People do lie, but that doesn't mean we should assume they're always lying.

I don't believe you can prove anything. I mean to say that's my perspective on the universe: that it is physically impossible to prove anything. At the same time, you can't live your life that way.

If I second guess the way my brain is interpreting light reflecting off objects all the time then I'd never leave my apartment. Of course I'm skeptical of how my brain interprets light sometimes, and not infrequently I was correct to be skeptical.

I view stories like this similarly. Could this story be deliberately misleading? Sure. Could it be accidentally misleading? Sure. Could it be dead-on accurate? Yep. We've each got to make a choice though, and that choice is going to be basically arbitrary despite whichever method we use to justify it. Someone might say "I know she is lying because she used this term which liars always use plus I read this story about a woman making up harassment charges to elicit sympathy." Another person might say "I know she is telling the truth because the same thing happened to my cousin."

In my case, I found myself believing the essentials of the story as I read it. My reasons for that are a black box to me. I suspect they'd become clear if I sat down and thought about it but even if I understood my own reasoning, it would still be arbitrary with regard to the events that did/did not occur. Point being: no one can faultlessly reconstruct the truth about a series of events from X number of words written about that event. And to think that you can is arrogant.

The only thing I'd try to advise is to not get dogmatic about your belief or disbelief (in this and other cases) and be ready to change your opinion if new information comes to light later.

>I don't believe you can prove anything. I mean to say that's my perspective on the universe: that it is physically impossible to prove anything.

Tons of things can be reasonably proven. A videotape of an incident can pretty much settle a dispute as to what happened for example, except if very special arrangements are involved (the camera angle hides the actual act, etc).

Key word is reasonably.

Sure, there might be only one person on the universe, and all of us are in his dream, and we do arbitrary things, plus he changes the past. That will be difficult to refute to prove something. Or magic exists (which we can't prove it doesn't) and changed the facts of a cases -- e.g. it was X that stabbed Y, but a magician transformed as X.

That said, why would you want to prove something beyond "reasonably"?

It's called the benefit of the doubt. You're free to believe one person is telling the truth and one person is lying, or that both people are telling what they believe happened, or whatever, but making that decision before getting both/all sides of a story is not the best way to get the facts.

Just like someone shouldn't read this woman's story and say that everyone above her at Apple should be fired, you also shouldn't read it and say that she's obviously just too sensitive or lying.

>It's called the benefit of the doubt.

Shouldn't that benefit extend to the other sides of the stories?

What happened to the "Auditur et altera pars" (hearing the other side) before assuming anything and awarding the benefit to just the one you've heard?

In this particular case, my thinking says Author is probably telling the truth. She has really no incentive of saying anything at all, she can keep it all to herself.

On other hand - never in my career, I have seen HR truly standing up for the Employee. The goal is always to deflect and maintain plausible deniability. I have never read a single story on Internet that highlights those HR heroes we deserve.

HR are paid employees of the company. They care for the company's interest's first, any other employee's second.