise, you have no reason to believe he is the one financially disadvantaged here.

But as to the meta-level point: The state should pay for both sides. Then bill the loser.

I’m not following your meaning here. If you’re convinced one party is in the right, wouldn’t you be concerned about who won in court?

Anyway, I do agree that neither side should be disadvantaged by money, but that just motivates me to donate to Radford, him having less of a legal fund and everything else being equal (as I’m not sure which party is in the right).

It doesn’t concern me so much who will win the case, only that neither be disadvantaged by money.

If he has the evidence he claims (he actually didn’t present any–not a single email with the alleged doctoring was shown) then he can’t be harmed by her being able to afford a lawyer. But I am skeptical he has that evidence. Because he would have pointed this out and proven it when CFI was doing its investigation originally…so that he only now “suddenly discovers” that the emails that that investigation found against him were meddled with is prima facie hard to believe. And his data dump was so grossly immoral (including near-naked in-bed pictures of the two of them against her permission, ironically itself an act of harassment according to CFI policy…and it hardly helps his case that he isn’t harassing her, when in his very defense against that charge he does it even more egregiously), I find it very difficult to trust anything he says at this point. His entire case is “she’s a crazy bitch, therefore I can’t have harassed her,” which besides being a non sequitur (so, no good skeptic he), is also a stock example of sexist victim blaming.

Conspicuously missing from his narrative is any substantive account of their communications in 2011, the actual year in the middle of which his own timeline reports she and her husband told him to stop harassing her. He instead handwaves at vast length about what happened in the year 2010. This is suspicious. Because it means the relevant evidence is in 2011. Yet he tricks you into only focusing on 2010. That looks manipulative. Moreover, his account implies a stock MRA-style women-are-property narrative: that it is impossible to have harassed someone or touched them against there will during a period in which they occasionally have sex with you (I assume then he would have to agree spousal rape is impossible, which maybe even he would concede would be despicable).

He also lies. In his data dump narrative he claims there is a video of a panel, which he implies is the one in which Stollznow reported he was fondling her under the table without her permission, that shows his hands are above the table the whole time. And he links to that video. I watched it. Not only does the camera not show him fully half the time (so, plenty of opportunity for his hands to have gone under the table, and indeed that is precisely most likely when they would have, when neither of the two of them were speaking and thus both occupied and being observed), when it does pass by him, several times one or more of his hands are below the table. And on top of that, Stollznow increasingly is seated turned away from him as it goes on, most peculiarly, but consistent with a woman trying to get away from under-the-table touching.

So I’m not all that alarmed by his data dump. Overall, it actually makes him look worse.

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/41435-ben-radford-legal-fund

I haven’t had time to look this case over in detail. The thing is, I get at least two calls a day for funds for some cause or another, and there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to fully investigate every one of them. I typically donate to a cause when it’s brought to my attention by a source I can trust. It’s a useful rule of thumb, and seems to work more often than it fails. In this case, Radford’s release of evidence that the timestamps on his emails were tampered with is enough (for me) to muddy the issue. I’m no longer confident enough in her account to contribute to her legal fund.

She has publicly confirmed they had a former relationship (and the harassment began after she left him; and continued even after she got married). He describes himself as being her “former lover”; I prefer the less loaded term “former boyfriend.”