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Security Researcher Attacked While At Conference
New submitter fineous fingers writes "U.S. computer security researcher Georgia Weidman has revealed on her blog that a fellow speaker at the Confidence security conference in Krakow, Poland attempted to rape her. The attack occurred in her hotel room in the early morning hours of 28 May. Luckily, Georgia was able to fend her attacker off by clocking him in the head with a coffee mug. I was personally at this conference, but was staying at a different hotel and found out about it after the fact. It was Georgia herself that told me after she gave her fantastic talk on Leveraging Mobile Devices on Pentests. That she was able to give a flawless presentation later that day and had the courage to talk about the attack on her blog shows how awesome she really is."
If you were going to make a court case out of it, posting your evidence to a blog immediately might hurt your case more than help it. It's true that this is a very public accusation without much to substantiate it, but I don't think it's completely unreasonable to want to warn people without hurting your own chances for justice in your particular case. That public shaming requires both an unsubstantiated claim and people who take that as fact.
Because there is no proof and there will never be? Sometimes, that's just the way it is. Maybe she prefers going public to shame him, since it is the only way she can actually get to him. Makes sense to me. Shows a lot of courage on her part, seeing how rape victims are treated by the public opinion.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Gont's on camera going into her room. They both have injuries. Cops verified hers shortly after Gont left the scene. So you have a situation in which a guy goes into a woman's room, then gets into a brawl with her. I can't think of many ways that goes down without sexual assault being involved. Let's say he's totally in the clear and she attacked him for some unknown reason. Maybe she wanted sex and he didn't so she clocked him with a coffee mug. Okay. If a woman did that to me, I would probably not respond by punching her in the face. I'd just leave. Given Gont's and Weidman's relative builds, it's not like she could have stopped him.
While we don't have irrefutable proof that sexual assault occurred, it certainly fits the circumstances, and I'm at a loss to come up with an explanation in which Gont comes out clean.