Allegation: My relationships with V and Y followed a pattern of behavior

The two relationships were very different from each other. I dated V for 20 months, in contrast to the relationship with Y which was very brief. Their ages were not the same: Y was over a decade younger than me, whereas V was around three years younger.

V claims that she met me at a conference; a similarity with Y. I met her at the Scala eXchange conference on 1 December 2013, but she was not a conference attendee or a Scala developer. We did not see each other again until 16 October 2014, and not at a conference. We gradually developed a friendship over the following year, which included two group vacations. Our relationship remained platonic until November 2015. This was 23 months after we first met, and long enough to make our first meeting at a Scala-related event irrelevant.

Timeline

In her statement, V expresses her intention to corroborate Y’s story and to establish a pattern. If V and Y could not show similarities between the two relationships, they would be unable to establish such a pattern. I believe that their efforts to show similarity—which appear more collaborative than corroborative—were all to the service of establishing a pattern.

”I stand by her decision to come forward, and I want to share my account of his interactions with me to corroborate her story and establish that this is a pattern of harmful behavior on his part.” V, I stand with Y

My relationships with Y and V were different in many ways.

Different Circumstances

My relationship with Y started nearly two months after first meeting her, whereas my relationship with V started 23 months after we first met. That said, both relationships involved significant online messaging, and both developed through openness and a gradual willingness to share experiences.

When I met Y, she had never had a serious relationship, whereas V was married when I first met her. Two years later, when I started dating V, she had just gone through an amicable separation. (We both remained friends with her ex-husband for some time afterwards.)

Y and V had different backgrounds, too. While both were immigrants to western countries, they grew up in two very different countries, both with strong but distinct cultures. Both were non-native, but fluent English-speakers who had used English professionally for several years.

Many of us fit into the profile: young, new to tech or the community, non-native English speakers, have a minority background (race, education, financial...) Y, My experience with sexual harassment in the Scala community

Y was a university student in precisely the same industry as me, whereas V had been working for several years as a UX designer; it was a related industry, but while Y could have done my job, V could not have.

Different Characteristics

Y’s and V’s personalities were very different. Y was talkative, exuberant and effervescent and shared her emotions openly, while V was more reserved and shy, but had a wicked sense of humor that could take me by surprise.

V was 29 when we started dating—around three years younger than me—whereas Y was over a decade younger than me, and did not have the same experience and maturity.

And insofar as it matters in a relationship or any other sense, their facial and physical appearances were different; nobody could look at V and Y and conclude that I was attracted to women of a particular “type”.

Meeting at Scala eXchange

V draws attention to the similarity between how I met her and how I met Y, highlighting the particular detail that she had met me at a conference. This is true: she met me on 1 December 2013, in a pub before the Scala eXchange conference in London, and we met again at a social event following the conference.

Similar to Y’s experience, Jon Pretty and I met at a Scala conference, in my case in late 2013. V, I stand with Y

However, she was not an attendee at the conference. She was not a Scala developer, and had no aspirations to be. She was in London because her then-husband was giving a talk, and she came into the conference venue to attend his talk.

I do not remember whether I spoke to her on that occasion, beyond saying ”hello”. If we did speak, we did not have a long or meaningful conversation. I spoke at some length to her husband, whose work I found interesting.

It was nearly a year before I met her again, on 16 October 2014, with her husband, but not at a conference.

We had a dinner—as friends—on 29 April 2015 as she was visiting London alone while I was passing through, and we both had an evening free.

My Relationship with V

V describes our relationship as “on-and-off”. This is not how I would describe it.

Our relationship was exclusive, romantic, intense, mutually-supportive, affectionate and caring. I loved V, and I told her. I trusted that she felt the same way about me, and she had told me she did. For as long as it lasted, we tried to make our relationship work. My feeling is that it was when we lost hope for its long-term future that it ended.

What followed was an on-and-off long-distance relationship in late 2015-2017. He visited me on his terms when it was convenient for his nomadic lifestyle. V, I stand with Y

However, that’s not to say the relationship was pure bliss while it lasted. It was difficult for both of us, and we didn’t always have the same outlook on life. We took a break for about one month in June 2016, and during this time we did not speak, but still exchanged a few messages.

The visualization shows the direct messages and phone calls I had with V over the time we were in contact. It should be clear from the graphic that our relationship lasted around two years, and only very few messages were exchanged before September 2015 or after September 2017.

A total of 132,464 messages were exchanged between us, of which about 60% were written by me and 40% by V. As a guide, the total size of these messages is around 810,000 words, or equivalent to reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace followed by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The most messages we exchanged in a single day was 2527, on 5 November 2015.

I liked to try to speak to V on the phone every day we were apart, and we spent a total of over 184 hours on the phone. For comparison, this is similar to the amount of time it would take to watch every Star Wars movie and TV series released since 1977 (source). The longest we spoke in a single day was 4 hours 7 minutes on 21 February 2016.

Information about the dates V and I stayed together has been corroborated against my phone-tracking data. It is evident from the visualization that we generally did not speak on the phone, and sent far fewer messages, at the times we were together.

Although we did not manage to speak every day, we would exchange messages on the days we couldn’t. There were only four days over the course of our relationship during which we neither spoke on the phone nor exchanged messages.

I do not recognize it as an “on-and-off long-distance relationship”.

Although we were together for nearly two years, I never moved in with V. We had talked about the possibility, but never made concrete decisions. For my part, I began to have doubts about the long-term success of the relationship during its final months, which made me reluctant to commit.

While I did have a more “nomadic lifestyle” during this time, because I was attending conferences around the world and occasionally visiting my family in the UK, I still spent most of my time with V. I did not, in general, make any non-work trips without V. Moreover, she would often travel with me to conferences, and I accompanied her on a work trip to Brazil.

Community Ambiguity

V was not a software developer. She was not a programmer. She did not, to my knowledge, work for any company that used Scala. She was not a member of the Scala community.

She acknowledges this indirectly when she wrote, “if I had been a part of the Scala community...” and later with, “I didn’t work in the same community as him”.

However, she attended several Scala events, first as the guest of her ex-husband, and later as my guest. She was a volunteer at my conference, Scala World, in 2015 (before we started a relationship) and in 2016 (during our relationship). She knew several members of the Scala community through me, and had provided freelance graphic design services to some of them. Many Scala developers would have seen us together at different events.

My experience with Jon Pretty is that he ⦗...⦘ took advantage of his position of authority to abuse my trust when I was a vulnerable newcomer to the industry.

However, in her post, V describes herself in 2013 as, “a young woman new to tech,” though it is unclear whether tech is intended to mean Scala (which was not her interest) or UX design (which had been her profession for at least three years before my first conversation with her).

She calls herself a “vulnerable newcomer to the industry”, but it’s ambiguous which industry she means. She says she took a professional sabbatical, and became “less involved in community activities,” but it’s ambiguous whether she means the Scala community or not.

An Anti-Pattern

⦗Jon Pretty⦘ has used the community’s conferences to target women who are new to the Scala community. ⦗...⦘ We state this based on multiple, independent, well-substantiated reports showing a systematic pattern of behavior over an extended period. Open letter of support for community members targeted by Jon Pretty

The Scala Open Letter cites Y’s statement and V’s statement as evidence of ”people who were targeted”, providing editorial context for interpreting V’s publication.

If you read V’s statement with that context, given the ambiguity with which she speaks about Scala, I believe it would be easy to be misled into thinking that:

1. she was a Scala developer or wanted to be,

2. she was attending the conference where I met her,

3. that brief meeting was relevant to the relationship, and,

4. the Scala community was professionally relevant to her during and after the relationship.

None of these is true.

The only significance of the Scala community to V is that she was married to a Scala developer and speaker; she then dated a Scala developer and speaker—me—for nearly two years; and she began a new relationship with a Scala developer and speaker afterwards.

In contrast, Y was a Scala developer and was attending the conference where we met. My role in the Scala community was relevant to our relationship because it created the situation in which we became friends.

It’s difficult to portray the reality of these two relationships as part of a pattern.

My Request

If you signed the Open Letter in 2021 because you found V’s and Y’s publications compelling, please reconsider their words in light of the evidence above.

Their posts were hugely damaging to me. The complete absence of due process meant that none of their claims were ever verified with me before they were published.

If, like many others, you feel like justice may not have been rightly served, you can make a meaningful step towards helping me get my life back by removing your name. I am grateful for your consideration.

❧

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