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?
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.