I had a colleague tell he won't invite X (a local celebrity with a lot of similarity in character with RMS) to our team because he "always feels like a fool when X is around".
I'm not completely sure about the answer, but that description sits well on a spectrum of anti-social and is the only lens through which all this makes sense to me.
> “When I was a teen freshman, I went to a buffet lunch at an Indian restaurant in Central Square with a graduate student friend and others from the AI lab. I don’t know if he and I were the last two left, but at a table with only the two of us, Richard Stallman told me of his misery and that he’d kill himself if I didn’t go out with him.
> I felt bad for him and also uncomfortable and manipulated. I did not like being put in that position — suddenly responsible for an “important” man. What had I done to get into this situation? I decided I could not be responsible for his living or dying, and would have to accept him killing himself. I declined further contact.
> He was not a man of his word or he’d be long dead.”
> —Betsy S., Bachelor’s in Management Science, ’85
I suspect that he was kidding, but who knows?
0) https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-appendi...
I had friends meet Stallman in some conference, and they told me he could make everybody (not just women) "feel uncomfortable around him" in some ways (but nothing an adult shouldn't be able to handle).
Now, if this is about attacking women (physically, or sexually, etc) that would be something else, and would need to be addressed on its own, not using his Epstein comments, and distorting them at that.
Even so, "Not taking "no" for an answer" seems to imply something close to rape or sexual assault -- wheres "making uncomfortable" seems to imply some inconvenience at most.
If he took his willy out, or touched some woman's privates, it shouldn't be called merely "making uncomfortable".
"Making Uncomfortable", at least to my understanding, falls more on the "whistles the Popeye theme incessantly", "smells", "shouts Eureka when he has an idea", "swears a lot", "is totally blunt about weight gains", "looks you dead in the eyes for minutes" etc, realm -- not fire-able offenses outside of a customer facing / corporate environment.
>"RMS, that creepy guy who keeps hitting on people even after they ask him to stop."
Like, asking some person out or something? There's a line there in how we went about it. Many a relationships and happy marriages have started from a person who insisted (even if they were told to stop or "it will never happen between us") - and that's for both men hitting on women, women hitting on men, gays hitting on gays, and lesbians hitting on lesbians. Humans are complicated that way. Some cases persisted for months of years, but eventually the other side agreed and they lived happily ever after (I know several cases).
Of course if he was a jerk about it that's different. There's a line between "asked me out several times even though I said no every time", and "he raised his voice/threatened/followed me out/etc".
(Note that myself can't help (mild aspie) but overanalyze the situation logically, YMMV. Probably you could already tell from the balanced parentheses in prose).