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Comment by sumedh | Hacker News Reader

> He held his positions at MIT, GNU, and the FSF for over thirty years, and in that time nobody accused him of coercion, unwanted touching, or verbal harassment.

The author missed the point of the Me Too movement. Lot of other powerful people were not publicly accused for decades because they were powerful and could easily silence their accusers.

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> because they were powerful and could easily silence their accusers.

this is certainly not the case for Stallman, as proven by the continuous stream of angry criticism that he has been receiving from many people through the years. It does not seem that RMS held any real power over anybody (except maybe for the handful of FSF employees). The fact that this criticism, which has already existed openly, has had a real effect on the FSF and MIT is obviously due to pressures from higher-ups, not from twitter pawns.

Do you think Richard Stallman was "powerful" enough to "easily silence" accusers?

It's not about what we think, but what people in the receiving end of his advances thought at the time that was happening. Stallman IS a powerful figure in the Free Software movement. The mere fact the people are making blog posts or coming to HN in his defense after what he said, both in the MIT e-mail and in his blog over the years, is evidence enough of that. While it is hard to think that Stallman would go after those who accused him of anything, the guy has a huge enough following that people would be intimidated to make accusations due to the possibility of push back from the community.

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