Richard Stallman was framed and misquoted
Richard Stallman was framed and misquoted his words were taken out of context. It was a hit piece.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Journalism
The original Remove Richard Stallman post contained leaked communications from a private mailing list. In it, the author quotes an email from Stallman where he explains that Marvin Minsky likely wouldn’t have known that the woman on Jeffrey Epstein’s island was coerced:
…the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
A paragraph later, the author summarizes Stallman’s view as:
…he says that an enslaved child could, somehow, be “entirely willing”.
This is the opposite of what Stallman said, but this lie was repeated by the press. An article in the Daily Beast said:
Stallman wrote that “the most plausible scenario” for Giuffre’s accusations was that she was, in actuality, “entirely willing.”
An article in Vice spread the same lie:
Early in the thread, Stallman insists that the “most plausible scenario” is that Epstein’s underage victims were “entirely willing” while being trafficked.
There are two possibilities here. Either the author of the Medium post was not capable of correctly parsing the sentence, or she didn’t care about truth and was leveling as many accusations as possible in the hope that one would stick. In other words: she is either foolish or malicious. The same goes for the writers of the Vice and Daily Beast articles. To describe what they did as journalism would be an insult to journalists.
I tried to point this out in the original article and got attacked instead of debated. I asked for proof and none was given. Now it has been debunked.