From what you describe, I don't think you were weak or cowardly, just inexperienced. There is absolutely no shame in that. Hindsight is useful for learning, but not for admonishment (by yourself or others). You had to make lots of decisions fast, amongst a bunch of bad choices with unknown outcomes. Your success rate for surviving bad situations so far is 100%, so don't beat yourself up too much, and tell the retrospective armchair philosophers to jog on.
It's really easy for me to think, when it's not happening to me, that "Of course I would do this, or that, but I'd never do nothing". And we see some of that thinking in this thread.
What people don't realise is that abusing people is an iterative process. The abuser has had a lot of practice at it, and refines the process over many years.
The victim (and that's a hard word to use about ourselves) hasn't had any experience of this kind of situation, and doesn't want to leap to the to them nuclear option.
I hope you're okay, and if you're ever in Cheltenham[1] I'd buy you a coffee[2].
> Maybe what Jake did to me wasn't all that bad.
It was bad, and most people would have had the same reaction as you.
> Maybe I deserved it.
No, you did not deserve it.
[1] The one in England.
[2] Or tea. Or beer.
But your document contains serious allegations which the body of it does not support:
> Jake has targeted, abused and silenced many close friends of mine, many of whom are researchers you probably know and respect. Whether it’s ripping off research or just harassing someone into submission, somehow we all felt powerless to do anything about it. He’s the perfect bully.
> Every criticism of him is met with suspicion, every accusation is some government-conspiracy-takedown.
> Those that tried to stand up to him were destroyed, one even took his own life after Jake stole his research. But that’s not my story to tell.
If you're not going to support these claims, you shouldn't make them. Now I get to feel like shit for calling this out-- and potentially causing you stress, because I am sympathetic to your experience...
I think your message would carry more weight if it was limited to your message, rather than setting the framing with a large number of serious but unsubstantiated claims.
Why is that? I am personally willing to believe "Multiple generally-trustworthy members of a community make accusations about a person P which, by their nature, cannot be easily substantiated to the public, which if true would imply that P is/has done X" as very strong evidence for "P is/has done X" - certainly enough to override my prior for "Most people are not/have not done X". And therefore, I think that people should make claims they believe to be true even when they are unsubstantiable by nature, and I am glad that these claims were made.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad for calling this out; you're just saying something that I see a lot in technical communities, in a lot of contexts. I would like technical communities to have a good, strong, evidence-backed way of reasoning about things like this. It seems so often that we default to reasoning about things the way the Anglo-Saxon legal system wants to reason about things when considering whether to point its monopoly on violence at a person. Especially for matters like harassment and sexual assault, we have strong reason to doubt that the legal system is well-suited in its current form at accurately making that judgment, let alone whether it is correct at judging truth, which it explicitly makes no claim to (Blackstone's dictum is specifically about how the legal system should minimize harm on the occasions it gets truth wrong). That default is baked into us by culture, but I think it's a bad default, or more specifically, an irrational and often erroneous default. Hearsay isn't allowable in a court of law, but that's not a reason that hearsay shouldn't be allowed to influence the personal opinions of community members who are making judgments for themselves and not for a government.
It's a share of what Jake is accused of: making it impossible to criticize or question.
From a perspective of statistics, these allegations are heresay-- and we've heard them elsewhere. The results in well known cognitive biases where evidence gets double counted when someone elses allegation is simply repeated by someone else.
What measure of proof do you require?
Further: This is a direct description of what I have come to know as Jake's M.O. Not an isolated incident. This has to do with one person's behavior, it has nothing to do with the projects that person was involved with.
Maybe what Jake did to me wasn't all that bad. Maybe I deserved it. Fine, call me whatever form of coward or weakling you want but in the end, this was my hobby and I found other things to do with my life where I didn't have to put up with this level of stress.