The sexual harassment lawsuit against UploadVR was reported to be settled via Tech Crunch on September 6th, and a week later the New York Times followed with more details about how Upload had been barely dented. The case was settled without any elaboration about what did or didn’t happen beyond a vague open letter from the founders of UploadVR. This issue has has splintered the VR community into different factions of people who are either actively blacklisting Upload or have written it off as an isolated incident that has resulted in changes and growth.
Former employee Danny Bittman wrote about his brief time at Upload in a recent Medium post and there were some women who spoke out in a Buzzfeed article in July, but beyond that not many people with first or second-hand knowledge of the lawsuit allegations have made statements on the record. (You can find my Facebook posts about Upload since May here: 1 2 3 4 5). There hasn’t been a lot of people who have been willing to talk about this issue on the record, but this seems to be changing after the latest round of news about the settlement lawsuit that has left segments of the VR community very unsettled.
One woman from the VR community who was willing to talk to me about the community fallout from the UploadVR lawsuit was Selena Pinnell, who is the co-founder of Kaleidoscope VR festival and fund. She is also a producer and featured participant within the Testimony VR project. I previously interviewed the director of Testimony VR project about their efforts to use VR to create an immersive context for women and men to share testimony about their experiences of sexual assault so that audiences can bear witness to those direct experiences. Skip Rizzo has said that healing from PTSD involves being able to tell a meaningful narrative about your traumatic experiences while remaining emotionally present, and Testimony VR is trying to create a new form of restorative justice by capturing these stories within VR that viewers can have have an one-on-one level of intimacy while they bear witness. Pinnell talks about how powerful it was to have over 150 co-workers and friends witness her testimony about being a rape survivor within the context of a VR experience.
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While VR holds potential for the future of distributing new forms of restorative justice, this issue with Upload feels like it’s a long way from achieving a state of justice and a full accounting of the truth of what happened. Members from the Women in VR communities privately do not feel like justice has currently been served, and Pinnell voices those common concerns as to why she can no longer support Upload as well as why in her assessment the leadership team of Upload never fully accounted for what exactly they did wrong and what they’ve learned.
She also says that it’s hard to trust the leadership after they originally declared that the originally allegations in the lawsuit were “entirely without merit.” Pinnell talks about how crushing it can be to have your testimony of your direct experience be so explicitly denied in this way, especially when it comes to taboo topics like sexual harassment or sexual assault. (Note that the original allegations against Upload were harassment, gender discrimination, hostile work environment, unequal pay, and retaliation, and there weren’t any allegations of sexual assault.) Pinnell emphasizes how important it is to try to listen to women when they are providing testimony about not feeling safe within a work environment, and to try not to go directly towards demanding objective proof from a frame of skeptical disbelief. Learning how to listen, empathize, and reflect the truth of a direct experience is a skillset that is needed here, and it’s something that the unique affordances of the virtual reality community can help to cultivate through projects like Testimony VR. But there’s many more unresolved issues and open questions that Pinnell and I discuss in deep dive into new models of restorative justice and the community fallout surrounding the Upload lawsuit settlement.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So let's talk about Upload VR. This is an issue that I've found that very few people want to talk about publicly on the record about what's been happening at Upload VR. I've been talking to a lot of people off the record, probably spent 30 to 40 hours over the last two months or so, just talking to various people about this specific issue. So for anybody who hasn't been tracking the nuances of the virtual reality community, back in May of 2017, the news broke that there was a sexual harassment case against UploadVR, filed by Elizabeth Scott, who had been hired the previous year in 2016 to be their social media manager. So she details in this lawsuit all sorts of allegations that range from sexual harassment, to gender discrimination, to a hostile work environment, to unequal pay, to her being retaliated against from reporting this and suddenly and unexpectedly being fired from her job without much warning or recourse. It's just basically like, you're terminated. Goodbye. See you. So this sent some huge ripples within the virtual reality community. All these allegations were detailed within the lawsuit and Upload's response to this was that we can confirm that these allegations are entirely without merit. So they basically did a blanket denial over all these various allegations that were made against them. So there's been a lot of discussions behind the scenes and private Facebook groups, face-to-face conversations all throughout these various virtual reality communities talking about the nature of these allegations and people trying to get a sense as to whether or not they actually did have merit or what degree to which they were true or not. And then just a couple of weeks ago, on September 6, Tutcrunch had reported that the lawsuit had been settled, that there was some sort of agreement that was no longer going to go to court. No independent verification of the sets of facts that were being presented, no evidence presented. It was just basically like, this matter has been concluded. And that was essentially the final word from Upload. And that just really incensed me. I've been writing a lot about this issue and social media. And Danny Bittman from Upload is a former employee. He also wrote up a whole Medium article, giving his direct testimony of what the work culture and environment was like. And then on September 15, last Friday, the New York Times had come up with a whole story, doing a whole analysis and reporting on just trying to navigate what had happened with this whole thing. And I was participating in this article, it was quoted a few times. So it was actually that collaboration with that journalist that kind of got me digging into the story a lot more. And this podcast, I hope, is just an opportunity for me to kind of do a debriefing to the community of what I've been able to learn. At the essence, I feel like the truth has been completely annihilated through a number of decisions by both Will Mason and Taylor Freeman deciding to deny and bury and sweep this under the rug. Functionally, the settlement agreement is such that they can't actually talk about any of the heart of any of the allegations at all. It's basically like they have to pretend like it never happened at all. And so there was a little bit initially like, OK, let's just kind of move on. And we've made a new dedication to promoting gender diversity and inclusion. And we've hired an HR so that, you know, they actually have processes for these types of allegations to be reported to and, you know, processes for firing people. But a lot of the gist of the heart of the claims were basically like papered over and not addressed explicitly in any way in terms of what did or did not happen or what had actually come of all of this. And so we're kind of left in this state of limbo and the sense of fracturing the community as to which side are going to be on, are going to be on, you know, the side of believing these original allegations and trying to negotiate the truth of the direct experience of Elizabeth Scott and the unpublished and unknown evidence of all these allegations? Or are you going to just believe that this was an isolated incident that they learned from their mistake and they're going to move on? So it feels like justice in this case has not been served. I think if you were to ask anybody that was involved within this process on all levels, I think you'd be hard pressed to find somebody that feels like justice has been served. It feels like at the end of the day, there hasn't been any justice. So I've been talking to a lot of people about this within the virtual reality community and I found somebody who's willing to talk on the record about it and it is Selena Pinel who is one of the co-founders of Kaleidoscope VR. They do a film festival where they travel around and show different cinematic VR experiences, but they've also gotten into the business of helping curate and produce different VR content. And so they actually produced a piece called Testimony that Selena actually was featured in as one of the main participants within this project where women give their direct testimony of their experiences of sexual assault. And so Selena's a rape survivor who knows what it's like to be able to share her direct experience and for it not to be believed. And through the medium of virtual reality, they're able to create this context to be able to have women share their direct testimony of their experiences so that they could be heard and to have an emotional catharsis and to move towards this path of healing. So it's a different type of restorative justice. It's not necessarily naming names and sending anybody to jail. It's just a process for them to tell the truth of their own direct experiences and for those experiences to have a context to be heard and to be listened to. And virtual reality is a medium that can do that. Now, before we dive in, I just want to make the explicit differentiation between sexual harassment and sexual assault. So sexual assault is the intentional sexual contact by force, threats, intimidation, abuse of authority when the victim either doesn't or can't give consent. And that was the experience of Selena, of actually being raped. Now, sexual harassment is conduct that unreasonably interferes with an individual's work performance or creates an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment. So in the terms of the allegations of Upload VR, it was a sexual harassment and gender discrimination case and this rampant sexist behavior that was happening within the workplace. It wasn't anything that was at the degree of sexual assault. I just wanted to make that clear because Selena's direct experience is about sexual assault, but Upload is about sexual harassment. However, there's a lot of similarities in terms of being able to give direct testimony of your experience and how that is received within the culture. And so we're going to start with how virtual reality provides a new mechanism to achieve restorative justice, and then we'll dive into the nuances of UploadVR. So this interview with Selena happened yesterday, Thursday, September 21st, 2017, at KaleidoscopeVR's First Look VR Market that was happening in Los Angeles, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:07:30.696] Selena Pinnell: So my name is Selena Pinel and I'm one of the founders of Kaleidoscope. Testimony sort of came to me through the DevLab project that we hosted last year. I met Zohar Kiffer, the creator of the project, and she sort of presented these seeds for this idea of this project. I myself am a survivor of rape and I immediately was moved by it and really just wanted to do everything I could to participate and help it come to life.
[00:08:03.711] Kent Bye: So in this testimony project, it's kind of a blend of video testimony of women talking about their testimony of their direct experiences of sexual assault. But it's in within the context of a VR experience so that you are creating a container such that you can bear witness to these testimonies of these direct experiences and different chunks and if any moment you're overwhelmed you can look away and it'll stop and I think that in terms of being able to create a container and a context to be able to actually bear witness to testimony I think the use of virtual reality in that way to me was a really great innovation in terms of blending 2D in that way. And so, maybe you could talk about your own direct experience of what that was like to bear testimony, but then to also have people listen to that within the context of these VR experiences, and if you had any other outlet to talk about your experience in that way.
[00:09:03.388] Selena Pinnell: Sure. So I feel like my participation in testimony was really my most public sort of forum to which I've shared my story. And it was a really interesting experience. So after I met Zohar, I raced home and within actually a week, I had my sister and Renee throw up a black curtain and I recorded my testimony and actually happened to be one day after Trump was elected. So it was really heavy moment. And it wasn't lost on me sort of the weight of what that represented, which was that for me in that moment, I was witnessing a man get elected to be our president that to me is a rapist. So it was heavy and I felt like recording my piece that day felt like a form of fighting back, felt like standing up. So the interesting thing was I recorded my testimony and that ended up actually being the demo for a while. So I was actually the only one existing in that space for a moment. And the first time that we presented the project in a room full of 150 people, I was actually there. And so I actually witnessed a bunch of people experience my story in a room. And a lot of people knew me as work colleagues. and had no idea about this aspect of my life. So, you know, it was really powerful for me. I was definitely nervous, but I watched, you know, men cry. I watched women sort of take off the headset and come over and hug me, strangers. I also watched people avoid me in the room after they witnessed my testimony, kind of stay away from me and kind of didn't want to approach me at all. So it was a very mixed response, but very powerful. And ultimately, I didn't get to attend Tribeca myself, but I was actually texting Zohar the entire time, like literally hour by hour, and was really, you know, just holding her hand sort of in spirit. And I think for a lot of the other participants in the project, I know that it was really intense. That was the first time they themselves had sat in presence with their story. The thing that I find really powerful about this piece, and you mentioned the idea of you can look away if something feels too triggering, I think what Zohar created was something that almost emulates, and this is what I think is so powerful about VR, it emulates what it would feel like to actually sit with a person. So if you're actually in a conversation with someone one-on-one in real life and that you start to say something that might feel too heavy for them and you sense that human sort of discomfort, you might pause, right? And similarly, I think it's really beautiful that Zohar sort of integrated that so that if you're witnessing the project and listening to something I'm saying and it does feel too intense, you can take that pause that you need. And so the outcome for me is that when you actually complete your experience, you walk away from it feeling as though you actually spent time with me. You actually spent time with a survivor. You actually sat in the presence of someone and had that human connection. And I think it really, yeah, it really provides that closeness. And actually I've had quite a few people feel as though they know me on some level after they've witnessed that piece. And I think that's really beautiful.
[00:12:15.987] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that the thing that I see in a lot of ways in our culture in general with response to sexual assault is that in some ways it's almost like our criminal justice system is broken and the anomaly that proves that is sexual assault and the criminal justice system's inability to handle these issues. And I think statistically you could tell that story. But I think in testimony you get a direct experience of at least five people who go through them talking through their direct experience of what they went through and then a secondary trauma of having to either tell their story and it not being believed or disbelieved and then yet there's people being stuck with trying to sit with the truth that they know of their own validity of their direct experience but yet culturally it's denied and you know how do you have healing in that context and so It feels like in some ways the Testimony Project is this path towards this restorative justice such that you're able to speak the truth, become emotionally present with that truth, to speak it and tell your story and your narrative, and to have that heard and believed and witnessed in a way that is not sort of in the context of a criminal justice system that is requiring a certain amount of objective proof that may be impossible.
[00:13:36.208] Selena Pinnell: Well, you know, the project in and of itself is validating these survivor stories. Just the very participation of the project in and of itself is saying, we believe you. We want to hear your story. In this context, in this space, you're able to speak your truth and we're all, what I love about the environment is we're all floating around you. It's like this beautiful sort of container of survivors literally sort of hovering over one another together. which I think is really powerful. And I did want to share something with you I thought was really striking. I'm not going to name names, but it was a very powerful insight, I think, into what we're dealing with with society's disbelief of these stories. And that is that early on when we were developing the project, we shared an early rendition of it with a group of people. And in the piece, there's a woman who experienced gang rape. And when this particular person in this group was giving us feedback about it, she got very angry. And she said, you know, she this woman, she made me want to just I just wanted her to shut up. I just wanted her to be quiet. It just she was too intense. I just wanted her to be. And I and I just sat there quietly observing this. And I was just a I was kind of blown away that this woman was saying this out loud. It was a woman. And what I took away from that was, for me, I think, A, I think this person has probably experienced something in her life, and I think that she probably is repressed and angry about that repression, but in doing so is complicit in wanting to repress us. for finding our voices. And I think it's complex, but I think this is just yet another example of one of those layers that is at play here that continues to sort of silence all these stories and perpetuate the system, the unjust system that we're dealing with right now.
[00:15:35.740] Kent Bye: And I think within Silicon Valley, there's been a lot of talk about sexual harassment, which I want to make a differentiation between sexual harassment and sexual assault, because I think there is a boundary there that I think is clear. But there's similarities in the sense that both of these issues get back to proving something happened or did not happen. And you often get into this kind of he said, she said type of situation where in the absence of video evidence, you know, it's sometimes difficult to know exactly what happened. So to kind of switch back into sexual assault, I'm curious to hear your own direct experience in terms of like the options for criminal justice to be able to go through the legal system to change things. And then what is it about it that makes it so difficult for it to find justice through that mechanism?
[00:16:22.312] Selena Pinnell: Well, for me, something that's really interesting is that I actually just learned a new detail of my case from my father, which I'd never been told until actually I started doing this testimony project. So when I went down to the courthouse the day that they decided whether or not they were going to pursue my case after eight months of investigation and after eight months of working with a detective and sort of working to, you know, bring my rapist to justice, when I got in front of the woman, which was the DA of Los Angeles at the time, she, you know, looked at me and did the classic victim blaming. And it's interesting because I was a little, I'm 35 now, I was 27 then, but even I've learned so much since. And in the moment I was so caught off guard, she did the classic, well, you were on medication and you had wine that night. Didn't it say not to drink with your medication? You know, just, I didn't even realize it was happening in that moment. But she looked at me and basically said, we're not gonna pursue this. and I actually lunged to attack her like I flipped out and it was just that for eight months what sustained me was believing that justice was going to be served so I actually like snapped in that moment because that's all that was holding me together and I was taken out of the room and put into like this small room that looked like it was for children. There was toys everywhere and I just huddled in the corner, inconsolable, hysterical. And I remember the detective came in and just apologized profusely and was devastated essentially. But what I didn't know until recently was actually that my father went into the DA following me and just was like, please tell me I'm a psych, my dad's a psychologist. He's, I'm a psychologist. I know my daughter's been through this. Like, how can you do this? And she actually looked at him and I didn't know this until recently and said that I actually believe your daughter was raped, but I don't have the bandwidth to pursue this. There's other cases. There's not enough budget, whatever it was. She just said, I don't have, the manpower to see this through. There's other cases that are more important, essentially. So learning that recently really blew me away because now you see that you actually have a justice system where people within it actually know that these things are true. So it's not even a matter of did it happen or not. It did happen. They know it happened. And yet somehow the infrastructure is built so that it can't, you know, see it all the way to where it needs to go, which is justice.
[00:18:58.637] Kent Bye: So to me, I think the really fascinating thing about the testimony project is that in the absence of finding justice within the criminal justice system, I think there's a whole other long list of issues that come there in terms of like, objectively proving things and kind of a he said she said dynamic but that sometimes even if things get to the point or there's a settlement or something there's something that that feels like it's is justice really served is there restoration of balance into the entire community and has the truth been able to be really spoken and heard and I think that this is providing a mechanism for that. That's a new model of justice. And I think that there's challenges to that, which is that, you know, I think there's, on the one hand, people who want to feel protected by like false accusations, such that if something was a false accusation, or something that, you know, maybe there's more gray areas than just a black and white issue, then what is going to allow people some recourse. And so I guess for the testimony project, you have this as focusing it on your own direct experience, not necessarily trying to implicate people or name people necessarily, but have the validity of your own direct experience to have your own healing process. But yet, When we think about like, well, is that enough? Is there some sort of blend between these two systems? Or what can that type of model of restorative justice be able to teach the larger system that is in place for reasons to prevent certain false accusations from going through?
[00:20:28.923] Selena Pinnell: Right. Well, I think so, yeah, if we want to remove sort of the actual political infrastructure of the subject and just return to the sort of human justice. Right. So I think like what we're witnessing, I feel over the last couple of years is sort of this women are fed up, men are fed up and a conversation has begun. And I feel like within the context of this project and then within the context of sexual harassment, cases or actual sexual assault cases, you know, and then when you make, you know, settlements and everybody's hands are tied and they can't speak up, it's left to us as people. It's left to society as people to continue this conversation forward and start to elevate how we view these subjects. You know, let's take away the legal system and just talk about us as fellow citizens and brothers and sisters. Like we need to start to hold people accountable and have women and men's backs that have experienced these things and speak up about it. And rape and sexual assault is just so goddamn taboo and I just don't want it to be anymore. It is a thing that so many people experience. It's a thing that is rampant in societies all across the world and it's something that just needs to start being discussed openly without fear. And I think the more men and women are willing to go there and do that, I think it will start to actually have a literal shift on the way people behave in general.
[00:22:05.653] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think we've been seeing that within Silicon Valley in terms of as an entire tech community, there's been a number of instances of women who have come forward to speak their truth, to tell their story in an anecdotal way in terms of this is my direct experience of what I went through. And, you know, Saren Fowler from Uber wrote her letter and then within like three or four months, the CEO of Uber is resigning and they've lost about half of their value from like 60 billion to like 30 billion. And so there seems to be methods of people coming forward and saying, hey, you know, these investors that were, they were hitting on me, they were having bad boundaries in terms of separating their personal life and professional life in terms of people saying, I don't know whether or not to talk to you about your company or to hit on you right now. And so these, those types of stories were coming out and VCs were resigning over that. And yet, there was a specific case with UploadVR, with the sexual harassment case from Elizabeth Scott. She came forward with a number of allegations to UploadVR, saying that these are the different toxic work environment conditions that I've worked in. This is what was happening in the context of my work, that was a toxic work environment with men talking about sex all the time, objectifying women. to personal experiences of things that she felt like she was perhaps being explicitly discriminated against as a woman. And a whole long list of allegations that when it came out, I think that there was a couple of reactions within the VR community. It was one, Like, okay, they've had a direct experience of the upload. They look at these allegations and say, okay, this sounds plausible or reasonable. It was beyond my own direct experience of being within the context of their work environment to see these things unfold. And so I think there was also a level of people like taking a step back and saying, okay, well, there's got to be at least some level of evidence for lawyers to take this on. And then it's going to go to court and it'll be resolved. And I think Upload's reaction to it was, All of these allegations are without merit. Blanket denial and just say this is not true. So it created at that moment a split within the community in terms of like a fracture. Do you believe that this was salacious claims that were made under the auspices of some sort of money grab? Or is this something that actually happened and that they're in complete denial about? And what happened after that was that there wasn't a lot of news coverage or anything to try to mediate that truth. And so it settles out of court. Upload basically paid and got their justice. And as a result of the settlement, no one can really actually talk about what happened. And so we as a community are left with this situation. It's like a dilemma. Do we believe these original allegations that there was some merit and there's enough people that were either there first-hand or second-hand for me that I've looked into that say, yes, there's absolutely some merit to a number of these allegations. I'm not willing to say all of them were true because I know that there's enough gray area there to say that some of this could be due to incompetence or other things that are just like moving fast and breaking things and just having poor communication styles. There's all sorts of other nuances to that. But that on the whole, there is enough truth to this situation, but since it's settled, nobody can talk about it, and we're left with this sort of fracture to what is the recourse for the community to deal with a situation where there's potential abusers who may be unaware or in denial about what they did, or unconscious about what they did.
[00:25:38.261] Selena Pinnell: We're unwilling to own what they did, right? Unwilling to really own it and step up and acknowledge it publicly, which is what Elizabeth and any other person that experienced things at Upload deserves. If they're willing to come out, I think I've read something along the lines of saying, you know, we've learned so much from this experience. Well, what did you learn? Because what did you do? Like, I need to hear that, you know what I mean? And yeah, I think that the approach that they took, unfortunately, has left the community reeling. I mean, it's really unfortunate. It's unfortunate that we don't that they don't feel the courage to actually stand up and own what may or may not have happened, and to acknowledge the person's experience. Because for me, yes, there's a lot of gray areas. You can look into all those details. But if Elizabeth's experience was that she felt unsafe or uncomfortable, or that she was being treated unfairly. That is valid. Period. Like that is not up for debate. Period. Right. And so when somebody in life, I mean, we don't always go into any situation saying I want to intentionally hurt this person, but if someone says to me, Selena, you hurt my feelings, I'm not going to say, no, I didn't. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. No, I'm going to say, well, please share with me how I hurt your feelings. Please. express to me what I did so that I can acknowledge it and own it and grow from it and I'm not just gonna blatantly just throw up my hands and say no, right? And so, you know, that's just, you know, bringing it, kind of stripping it down to what I think the core is, which is that A, I have tremendous respect for Elizabeth for coming forward and having the courage to speak up. I admire her greatly. And I personally don't feel that because of the way things were handled, I personally don't feel that I can support Upload moving forward. That's just where I stand. And that's just because of the way things fell. I mean, it's unfortunate. I don't feel that they owned what they did in any shape or form. And furthermore, I think they did something greater of more harm, which is actually totally say this person's experience was without merit. I mean, that, that phrase in and of itself just blows me away. And I think it's, it can destroy a person. And in my, just to bring it back to my experience, when I was told that my rape was not worthy of being persecuted, It made me feel like my body wasn't worthy of being protected. So the message it sends the person inside, it shatters you. I mean, you're not worthy of being in the workplace and feeling safe. You're not worthy of being in the workplace and being paid fairly. it literally will rip you inside. And so when he said that statement, those things are without merit, to me that is criminal to say to anyone who's had the courage to speak up and say I'm hurt or these people did these things.
[00:28:34.737] Kent Bye: Well, probably about four or five weeks ago, I got an email with a New York Times reporter who was looking into this case of Upload. And he was looking at it because there is a large number of different sexual harassment issues that have been coming up within Silicon Valley that are kind of pointing towards this larger threat of sexism within the tech industry. And I ended up talking to the reporter for about 90 minutes on our initial conversation. And one of the things that came out of those initial conversations was there was people that were saying something that, you know, relative to the upload allegations, there was people that were saying, like, I don't know whether or not to hit on you or to talk about your company. And that phrase was something that was then causing somebody to actually resign and then basically get run out of their career. And yet he was looking at these allegations from Upload and kind of comparing that and being like, wow, these are a lot more salacious and a lot worse, but yet this is sort of like an unresolved issue. He said once it got into the legal system, it became a different story than had it been just an allegation that was being made. If it would have been an open allegation, then there wouldn't have been the weight of the financial and legal liability such that anything that they say on the record is going to be potentially used against them in the court of law. And so there's a certain degree of institutionalized sexism that happens within our legal system such that there would be lawyers who are being paid to advise their clients to completely deny all of these allegations without merit. and a PR strategy of that. So there's two dimensions. There's the PR strategy that you say something such that this is not hanging and your silence is basically a sign of being complicit. There's another strategy. So you know what? We're going to settle this in court and the court will decide. That's another approach. And then the other approach to just completely deny the direct experience and to not say anything that's going to be used against you in a financial or legal context. So I feel like once the upload case had gone to the criminal justice system, it sort of entered into this other realm where the truth had a different weight. But not only that, it had a whole layer of lawyers who have navigated this before and have methods of resolving these legal issues without any larger consideration for the community and what would be justice for the entire community. It now becomes an instance between these two individuals But yet the community is kind of left with, in the absence of it going to court and getting any sort of clear answers, I think a lot of people were in this state of suspended judgment, of like, we'll let the courts decide. But without the courts letting decide it, now we're left to kind of like navigate this ourselves and to try to figure out sort of in a peer driven back channel,
[00:31:27.143] Selena Pinnell: Gossip campaign to be able to like ask what people have heard and so there's no real clear mechanism for that truth to be explained now that the legal system has Decided to bury the truth Absolutely, why I agree with everything you just said and I I think like and I just want to go on record saying that like you know with the dudes from upload my thought is this if you're willing to own verbally what you've done and Express that to the community I am fully willing to forgive you, actually. I am not trying to crucify. I believe that people that commit sexual harassment are human beings, and I believe that if they are willing to own what they did and get therapy, and apologize and really just stand up with that, I'm willing to move beyond that with them. I'm not out to just say you're an evil person by any means. So what I feel has now been robbed of the community is sort of that we are left to sadly pick sides. And I think it has had a splintering effect, which I find really sad. In participating in a thread on a women's group on Facebook, I witnessed that. I saw a direct line being drawn in the sand, and women and men both fell on either side of that equation. And what's unfortunate, especially in VR, since it's such an emerging new technology in such a tight, small community, those sort of splinterings and separations I feel like could ultimately do some damage. That being said, I also kind of like knowing where people stand. It's also a little revealing and refreshing to see like, OK, well, if you support that and this was sufficient for you the way it was handled. maybe I don't want to work with you, you know, like maybe that's good that I know that about you, you know, and we're different, you know, and so although it has had a splintering effect, maybe what we're also left with is kind of a revealing sort of mechanism for having a little bit more truth about who people are, where people stand, and how we move forward with that.
[00:33:31.504] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think the, you know, this is an issue that on the surface is black and white, but the more that I've personally looked into it, there's so many shades of gray that are difficult for me to really go into because of so many people have shared different things and confidence. And I think one of those shades of gray is that it is entirely possible that this settlement agreement is such that any allegations were made is impossible to ever talk about from a legal perspective. But my perspective is that at what point was that decision made to bury the truth? And how much agency was there? And if there was a certain amount of completely unconscious sexism, which is a level of behavior that you can't even observe and see and name, then there is entirely possible for someone to do something that is transgressing somebody's boundary or acting inappropriately within a professional context and they don't even necessarily are able to identify it and name that. And I think there's that level of unconscious behavior that I think is the open question of like how much of these things are either happening at a level of awareness that you're not even aware of that there's a certain amount of denial or is it explicit denial or is it like because of the legal system that you are not talking about it because the truth can't be spoken across that full spectrum then we don't know whether it's on the extreme of somebody who is a potential abuser that is in denial and unconscious of it or somebody who has actually learned a lesson but they are legally prohibited from actually talking about it.
[00:35:02.660] Selena Pinnell: Well, I think when you bring up all the women that have come forward in Silicon Valley, for instance, and if we've all watched or choose to watch a movie from the 1980s and you look at the work environments there, sexism in the workplace was an absolutely accepted thing for generations. And as we've evolved, we're obviously finally waking up to the fact of how criminal that is and women are speaking out. So do I think that there is a pervasive unconscious sexism that exists in the workforce? Absolutely. Do I think men are conscious of it? Absolutely not. Because I feel like they've been told it's okay to act that way. So it's just ingrained in their nature. It's ingrained in just their unconscious behavior. And as women say no, they kind of are shocked out of something. And I think often the knee-jerk response is, I didn't mean to do that, or I didn't do that, because maybe they're not terrible people. I think there's a huge gray area there that I fully think exists. But I think what's important is that we continue to support these women coming forward and that we continue also to support the conversation with men. I'm a huge proponent of that. I want men to start speaking up about this. I want other men to talk to men about this subject. because I think it's actually a huge behavioral shift that needs to occur that maybe from birth and beyond, it's just bad behavior. They have not been told to act in any other way. So what they may appear to be as natural behavior is actually offensive and inappropriate. And finally we're sort of drawing that line and bringing that to light, really, and hopefully shifting things as a whole. And my hope is that by us doing this in this generation, that younger generations essentially will completely, from the ground up, shift their behavior entirely, and that we won't even have to have this discussion in 20 years.
[00:36:57.565] Kent Bye: Yeah, and from my own personal journey in this particular story, you know, I am a journalist who does a podcast with people talking on the record, and when this story broke, I immediately gave support on social media to Elizabeth because I did believe that there was merit to these allegations. Based upon what she was saying was not so far beyond my own experience of the kind of party culture of Upload and the possibility of blurring the line between when the partying stopped, because they were an events company that literally threw parties, and how much of that party culture kind of seeped into the day-to-day workplace. And for me, there was a certain amount of professionally in terms of covering this story as a journalist that I thought, well, you know, I wasn't there. Anybody that was there, they said these allegations were without merit. So anybody that was there, they told all of their employees to not speak about this on the record. It was like a directive that was given to everybody that this was going to be silenced. And for me, I was like, well, how can I really tap into this issue without doing things on the record. But yet, at the same time, every single event I went to after that, the major back-channel gossip conversation is what is happening at Upload. And so, just by the nature of the truth being suppressed on the surface, that doesn't mean that it's gonna not be expressed. It's gonna be expressed through the back-channels and the gossip. And so, I was in the community hearing all these different stories, and I had enough discussions with people who either had first or second hand knowledge for me to come to a personal belief that there is merit to those allegations. But yet, as a journalist, I didn't know how to talk about it or to cover that because anybody that was saying that was off the record. So then I get a phone call from the New York Times, and he's basically asking me, does this have merit? And I'm like, yeah, there's definitely you should check into it. But at the same time, there was a part of me that was telling him, you know, you're not going to be able to like cover the story because I don't think anybody's going to really want to talk about it based upon what I knew about the influence of the dynamic of upload being a major player, but yet, because they're a connecting node, it's going to be difficult for people to kind of speak out against it. And that's pretty much what's continued to happen. It's been very few people that have been willing to kind of go on the record and talk about this. But at the end of the conversation, he was convincing me like, but no, it's better for the truth to come out and the community would be better for the truth to come out. And so I kind of, I did a flip in that moment from that conversation where it's like, oh, actually there is something that I might be able to do. Maybe it's, you know, behind the scenes, but there's things that I can do to maybe kind of look into this issue a little bit more. And so as I've been looking into it, I've sort of been navigating these grey areas, but yet it's still very difficult to talk about. But from my own direct experience, there's a part of my own unconscious sexism, or casual sexism, that I was willing to turn my head the other way and not do everything that I could to be able to cover the story. And now that it's settled, it's sort of in that situation where the truth has been buried and it's sort of in this nebulous state of like, I don't know if the people that were even actually there could actually talk about it, but just from my own perspective of noticing my own levels of unconsciousness, becoming aware of that unconscious and the shame that can be associated with that, because there's behaviors that you can do that if you're a free will agent and you're knowing of that, then you can write it off as a behavior. But if it's something that's unconscious that somehow becomes a part of your core being that you're not fully aware of or even have agency around, there's a level of depth of shame that comes with being able to acknowledge that a part of my own behavior is where it was below my conscious awareness. So yeah, I feel like there's a dimension there to really navigate these levels of unconscious behaviors. There's shame, but also safe containers such that without the threat of legal action or financial liability to really have an honest conversation about that.
[00:41:05.041] Selena Pinnell: conversation about it. And absolutely. And what I sort of want to wrap this conversation around is this, and this is so important to me, the very questioning of whether or not Elizabeth went through what she went through, in and of itself, is so damaging to her as a human being. And I just want to bring it to a human level. The fact that we as a society are judging and weighing, did this happen? Did this not happen? I cannot express more to men and women that are listening to this conversation about how incredibly hurtful and crushing that is to endure as a person. It's as if you got, and I often say this, it's as if you got shot and you're bleeding and we're all standing there looking at your bleeding arm going, did it actually happen or not? And you're in pain. So what I want to say is this, we as a community need to support these women and men that come forward and are willing to speak up about this issue. And we need to support them without questioning whether or not it's true. Because in my experience and from what I've learned, men and women do not lie about this stuff. They don't. We know what society does to people like us that have the courage to speak out. We know that we're going to be judged. We know that we're going to be questioned. And so if we've had the guts to weigh all of that weight and choose to speak out despite all that, You better believe we're telling the truth. And that's what I want people to walk away from this conversation knowing. I believe these people wholeheartedly. I don't need to know the facts. I don't need to go and research and do all that. I believe you, period. If you have the guts to speak up, I believe you, period. That's how I feel.
[00:42:53.529] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that as a society, this is a deeper question in terms of like navigating how to have protections for people if they do make salacious claims. And I'm talking generally across all matters of where money or finances are kind of in terms of serving justice. And I think that is an assumption where I'm not sure if that's an actual thing of like feeling like in domains of interpersonal relationships and harassment that you know getting a payoff is necessarily going to feel like justice has been served and that there's a balance I think that as a society we're trying to figure out like the criminal justice system seems to be broken when it is handling both sexual assault and sexual harassment. It's got its merits for handling other issues but yet there's this deeper thread of restorative justice like projects like testimony and having the ability to listen to women's stories. And I think that's the thing that I think is the challenge going forward, is to have a balance between, okay, where do you use your left-brain objective mind of reductionism to be able to see the facts because, you know, we want to protect people from salacious allegations, but at the same time, We want to have an open heart to be able to listen to someone's direct experience and to honor the validity of the direct experience, even if the cause of things may be due to incompetence or other things. And so I think that's the thing of like trying to figure out how to have that balance.
[00:44:16.147] Selena Pinnell: Absolutely. And I appreciate you giving me this opportunity to have this conversation with you, Ken. Thank you.
[00:44:21.489] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:44:23.070] Selena Pinnell: Cheers.
[00:44:24.306] Kent Bye: So that was Celina Penel. She's the co-founder of KaleidoscopeVR and a producer and participant within the TestimonyVR project. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, I just want to take a step back and really honor and thank Selena for doing this interview. She was actually working at First Look and so near the end of the interview she actually gets pulled away to go kind of attend to her various duties there. You know, her courage to be able to not only share her experience but to do it in a way of exploring this new virtual reality medium and to create this context under which she could share her direct experience and have people feel like they were having a one-to-one conversation with her and just the impact of what that was able to do within her own life and her own healing journey for her to be able to just speak the truth when justice wasn't able to be found through the criminal justice system and for people to hear it and to understand it and to know that this is something that she went through. And I think that this is like a matter of the heart and a matter of really deeply listening to people and having this sense of empathy with people. And I think this is an issue that I personally struggle with in terms of when I'm listening, am I listening with my heart into the story and in a way that is going to really reflect someone's direct experience? Or am I listening to the information and am I suddenly contradicting facts and trying to differentiate between what is true and not true? And these are tricky topics to really talk about because it really changes depending on the context under which you can talk about these things. On one hand, as soon as Elizabeth Scott filed her lawsuit, it went into a legal context, which gave it a level of legitimacy that allowed other news organizations to start to report on it. The challenge, though, is that in order to have a safe container, in order to really deeply talk about some of these underlying issues, it kind of has to operate outside of that legal framework so that people could really have this honest and free discussion to be able to look at some of these deeper behaviors. But from what it sounds like from the allegations from the lawsuit is that Elizabeth had tried to do that in terms of reporting these different things and that it wasn't really getting through and wasn't changing. In fact, they retaliated against her and fired her without much of a due process in terms of the normal procedures that you do in terms of like, hey, like, here's a warning, like, you better improve. And there's like, there's a lack of general HR practices in place. But at the end of the day, it was a huge communication breakdown, where they just fired her without much of an explanation. And so she just felt spurned to then take the recourse that she felt was justified to be able to then document as much as she could and get these lawyers to be able to file this lawsuit. The challenge, I think, is that as a community, we're kind of left with trying to mediate what the truth is. And as far as my understanding, according to the terms of the settlement, there is never going to have the opportunity to be able to mediate the truth on any of these different claims. That is gone. That is swept underneath the rug. And to me, that is what is the most baffling, because at some point, it was either the lawyers or a public relations decision, or maybe it was just a pure sense of denial and unconscious awareness and a self-preservation of Wilmason and Taylor Freeman to make the decisions to, at some point, decide that nobody could ever talk about this. It just feels like justice has not been served and like the community is left reeling of like, are we supposed to like just suddenly be in the bubble of denial that this never even happened and just kind of move on? which was kind of the impression that you got from reading the original articles and TechCrunch back in September 6th. And then the New York Times article came out and then they issued a more detailed statement, but was clearly vetted, clearly kind of sanitized of any authenticity. It was written, first of all. And so there was no embodied description of what had happened. This is what went wrong and this is what we learned about it. It was sort of like, it just gets this feeling of like it's all papered over and that truth has been buried. And I'm left with this complete lack of trust in the leadership of Will Mason and Taylor Freeman to be able to even trust anything they say, because I don't know if they're completely unconscious as to, like, everything that happened here within the allegations of the lawsuit, that they just think that that was okay, or that they don't believe that it happened, or they really do believe that all those allegations are entirely without merit. I like to hope that they think that they made a mistake and that they were just in this place of panic and fear and taking advice from all these different people who are telling them, but this is what you do. This is how you handle it. But that is just an echo of this larger sexist context under which that, that would even be a viable option to be able to like, just deny the direct experience of somebody who went through all this. So I think it's a challenge as we move forward because like in this instance, I can see how when someone is sharing their direct experience, you almost have to be able to flip between these two realms of just really listening and empathizing and hearing it and being able to really tune into the emotion of that story. And because it's surrounded in this context of information and facts, and sometimes those facts are directly implicating the people who are listening to it. And if it's a level of unconscious awareness of behaviors that they can't even see, then there's this sort of defensive mechanism to either fight or debate it. And I've been in this process of trying to unpack and discover my own degrees of unconscious awareness and behaviors. And once you find something that has been there, and you never noticed it, and you're like, oh wow, this is like a thing that I do, then there is this reckoning of like, how do you get to the place of forgiveness and redemption if you can't even fully articulate what you did wrong? And I think this is the underlying issue here. There's been no articulation of the truth from Willard Taylor, and in the absence of the articulation of the truth, there's no ability for us to really judge whether or not they've been able to learn and grow from this experience. And they said in their second issue, like, pay attention to our actions, not what we say. And from what I'm seeing from behind the scenes of some of the actions they're taking, it's not engendering any trust in me. So I believe that there's a path towards like forgiveness and redemption with these new models of restorative justice. And I think the testimony project is like a living embodiment of what is even possible. And just to hear Selena talk about her experience with this whole project and what it's done for her and the potential for this to really expand out and to create a certain context for direct testimony to be shared. That to me is just like revolutionary. Now how to integrate that into having people be held accountable? That is like the biggest open question because right now the way that's being done is through this peer-driven community distribution of hearsay and back channels and there's no independent way to arbitrate the facts of the details of the truth and so it's sort of in this weird nebulous place where you kind of have to figure out where you sit, which side you sit on. Do you believe that you should listen to the direct experience of women and believe that if they're working in a hostile work environment that you should just full stop believe it and leave it at that? and say okay we need to listen to this and make some real changes or do you believe that it was okay to just completely deny that move on from it or you know you want to kind of live in this suspended state of judgment where you don't have to decide and you just kind of ignore it which is a choice within itself is to not make a choice So at the end of the day, she's not interested in sort of mediating all those facts, but you have to just really listen to that direct experience and open your heart to be able to take it in. And as we move forward, I think that's the challenge is to really figure out how to do that both in your interpersonal relationships with whoever your partner is. Cause this is a, this is the thing that happens all the time with, with relationships of being able to really listen to each other and not get into a dynamic where you feel like you're being attacked or blamed and you have to, sort of turn it into an intellectual debate about the objective facts of what happened rather than trying to really listen and reflect and empathize. This is a communication skill that I think takes a lot of skill and practice to really perfect, and I'm on that journey trying to do that within my own interpersonal relationships. And so as I move forward from this upload case, I'm just trying to look inward for things that I can do. What can I do to be able to uncover and unmask all my own dimensions of unconscious actions and behaviors when it comes to race or gender or age or any sort of unconscious ways that I'm behaving and interacting in the world that I'm not aware of and I'm just trying to maintain for me personally in that state of humility to really deeply listen to people like Selena who is sharing her experience and when I hear her experience it's just like rips through me and I just feel the truth of it. I just feel how people go through experiences, but yet sometimes when they're on these taboo topics, they just are faced with this denial and disbelief of things that happened. So, wow, that's all that I have for today. Um, this has been a crazy story for me to try to wrap my hand around and um, I have spent a lot of time on this, just talking to the community and spending a lot of emotional labor trying to just figure out and mediate my own conclusion of what the truth is in this particular case. It's hard for me to transfer my direct experience of all these confidential and private conversations that are interactive and off the record to be able to try to give you a story of this is what my conclusion of what the truth is and so again it's like a it's a hard thing to do within the context of a podcast I'm really trying to figure out how to do that but I would not be able to do this and I wouldn't be able to do that type of investment of time and energy and I wouldn't be able to have the freedom to feel like I could go on the record and to cover a topic like this and be quoted in BuzzFeed or the New York Times or to do my own social media post or to do this podcast without the support of my Patreon supporters. This is a podcast that is supported entirely by listeners And if you feel called to donate to this podcast so I can continue to do this type of coverage and continue to explore these new models of truth and justice and journalism and community healing and the potentials of virtual reality, then I really encourage you to consider becoming a member of my Patreon. So you can donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.