He got some heat in 2019 after an untastful statement he made regarding the Epstein case. A massive backlash happend, followed by him leaving many of his positions, esp. at MIT and at the FSF. Eventually he made some public excuses and got re-integrated to the FSF board, to the displeasure of some.
To elaborate after I Googled to find more information about this:
Stallman had cast doubt upon the reports that AI pioneer Marvin Minsky had sexually assaulted one of Epstein’s victims. In an email chain sent to the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) mailing list that was published by Motherboard, Stallman said that “the most plausible scenario” was that Epstein’s victim “presented herself to [Marvin Minsky] as entirely willing.”
Stallman also described the distinction between a 17 or 18 year old victim as a “minor” detail, and suggested that it was an “injustice” to refer to it as a “sexual assault.”
and a different article:
Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a victim of Epstein at age 17, testified in a May 2016 deposition that “she was directed to have sex with Minsky when he visited Epstein’s compound in the US Virgin Islands,”
Stallman objected to the text of the event announcement, saying that it “does an injustice to Marvin Minsky” by saying that Minsky was “accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims.”
“The word ‘assaulting’ presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself did say no such thing. Only that they had sex,” Stallman wrote.
Stallman added that “the most plausible scenario is she presented herself to [Minsky] as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to conceal that from most of his associates.”
After one person wrote that “Giuffre was 17 at the time; this makes it rape in the Virgin Islands,” Stallman responded, “I think it is morally absurd to define ‘rape’ in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”
“We know that Giuffre was being coerced into sex—by Epstein,” Stallman also wrote. “She was being harmed. But the details do affect whether, and to what extent, Minsky was responsible for that.”
“Headlines say that I defended Epstein,” Stallman wrote. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve called him a ‘serial rapist’, and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him—and other inaccurate claims—and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said. I’m sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding.”
Stallman, who in 2006 wrote, “I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children,” also wrote in September 2019 that he had changed his mind about sex between adults and children.
“Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it,” Stallman wrote. “Through personal conversations in recent years, I’ve learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per [sic] psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.”
He got some heat in 2019 after an untastful statement he made regarding the Epstein case. A massive backlash happend, followed by him leaving many of his positions, esp. at MIT and at the FSF. Eventually he made some public excuses and got re-integrated to the FSF board, to the displeasure of some.
To elaborate after I Googled to find more information about this:
and a different article:
I found a PDF of that email chain, first entry on page 18: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929/09132019142056-0001.pdf (the ordering of emails is basically backwards, i.e. oldest entries at the end).
Oh no