I've known RMS since the early 80's, crashed in his house when visiting the MIT AI Lab, had him crash in my hotel room at science fiction conventions, and I'm friends with numerous people who have worked and lived with him, one of whom he let stay in the largest bedroom of his house because it had a menacing tree outside the window that he was afraid of.
And I know Star Simpson personally (the freshman who quoted the MIT upperclassman who said female CSAIL professors kept plants in their offices to repel RMS), and we have discussed RMS's antics.
And RMS has personally asked me to hold the branches of bushes that were leaning into a sidewalk out of the way so that he could pass by.
So yes, I'm pretty sure first hand that RMS is afraid of trees and bushes and foliage, among other quirks, and it's pretty widely knows around the people who have lived and worked and hung out with him.
Here's a photo I took of RMS holding a gerbil wrapped in duct tape, just before he asked, "I don't know, why do you wrap a gerbil in duct tape?" (Google it!)
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/jsol-rms-gerb...
And here are a couple photo of my brave friend Devon, who was his housemate for many years, fearlessly climbing up to the roof of his house on the evil tree that RMS was afraid of, so you can judge for yourself how menacing it was:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/devon-climbin...
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/images/devon-landing...
And here's a true story about a funny joke that RMS made about my other friend Mike and I burning down his house, the one in that photo:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113192
>I worked at UniPress on the Emacs display driver for the NeWS window system (the PostScript based window system that James Gosling also wrote), with Mike "Emacs Hacker Boss" Gallaher, who was charge of Emacs development at UniPress. One day during the 80's Mike and I were wandering around an East coast science fiction convention, and ran into RMS, who's a regular fixture at such events.
>Mike said: "Hello, Richard. I heard a rumor that your house burned down. That's terrible! Is it true?"
>RMS replied right back: "Yes, it did. But where you work, you probably heard about it in advance."
>Everybody laughed. It was a joke! Nobody's feelings were hurt. He's a funny guy, quick on his feet!
Yes, his house actually did burn down, but we didn't set it on fire, hire someone else to do it, or even know about it in advance.
And here's an excerpt from a September 1986 email from my eloquent friend who he let stay in the biggest room of the house with a menacing tree outside the window:
>RMS as God (or, why isn't the world made out of decayed slugs?)
>What can I say? All three of us moved out of [address redacted] because there was no way in hell to get him to move. This is a man who has created an operating system people worship slavishly as a "perfect environment", but who claims he must continue to use everyone else's towel because he doesn't know where to buy one himself. This is a man who talks about immorality and considerate-ness, and claimed it was a "special favor" to take his boots off at the top of the stairs like the rest of us and not track mud through the living room where we all roamed barefoot. This is a man who let me have the best bedroom in the house because there were trees outside the window and he was afraid of them. He has mentioned to a few people that he thinks it would be neat to have a daughter by some willing female and raise her up so that he could have sex with her when she was old enough. This man says he will never be happy until there is no more purchased software, until copyright laws are totally trashed. He will accept no lesser events as conditionals, and disqualifies any other good things/feelings that happen to him as "false happiness" or simply things that don't count.
>Yet I still hear people I love and respect talk about him as if he were some kind of deity, as if his Free Software Foundation were the noblest effort in the world. It is admirable, yes. But to glorify the thoroughly sick human being behind it into some sort of whole-life messianic figure is unconscionable. Meeting RMS groupies was yet another contributing factor to my punting of the computer world for the time being. So many of the "hackers" out there (hackers, not crackers/urchins/destructoids) seem to have their external values totally fukt. Sure, we're all entitled to different values. Fine. But it grieves me to see good people withering away behind a self-imposed wall of lonely techno-perfection, their frantic efforts to acquire friends and lovers made all the more poignant by the desperation in their eyes, voice, manner. Most of them know that they are lacking something important, but don't know what it is, or how to get it, or who to ask for it. Many can see themselves alienating people or spurning offers of friendship and affection, but don't know how or why they're doing so. They just look impassive and bored and in control, and damn themselves silently in their minds, self-inflicting the rejection and pain that they feared from the outside.
[She goes on, but I'll stop quoting here... And you can decide for yourself if what she wrote about RMS in September 1986 is accurate and authentic, and aligns with other stories you've heard about him in the intervening 35 years.]
And here's a transcript of a bunch of people telling RMS to fuck off because they didn't appreciate his pointed joke about the Evils Natalism, which I then fed to Doctor in Emacs to psychoanalyze him:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/text/rms-vs-doctor.h...