[threepio]

1) No, you don't need to speculate. He describes three years of events that all happened in private (with no resolution). Starting from the very first sentence of the piece ("In January 2020, I told two members of Racket’s core team …")

2) The private email is relevant because its message is so starkly at odds with the public statement. It goes directly to the whole thesis of the piece: that bullies gain power through secrecy. He does not owe the bully any secrecy, because the bully has misused secrecy in the past. His attempt to find a principled middle ground is reasonable.

[haswell]

1) Nowhere does he say he ever attempted to address this in private. You could argue that "Matthias should have apologized unprompted", and I agree, but I think it's clear that this was behavior that had to be confronted. My comment about speculating is about prior attempts to resolve this privately, and as far as we can tell, that never happened (we also don't know it didn't happen, because Matthew never comments on this).

2) I'm reacting here because Matthew's message regarding the private communication is also starkly self-contradictory.

He starts by saying:

> I believe in the norm that private commu­ni­ca­tions should remain so, unless everyone agrees. So I’m going to para­phrase his message. If Felleisen feels mischar­ac­ter­ized, I give him permis­sion to publish it.

He seems to believe that by not publishing the exact words, he's somehow free of his own belief that "unless everyone agrees, private communication should remain so". What he's actually doing is proceeding to publish the private communication anyway by using a technical workaround, despite not having the agreement he called out moments before.

Again, I want to be extremely clear: I'm not defending Matthias here, at all. But Matthew is not being true to his own statements, and while this shouldn't invalidate his message, it certainly doesn't look great as a tactic, either.