Vanity Fair tries to link Arrington rape accusation to Silicon Valley's lack of women in tech

Summary: It claims that the scandal represents "the dark side of the Internet Age"

Maximillian Potter’s “Letter from Silicon Valley” in the December issue of Vanity Fair examines the career of Mike Arrington, founder of the news site TechCrunch, “and accusations that he raped an ex-girlfriend and abused two other women.”

There’s not much new information about the case even though Mr. Potter door-steps the apartment of Arrington's accuser, Jenn Allen, and her parents’ San Francisco home.

The long article tries desperately — and bizarrely — to link the rape accusation to the lack of women in Silicon Valley startups, and that this case demonstrates “the dark side of the Information Age.”

He completely fails to prove that there is a wider meaning for the rape accusation but that doesn’t deter him from claiming that there is something very wrong with Silicon Valley and its “shiny new startups.”

But there is most certainly not a larger theme here beyond the very specific legal case that Mike Arrington is involved in, and the whole affair has absolutely no connection with the lack of women in tech, or the “Information Age.” It's extremely rare to hear of such a case in Silicon Valley.  

The author tries to portray Jenn Allen as a woman scorned. And he implies that Nick Denton, founder of New York based Gawker Media has some kind of vendetta against Arrington, which has absolutely nothing to do with the case at all.  

In a baffling concluding paragraph he writes:

Regardless of the absolute truth of what Arrington did or did not do to Jenn Allen, the whole affair makes this much clear: while the Valley is busy incubating a lot of shiny new start-ups and promising innovations and social networks that generate all kinds of value propositions and tremendous revenue possibilities, behind the scenes of that eco-system there’s another part of the culture, where someone is always trying to screw somebody over, where it’s crunch or be crunched. The big question the luminaries of the Valley might want to ask themselves is the question Arrington himself posed that day at Berkeley: Does the Valley want to solve the problem, or does it want to pick on Mike?

“Regardless of the absolute truth of what Arrington did or did not do to Jenn Allen…” Wow. He just threw away the core of the entire article to deliver a stern warning about Silicon Valley where “someone is always trying to screw somebody over.”

Rape is not the same as a soured business deal — it's a much bigger deal. And it’s not about Silicon Valley “picking on Mike.” He picked this one himself. 

Tom Foremski reports on the business and culture of Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology and media.