Ashley Paramore (Healthy Addict) Speaks Out About Conference Assault

Ashley Paramore, a.k.a. video blogger healthyaddict (@healthaddict), has made a YouTube video describing and discussing her experience (only one of them) being assaulted at a skeptical conference. In this case, TAM.

If you see any more denialist (I’m not calling it hyperskeptical any more, I’m calling it deniaist, since that’s what it is) bullshit about “I’ve never seen any harassment or assault at conferences, therefore it doesn’t happen,” please point them to this video.

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Ashley Paramore (Healthy Addict) Speaks Out About Conference Assault
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4 thoughts on “Ashley Paramore (Healthy Addict) Speaks Out About Conference Assault

  1. 2

    Unfortunately there are denialists in her comments on that video. Which absolutely means that they will never accept any form of proof because they don’t actually care about proof.

  2. 3

    I don’t comment on YouTube often but I just had a new-to-me experience posting on this. I’m a little bemused, a little “huh?” If anyone would like to explain this to me, I’d love to know why you think it happened. To whit:

    A commenter asked why Ashley did not out jimbob by his actual name. I responded that while I don’t know/can’t speak for Ashley, she happens to have a valid legal reason not to: Nevada is one of the very few states that has a criminal libel law on the books; as she did not file charges against jimbob, she would open both herself and YouTube to prosecution by the state of Nevada (presumably prodded by jimbob, under those circumstances) under the Nevada Revised Statutes. As YouTube is technically the publisher and equally liable, a reasonable recourse for them to take would have been to suspend Ashley’s account if she disclosed jimbob’s name, lest she post anything further that could be libelous. Obviously both Ashley & YT would win a case, as libel is defeated by proof of veracity, but it would be a pain in the ass for Ashley and for YT. This sparked a little disagreement with the original commenter, not heated but he clearly isn’t accustomed to having to read law. Most people aren’t, and this is the kind of shit only lawyers, free speech advocates, and law librarians could love. For clarity, in a separate post, I quoted all the relevant parts of NRS 500.210-260.

    Okey dokey. So I have a life, and had to go pay attention to that for a while. Around lunchtime, I decided to check back & see if the commenter had responded to my last post. I was surprised to see that one of my separate posts, in which I quote the actual statute, had been hidden due to receiving to many negative votes. JUST a legal quote. Also receiving too many negative votes was one of my responses to the commenter, which I’ll just cut&paste below, including my typo:
    “It does not matter whether or not the post gets mirrored, YouTube would still be prosecutable. As a result, YouTube would likely [ban] Ashley from putting up any more videos, period. That would not be an unreasonable reaction. I do not have LexisNexis access from where I am at the moment, but cases have already been tried in re this. I can post a ref later.
    Regardless, they would be open to criminal prosecution– NV is one of the rare states that allow criminal as well as civil prosecution of libel.”

    Any thoughts on why someone would take the time to downvote that? Given some of the rage in the comments section, this post seems utterly innocuous.

  3. 4

    I am seeing a familiar name bandied about in the comments section of the video, and I am not able to discern (due to the comment display system acting all wonky) whether people are referring to him as the man who may have assaulted her, or if they are referring to him in some other context (being a frequent denialist, for example). It makes me want to start a YouTube series called “Why Do People Laugh At Denialists”.

    Can anyone shed some light on this without naming names?

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