Crossposted on Medium.
Content warning: This article discusses sexual assault and suicide.
Edited to add: This post is not an attack of EA, on the contrary. It is a plea for help. We share a concern that a morally corrupt tech community will develop misaligned AI.
There is a rape-to-exodus and a rape-to-suicide pipeline in the Silicon Valley Bay Area. We raise the alarm about this issue.
We compiled this article with the collective information of multiple women. We want every person who experiences this horror to know that they are not alone. If you’re in tech and haven’t experienced abuse, but suspect that you know someone who has, this article will help you get a better understanding of their reality.
Because our experiences happened in the San Francisco Bay Area and in AI in particular, we share a broader concern about humanity’s shared future. The men who victimized us are shaping the world. We are canaries for their disregard for human dignity.
A puzzling phenomenon
In 2020, we lost a friend to suicide. She was an energetic and optimistic tech entrepreneur. She was speaking on world stages about her work to improve the state of the world.
More than a year prior to her death, she had allegedly been sexually abused at a conference. A successful man had allegedly shared a hotel room with her, given her drugs, and taken advantage of her. Among friends, we rumored that this had something to do with her death. But why did she die long after the event was over — and not right after the traumatic event, when the stress is supposedly the highest?
In this past decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, we have come across similar stories. Many women left. A few died. By now, many of us know more women with tech backgrounds who have left Silicon Valley than who are still there. Of those who left, everyone mentioned non-consensual sexual experiences and the resulting fallout.
What’s the reality?
Here is an anonymized list of the reality of women whose experiences contributed directly or indirectly to this article.
A was sexually assaulted. She moved to another country and re-enrolled in college to earn a new degree in a different industry. Her rapist’s career was unaffected.
B worked at a venture fund for tech startup companies. She was groomed for being trafficked in Epstein’s network. She left the Silicon Valley Bay Area. She now works in tech in another country.
C was an investor for tech startup companies. She left after a well-liked entrepreneur violently attacked her. Her abuser’s career was unaffected. He flourishes in AI.
D’s reputation was destroyed by a close male friend of hers after she was raped by a buddy of his. After the rapist started addiction treatment and somewhat owned up and apologized, she was cautiously tolerated in the tech community again. She now has a new job and a family.
E quietly struggled, hinted at traumatic experiences, and took her own life.
F was tied up and sexually assaulted. She left the tech industry and moved away. Her rapist’s career was unaffected. He flourishes in AI.
G was sexually assaulted while intoxicated. She moved to another country. Her rapist’s career was unaffected. He flourishes in AI.
H was sexually assaulted in her sleep. Her rapist slandered her mental health, leading her to be ostracized. Later, her rapist was ostracized himself after he sexually assaulted someone of higher social status and popularity.
J was abused on business travel at a conference. She died of suicide more than a year later. Her rapist’s career was unaffected.
K was a VP at a major tech company. She left Silicon Valley after she was raped on business travel and subsequently fired. Her rapist was investigated, but never formally charged. His career flourishes.
L was abused several times. She went on to study misogyny and reported about it to the Effective Altruism community. Her work was dismissed. She named her abusers in an elaborate post, then took her own life. Her accusations were dismissed. [0]
M left the Bay Area for two years after being sexually assaulted, then returned to start a new life. Her rapist’s life was unchanged.
N was sexually abused by someone influential who keeps inspiring social aggression against her. She is considering a dignified death at a euthanasia facility in Switzerland. His career flourishes.
Why though?
This phenomenon has puzzled some. Why do women in Silicon Valley, instead of getting therapy and support, leave their lives behind? Some of us even received therapy money from our respective rapists. And yet, after much struggle to stay, we couldn’t. Some of us hosted goodbye events. One woman even organized a “funeral” gathering before leaving to say goodbye to her career, her friends, and her chosen family. Why is sexual assault in the Silicon Valley Bay Area such a life-ending event?
We argue that the initial trauma of a sexual consent violation, while severe, does not explain the magnitude of the impact on the lives and careers of women. The real horror is in how the Bay Area treats its witnesses of sexual abuse. Women leave after sexual assault because of the loss of belonging, psychological safety, and shared meaning.
The real horror is in how the Bay Area treats its witnesses of sexual abuse.
Introducing the Alice
In this article, besides calling a person a survivor, a victim, or a witness¹ of sexual abuse in the Silicon Valley Bay Area² (which are all appropriate terms in the right context), we will call them an “Alice”³. “Alice” refers broadly to a person who experienced a violation in a world pitted against her⁴. This is intended to be a value-neutral allegory to the fairytale protagonist who unexpectedly finds herself in a bizarre world full of nonsense and casual cruelty. It also challenges the “Karen” trope that is weaponized against Alices. Next time you encounter someone alleging abuse and getting called a Karen, you may ask yourself: “Is she really a Karen? Or is she an Alice?”
“Is she really a Karen? Or is she an Alice?”
Down the rabbit hole
When we talk about the Bay Area or Silicon Valley culture, we’re referring to the particularities of tech workers and the tech elites. A wealthy social class of a particular type of neurodivergence dominates the culture. Many people formally or informally identify on the autism spectrum. Openness to new experiences is high, and mind-altering drugs are common and popular. Akin to royal courts of the past, exclusive events are where deals are made and new companies are founded. It creates an environment that can be extremely fun and stimulating, but also dangerous and unaccountable. With drugs, parties, overflowing testosterone, a lack of communication skills, and blindness to social cues, consent violations happen easily and frequently.
A perpetrator often has an active imagination, projecting more sexual desire than what actually was present in the other party. His⁴ perception may be affected by a long string of encounters with women where he successfully imposed his fantasy on them, including “no consent parties” where drugged women are available for him to have his way with. An Alice, on the other hand, suffers from a lack of imagination: She expects society to work as advertised, her boundaries to be respected, and is unwilling to bend to his distorted version of reality. To a tech entrepreneur who has a “reality distortion field” around him, living in a fantasy world of his making, this can be an unusual and jarring experience. An Alice is an unwelcome tether from the default world.
A perpetrator often has an active imagination, projecting more sexual desire than what actually was present. An Alice is an unwelcome tether from the default world.
In concrete numbers
Can we estimate how many “bad apples” there are? In a study⁵ among US college students, almost a third of the men (31.7%) said that in a consequence-free situation, they’d force a woman to have sexual intercourse. The Artificial Intelligence industry is highly male-dominated, with only an estimated 12% of employees in AI being women⁶. In our back-of-the-envelope comparison, the AI industry can be estimated to contain more self-identified sexual assaulters than women.
This tracks when we look at the statistics about victims in this population, too. Women on the Asperger’s spectrum, the archetype of the “technical person” (that Elon Musk identifies as, too), report⁸ rates of sexual assault at 90%.
Sexual assault is very rarely reported to the police, and when it is, the police even more rarely move the case to formal charges⁹.
Another characteristic of Bay Area tech culture is that there is little to no separation between work and private life. Work, community, housing, spiritual life, our “tribe”, everything is one big source of meaning, and different from “normie” life. This is very effective for startups, but when it fails, Alices are left without support, social connection, or sources of meaning.
Statistically, the AI industry can be estimated to contain more sexual assaulters than women.
No way home
Once a consent violation has happened, a perpetrator may recruit allies in a war against the Alice while she is still in shock. The collective efforts to shut down her truth render her world bizarre. As a result, the Alice can no longer live an authentic life: She has to choose between conforming to the pressure and denying her reality or saying goodbye to her network, her career, and her ability to keep and form social connections. The section “Real life Cyberball” below describes what this looks like concretely.
We’ve found¹⁰ that the amount of second-hand betrayal is most highly correlated with the perceived social influence of the perpetrator, such as his wealth, his power, and his network. Social climbers will further harm the Alice to curry favor with the perpetrator.
The Cyberball experiment
In a classic psychology experiment¹¹, a human participant sits in front of a screen to play a simple game. They, let’s call them player A, virtually tosses a ball back and forth with two other players. It’s simple, wholesome, ball-tossing fun. A tosses to B, B to C, then back to A, and so on. Now comes the kicker: Players B and C stop including A in their tosses. A watches helplessly as B and C keep tossing the ball to each other, but never to A. A’s stress response shoots up. What A doesn’t know is that the game had been rigged from the beginning; they are the only real participant.
As players B and C exclude A from their ball tosses, player A will soon start to get nervous, then distressed, and then hopeless. We can measure their significant stress responses, for example in their skin¹² and in their pupils¹³. Brain scans¹⁴ revealed that these feelings of social exclusion are registered in the same way as physical pain¹⁵. Their distress is negatively correlated with a sense of control, belongingness, and meaningful existence¹⁶.
Luckily, it was just a brief experiment, and they can go back to the real world where they are seen and included. Often, the researchers let the participant play a few more inclusive rounds of Cyberball in the end to undo the feeling of ostracization.
We posit that even more than the initial sexual assault, this social pain of ostracism exiles and ultimately kills Alices. Instead of a quick trauma that could be addressed and resolved, it is a slow, ongoing, excruciating one, happening repeatedly until the Alice gives up on shared meaning, social connection, and impactful work.
Real life Cyberball
Calling the Alice’s reality cruel and bizarre is no exaggeration. We have collectively experienced the following acts of ostracization after sexual assault:
We were uninvited from events and conferences.
We lost jobs and had job offers revoked.
We were removed from group chats.
When contracted for work, employers have requested secrecy from us to be able to deny knowing us.
Speaking engagements were canceled.
Our trauma was disclosed as a reason to exclude us from communities, conferences, job opportunities, and retreats.
Elaborate documents were circulated in group chats in our absence on the topic of our character and mental health.
Cherry-picked screenshots were circulated in group chats, along with elaborate discussion for character assassination.
Our friends have been selectively approached and influenced to no longer engage with us.
We were unfriended and blocked on social media by former friends.
We were frozen out and lied to about upcoming social gatherings.
Warnings were circulated about us with calls to spread the warning to everyone.
We were kicked out of community housing, and prevented from finding new housing within the network.
Besides ostracization, we experienced concerted efforts to silence us, including:
When reacting with fear to being in the presence of our rapist, we were accused of “projecting our trauma” and ruining a friendly event.
We were manipulated in various ways to agree that what happened wasn’t “really” sexual assault.
We were pressured to sign non-disclosure agreements or “consent statements” in a manipulative “community process”.
We were put through triggering psychedelic experiences — and accused of not being spiritually enlightened enough when it didn’t change our story.
We were put through intimidating “community mediation” processes by self-appointed “witch hunters”. When we didn’t recant at the end of the process, we were excluded on the grounds of failing the process.
We were pressured to publicly “admit” to lying about the sexual assault, under the promise that it would end the ostracization.
We were threatened and intimidated to stay silent in text, in voice, and in person.
We were vilified for “violating social norms” when we named an abuser.
We were directed to file our concerns with self-appointed community stewards, who advocated for silence, no police intervention, and who, on multiple occasions, compassionately recommended suicide.
And then there was opportunistic harm, including:
We were targeted with other interpersonal crime, such as theft and appropriation, followed by the thieves joining ranks with the rapists to cast doubt on us.
We were refused pay, equity, and credit for our work, followed by the employer joining ranks to freeze us out from our industry.
Humiliating websites were put up about us with cherry-picked screenshots and non-consensual recordings.
Our home address was publicly released (doxxed) with encouragement for harassment.
We were pressured into sexual acts to “prove ourselves” to “community advocates”.
We were preyed on by other sexual assaulters in the rapist’s network. The amount of predation after the initial assault implies a gossip network among rapists where they help each other identify targets and coordinate to harm the woman’s credibility.
It is now becoming more clear how our friend died in 2020. After the sexual assault, rumors began to circulate that she was crazy, annoying, and dangerous. Her distress, confusion, and shock at being frozen out from meaningful interactions were interpreted to confirm the rumors about her annoyingness and contributed further to her isolation. Over time, it became impossible for her to raise capital for her business, to find a new job, or to have trusted friends, until there was nothing meaningful left. Ultimately, she stopped communicating, eating, and drinking water. She died alone, in a slow death of starvation and dehydration.
Among us, a certain kind of gossip and warning about a woman raises skepticism now. More likely than not, the woman is another Alice, and the gossip is the candy trail that leads back to a rapist and his circle of enablers.
Among Alices, we confidentially share knowledge not only about the men who violate boundaries, but also about those who will do their dirty work of harming the women’s reputations. While rapists vary, the ones who take an active role in ending women’s careers, social life, and belonging in the Bay Area are a shockingly small number of individuals who come up over and over. A wealthy and popular entrepreneur in AI has been identified by half a dozen women for having harmed their reputations after they were raped by buddies of his. A thought leader in AI safety wrote multiple slandering documents about women whom his friends had raped. They often present as extraordinarily “caring about the community”, seeking social leadership positions. Needless to say, the presence of these “witch hunters” does not imply any actual witchcraft — just like in historic days, non-conforming women are eliminated to protect the establishment and the illusions that uphold it.
Deep thanks to everyone who contributed to this report.
[0] If I Can’t Have Me, No One Can (Kathleen Rebecca Forth — Born April 11, 1980) | by Itai Emberwell | Medium
[1] [Pt 0] The Lucretia Books: My Experience with Sexual Harassment/Abuse as a Female AI Researcher in Silicon Valley | by Lucretia | Medium
[2] The same dynamics may happen in other locations, too, most likely everywhere where power is largely held by men.
[3] This is not to be confused with the neurological condition called Alice in Wonderland syndrome. canmedaj00720–0006.pdf (nih.gov) Alice in Wonderland syndrome | Neurology Clinical Practice
[4] We are using female pronouns when referring to the Alice concept, although male victims and non-binary victims exist, too. To respect their gender identity, their preferred label may be included when referencing them specifically, such as “male Alice”. Perpetrators are referred to in this article with male pronouns to distinguish from the Alice’s female pronouns. Of course, all genders can do everything in conducive circumstances.
[5] Denying Rape but Endorsing Forceful Intercourse: Exploring Differences Among Responders | Violence and Gender (liebertpub.com)
[6] Estimating the Gender Ratio of AI Researchers Around the World | by Yoan Mantha | Element AI Lab | Medium
[7] Sexual Assault of Women | AAFP
[8] Frontiers | Evidence That Nine Autistic Women Out of Ten Have Been Victims of Sexual Violence (frontiersin.org)
[9] Why don’t more women report sexual assault to the police? | CMAJ
[10] Observational — a scientific study on this would be great!
[11] Cyberball: A program for use in research on interpersonal ostracism and acceptance | SpringerLink
[12] Cold-blooded loneliness: Social exclusion leads to lower skin temperatures — ScienceDirect
[13] The social pain of Cyberball: Decreased pupillary reactivity to exclusion cues — ScienceDirect
[14] Does rejection hurt? An FMRI study of social exclusion — PubMed (nih.gov)
[15] Neuroscience. Feeling the pain of social loss — PubMed (nih.gov)
[16] Afraid of Social Exclusion: Fear of Missing Out Predicts Cyberball-Induced Ostracism | SpringerLink
Thanks for posting and drawing more attention to this. I can only imagine that it takes a lot of courage to write about this in such a public manner. I hope you and your friends have all the support the you need.
Reading this makes me feel really angry and sad, both that an initial violation occurs, and also that later harm occurs.
Thank you a lot for this comment. I am honestly surprised and saddened by the number of downvotes on Mandelbrot’s post and think it’s ironically reflective of the issue she is drawing attention to.