Uncrunched

My defamation action against Jenn Allen, the woman who falsely accused me of rape last year after I ended our relationship, is over. She retracted her statements and apologized, which is the very relief I sought before filing this action, and I accordingly dismissed the lawsuit. The settlement agreement is here.

Unfortunately, when you have been accused of rape — even provably falsely as I have been — there’s no way to “win”. For the rest of my life, when someone searches my name on the internet, the word “rape” will appear somewhere among the results. And that person will always wonder whether or not I was capable of such a heinous act.

Despite the pain this has caused me and my family, I took action to enforce my right not to be defamed by lies. I sued Jennifer Allen last year for defamation based on the false rape allegations she made against me. The truth is, she made those allegations because I was in a stable and happy relationship, and would no longer communicate with her.

Today that litigation ended because I was innocent of this outrageous and malicious lie. Jennifer Allen herself offered to settle the case by voluntarily retracting her statements and apologizing, obviously without receiving anything from me in return. This – the truth – is what I and everyone deserves, and is all I’ve asked for from the beginning.

Three pivotal events led to today’s result.

The first was that Jenn had falsely claimed other witnesses would support her testimony. Allen accused me of raping another woman – that woman, once we discovered who she was, told us and the court that Allen had tried to coerce her into saying I had raped her. A recent message to me: “I feel so manipulated by Jenn. I can’t believe how it must feel to be you. If I had known everything that was going on I would have gotten involved sooner.”

The second pivotal moment: another ex boyfriend of Jenn’s came forward and, despite fearing that Jenn would attack him publicly as well, made a statement to the court that Jenn had been abusive and extremely delusional with him too, even scaring his young child. He also said that Jenn believed I had her under satellite surveillance and routinely hacked her phone calls impersonating other people. She would only talk via video chat to ensure that she was talking to this man. She believed that any voice only calls could be me impersonating him with a voice device. She was also unable to tell truth from delusion.

These psychological issues became apparent during the third pivotal moment, her deposition. Jenn arrived so late to her deposition that her own attorneys weren’t sure if she would show up. She appeared drugged, and admitted that she had taken a strong antipsychotic medication before the deposition. She was prescribed and taking a variety of antipsychotic/bipolar/depression drugs, including at least Seroquel, Abilify, Lexapro and Trazodone.

Her lawyers then ended the deposition hours early. Jenn thereafter retracted her statements and apologized to me.

With Jenn’s retraction and apology, obviously without receiving anything from me in return, I agreed to dismiss this lawsuit. This – the truth – is what I and everyone deserves, and is all I’ve asked for from the beginning.

I’m going to try to move forward with my life now. I’m lucky to have had the support of family and friends. And most importantly, a loving partner who has stuck with me throughout this ordeal (and who had to remove large parts of her life from the Internet when Jenn became abusive towards her, too).

They say that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I can say with certainty that is not true. My goal now is to try to continue seeing the world as a fundamentally good place. It will be something I struggle with for the rest of my life, but I’m confident that I’ll find a way.

Update: Scott Sullivan-Reinhart, the person I mentioned above who was brave enough to speak out about Jenn’s behavior, has made a public statement on his Facebook page:

Virtu, a Washington D.C. startup, raises $6 million in new capital. The company is building an encryption product that will work with email platforms, including Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook.

Which is great except that the founders are ex-NSA guys who used to be paid to do things like collect emails and phone call information from hundreds of millions of terrorist suspects Americans.

The kind of stuff that this new product is designed foil.

It’s like hiring Darth Vader to build planetary defense systems to thwart the Death Star.

Except the analogy doesn’t quite work. Vader switched to the light side because of his love for his son. These guys are just doing it for the money.

Update: Microsoft says they’re suspending the program in a statement: “This action by a vendor is not representative of the way Microsoft works with bloggers or other members of the media. The program has been suspended.”

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Why in the world is Microsoft (through an agency) trying pay bloggers to write about Internet Explorer? Do people still do this? And given my position on paid posts, why would they think I’d be willing to participate?

This is just layers of stupid.

Here’s the link in the request below. Here’s the hashtag (#IEbloggers) that they’re requesting people use, so I’m guessing anyone using that is getting paid.

“The data center is broken, and we fixed it, like Google. Developers will never have to worry about scaling issues again.”

That’s a strong statement from Mesosphere CEO Florian Leibert.

At CrunchFund, we believed it and invested last year. And we’re very happy to see Andreessen Horowitz lead a new round (along with Data Collective and Fuel Capital) of $10.5 million today.

Mesosphere isn’t some hot new messaging app, but they do make it possible for that app to scale. As Cloudera is to Hadoop, Mesosphere is to the open source Mesos cluster manager.

To some including us, that’s just as sexy as that app. Or even more so.

In short, it’s the operating system for data centers. It lets you combine your severs into one, big computer. And it’s credited for fixing Twitter – Mesos manages some 50,000 cores at Twitter, in fact.

“Mesosphere brings Google-scale compute to everybody,” says former Twitter Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury.

Mesosphere provides the packaging and tools needed by companies without Twitter’s resources but who want the same ease of scaling. And those companies are starting to migrate to Mesos and Mesophere more and more frequently.

Airbnb, Twitter, Hubspot, URX, ebay, Groupon and others using Mesophere are just the beginning. We are very excited about where this company is going.