Nat and [name redacted] were always exceptionally close, which I always found confusing. [name redacted] was intense, passionate, charismatic, but also had troubled and troubling relationships with people, _particularly_ women. [name redacted] was, if I remember correctly, let go from Ximian when he failed to arrive to work every day by noon for one week straight (we lived a 5 to 10 minute walk from the office).
Even after [name redacted] was let go, he and Nat remained fast friends.
This was the beginning of a long chain of emotionally abusive, controlling, and manipulative behaviors.
Also.. This seems to have disappeared from the front page.
In regards to the front-page, there's a lot of downvotes. Went from 160 upvotes to 121 in a matter of minutes. I suspect bots.
Alex also assaulted me as well during a short, but extremely abusive relationship.
Alex mentioned his relationship with Nat several times and used it to threaten me on multiple occasions.
Alex attending Nat's destination wedding in Italy. It's that's not close, I don't know what is.
Playing devils advocate for one moment: I don’t always agree with friends abandoning other friends when they turn out to be bad people. If a person stands any chance of rehabilitation they need people who are willing to stand by them. This doesn’t mean those friends support their actions - in fact they should be honest about what actions are inexcusable. But as a society we are too quick to claim guilt by association without understanding what their relationship is like and whether that friendship is helping to reform individuals who have been (understandably) abandoned by everyone else around them.
I’m not making direct commentary on Alex and Nat though as I don’t know them nor their relationship. I’m just making a generalised observation.
You might be right and remember my post wasn’t commenting on Nat and Alex specifically. However, and mean this with the greatest of respect to yourself, even though you’ve been involved with Alex you still don’t truly know how Alex and Nat communicate in private between just the two of them.
The reason I commented is because I’ve recently seen this same kind of mob mentality happen against some genuinely nice people who have kept their association because they were sincerely trying to rehabilitate others. So they didn’t deserve guilt by association. But their cases were different to these ones.
Anyhow I’m not here to defend Nat nor Alex (I don’t even know them) and this is a understandably going to be a highly emotionally charged subject so I’ll refrain from further comments because sometimes my well intentioned remarks can come across poor (totally my issue. I’m working on fixing it).
I do truly wish you happiness in any future relationships and hope this nightmare you’ve been through doesn’t leave any scares (emotional or physical) that cannot heal.
I initially approached Nat about with this with a great deal of empathy towards Alex in spite of what he did to me. Ignoring a victim and giving a leadership position to someone like that?
How about their podcast together?
You can confirm that by Google their names and 'ximian'.
All I can find is anonymous stuff on a website called http://techrights.org/ which has a series of articles trying to in some way associate Nat with Gravely's domestic violence.
The "best friend" claim seems to have started with a weird "teaser" post on techrights.org wherein an anonymous source claims that "many others" can confirm that Gravely was close to Nat. That of course doesn't even come close to establishing that either of them considers the other their "best friend", if it's trustworthy to begin with.
Then techrights.org cites their own teaser in other posts as saying that Gravely claims Nat is his best friend (not true, or at least not supported by the source).
Now you are, I guess, using that as your basis to claim that they ARE in fact best friends.
I realise it's possible you're entirely honest and have sources I don't, but this looks like a pretty cynical smear job to me, especially given that none of the sources I've managed to find asserting that the two were close date from before this domestic abuse case. I don't have any insider knowledge, but the superficial appearance of all this is that a handful of activists with something against Nat have cooked up this "best friend" narrative for some reason, gradually escalating the claim each time they cite each other, and ultimately it all hinges on an anonymous source saying that other anonymous sources say that the two were close once.