[jeffjose]

This is an easy trap to fall into. Try to think from the victim's perspective. Countless women had to suffer mental and emotional distress due to Lasseter. Who knows, without such stress, some of these women could have been even bigger than Lasseter himself.

The ends never justify the means.

[empath75]

I think it’s probably an exaggeration to say that ‘countless’ women were personally harassed by Lassiter personally, but countless women have been harassed by people like him and continue to be today.

I think people are focusing too much on individuals and missing a very important question: Why are we relying on journalists for this? Presumably all of these people work at corporations with HR departments. Why weren’t there consequences sooner?

Something is fundamentally broken with the incentives around harassment in the work place — HR departments exist to protect the company and its executives from lawsuits. They don’t exist to protect employees from the company. Until there are serious financial consequences for failing to act on harassment complaints sooner, nothing is going to change.

Every newspaper on earth can’t exclusively commit itself to uncover sexual harassment. Eventually this is going to die down— and then what? If Jane Engineer is harassed by Joe Manager today— where does she go? The media only cares about celebrities. Are HR departments changing their policies to stop the ongoing harassment today? I seriously suspect not.

In another ten years we’ll be seeing another round of these stories.