I had written it that way because journalists can choose how carefully to fact-check what they write, and how much energy and timeliness they apply into corrections. This gives journalists an ability to “optimistically” publish errors and give misunderstandings narrative momentum. I believe Gruber wielded those tool in his Stallman piece and the correction, and I thought the proof was that he did not to try to correct the perception resulting from his original story. But, as dang said, I don’t have a mind-reader, so I had broken the site guidelines by writing as if I knew that for sure.

If even a third of those people had something resembling my two experiences with RMS than the anti-Stallman effort as you describe it is a tiny thing compared to the thousands of people in the industry that have come to know RMS personally well enough to look at the reports and find them more than plausible. Or, in my case and seemingly in many others, look at the reports and say to themselves, "I saw him do this, I know that he does this, I should have done something about it at the time."

In summary: I think that it goes a long way to explain MIT's decisions and what you may be perceiving as a general lack of support in the community to point out that thousands of people had first hand experiences with RMS that fit with the picture being painted. The reports were not isolated. They were many. The fact that they were not acted on earlier is criminal. The fact that they were finally acted upon is just.