Media lied excessively about Richard Stallman’s inexisting Epstein comments on the MIT mailing lists while persons from the DoD drone business called him out for alleged unethical behaviour and the FSF released a statement according which Richard does not speak for Free software. In fact he has been speaking for Free Software for eternities while everyone else used the term open source for software like Linux. Which Richard calls GNU/Linux and die hard followers are compelled to use his terms on which Richard is very picky.
What did Richard Stallman do? He defended his deceased patron Prof. Marvin Minsky, a legendary AI researcher. Minsky was an invited visitor at Jeffrey Epstein. Proceedings of oral investigations have been released according to which an Epstein victim was ordered by Epstein staff to have sex with Marvin Minsky. We have no evidence that Marvin accepted that offer. And she also could not give testimony that she was underage at the time, at which exact time it happened.
Richard did not question the notion that Minsky had sex with her but pointed out that it would be imprecise for campaigners to call that “sexual assault”.
This is factually correct. Any attorney would have argued along the same lines. Minsky had no reason to assume she was an underage victim of psychopathic sex abuse but rather a member of the cliche adult entertainment ring at billionaire’s mansions. Richard called that ring “harem” which is the correct term for a sex slave group.
What is the effect?
a) The FSF lost all credibility in the community failing to protect Richard.
b) A twitter hate mob found a new victim. Successful hate mobs are dangerous as any scalps make them gain power.
There were many direct insults and ad hominem attacks.
c) some people orchestrated a poisonous facts don’t matter campaign basically just insulting him as a shitty person and a child molestor without any evidence. Even staff of the former Free Speech group EFF spread the defamation.
d) some former colleagues realised the falsehoods but blamed the campaign on him and his behaviour. Others shared anti-RMS anecdotes
Media lied!?
It is hard to find a media report that is factually correct about what happened. No one corrected falsehoods, no one apologized so far. That wasn’t professional journalism. For a start: RMS did not comment on Epstein. RMS did not call Epstein’s victims entirely willing.
Conspiracy theory
As the poisonous CoC crowd in earlier years this is not an ordinary SJW attack, RMS would qualify as a SJW himself, but appears to be organised as a smear campaign to take control over free software. Notably the goal is to replace the GPL by an instrument that excludes human rights abusers (China etc…) from using the license to bring it more in line with the military users. Despite his strong personal convictions on certain regimes and human right abuses, RMS never considered such usage restrictions compatible with the spirit of free software. As most software has adopted the GPL for licensing, changing the GPL and taking control of the FSF would allow members of the military complex to pursue their agenda more freely.