He didn’t say that it was “possible”, he said it was the “most plausible explanation”. Those statements are not the same because one implies a certainty of truth. He defended this heavily in a 20-something page long email thread.
> I read it as an "I, personally, would not be bothered by this, and it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would be traumatized by it" thing, which would be consistent with his obviously-some-kind-of-neurodivergent mind.
You’re right, he eventually relented and said we probably shouldn’t be doing this. If this were the only questionable thing he had done and he later said “you know what, I was wrong” then I would be much more willing to give him some leeway here. However, that just isn’t the case. His entire academic career has been riddled with inappropriate behavior and misguided statements.
Stallman tried to defend his accused-rapist colleague by asserting that we need to be “scientific” and look at facts. I agree, and the fact is that RMS has a long-standing pattern of behavior that trends towards immoral, misogynistic, and hateful. Scientifically, you can’t cherry pick the one time he doubled back and admitted he was wrong and ignore the overall trend.
If you personally choose to ignore all of this and worship at the cult of personality here, that’s fine. You do you, I’m obviously not going to convince you that zealotry is wrong. But asserting that he’s some paragon of virtue for his humanitarian fight for the freedoms of software is just laughable.