EFTA00805531.pdf

My story of harassment: In Aug 2017 I was informed of a false allegation that at a private event banquet in 2016 associated with a skeptics group in Australia, during a session of 'selfie' photographs, I had touched a woman's breast. The allegation was made by a third party, not the woman in question, and was not reported at the time to the organization, but was claimed in letters to two Universities with which I am associated, and to Buzzfeed. The report was quickly discredited by investigations at both Universities, but Buzzfeed decided it was good fodder for a story about alleged sexual harassment by a 'prominent atheist scientist', feeding the claim that the atheist and skeptic community is dominated by misogynistic harassers, and supplementing it with the notion that somehow my Universities were protecting me from claims of harassment. Since that time, for the past 6 months Buzzfeed has continued to harass me, my family, my friends, my colleagues, and former students and postdocs, dredging up discredited internet allegations and confronting us with them along with new false claims, and twice sending me emails threatening to publish them, until I provided evidence that they were false. Nevertheless, undetermined by evidence and having decided in advance on the conclusions they wanted to use to get clicks online, they have continued to try and find or create misleading allegations to defame me, and by extension, the atheist community. I understand that a formal complaint of harassment has been lodged against one of the Buzzfeed reporters to the UC School of Science Communication, where he is a lecturer, based on the unprofessional lack of integrity in the methods used to try and coerce statements from sources in support of his thesis. In any case, I understand that Buzzfeed will be producing some kind of story, having devoted six months to the effort. Needless to say, it is as credible as the Buzzfeed reporters, namely not at all. EFTA00805531