One woman complained. USCF assigned her an escort. More women complained. USCF banned the guy.
This sounds completely reasonable, unless the first woman provided proof, you can't just ban someone because of an allegation. But they took steps to ensure her safety at future events.
What does Lichess want here? They say it's insufficient, but they never really say what should have been done.
Edit: to clarify, I'm talking about the incident with Timur
They seem to want confidence that US Chess and STLCC leadership are able to handle these complaints appropriately going forward: a change of leadership would be one way. Per the intro, they're looking for scrutiny and accountability of the handling: with that the current leadership might be able to regain confidence, I guess.
Your characterisation ignores the other case, of course, but on the one you're referring to note that there were two complaints prior to the multiple ones and the ban was a secret, partial ban.
It's very likely there would be no proof, but a competent investigation can talk to those involved and come to a conclusion. Patterns of behavior can be established over time. And there may have been say CCTV that an investigation could obtain that the woman herself couldn't immediately provide.
Both of the offenders here have multiple allegations against them -- escorting one woman doesn't protect other women (and presumably ends at the edge of the venue), and escorting all women isn't a scalable solution.
Timely, competent investigations of allegations and the removal of predators is the only way. But orgs are learning this stuff, and are staffed and run by humans. Where mistakes are made they should be owned up to.
For women to be able to enjoy chess without fear of assault, and for chess clubs to raise the bar on protecting the physical integrity of their members.
> they never really say what should have been done
It’s for the individual club to decide, but I think the answer is uncontroversial and obvious: find out if their member assaulted another member and kick them out of the club permanently.
They want each organization to publicly state (“acknowledge”) that they acted and communicated inappropriately in the past regarding these events. In their exact words from the post:
> However, in our opinion, both US Chess and STLCC have failed to demonstrate an important aspect of accountability – a willingness to acknowledge and address past shortcomings. We do not think that reconciliation will be possible without this acknowledgement.
Not happening. The sad fact is, people and organizations rarely admit to wrongdoing. You usually only see it happen in court and even then they may deny it even when judged to have done wrong.
Lichess wants women and girls to feel safe. When women and girls feel safe, Lichess can once again endorse USCF. It's not lichess/Thibault's job to fix USCF.
You absolutely can ban someone because of an allegation. It's a chess club. The worst punishment they can levy is banishment. That doesn't need the kind of "beyond reasonable doubt" certainty that a court throwing you in prison needs.
If this kind of ban was happening all over the place for similar reasons I’d argue that you have a point. After digging a bit, however, I wasn’t able to find many males banned for harassment or assault on another member. So it seems you’re protesting on the basis of an unlikely hypothetical scenario.
What are you talking about? There are like... a thousand things that could have done better here, and which were still being done long after the complaints.
Ban the people. Completely totally remove the people who are assaulting underage girls from any event and any association. Don't "provide an escort", wtf. Ban them.
Yes, it's shocking the lack of empathy towards the victims being shown by the organization and the lack of long term prevention for this kind of behavior.
There's much talk in media and on social media about accusations of pedophilia, but when there are multiple real predators being outed there is a surprising amount of people who come out to support treating them with white gloves. The fact it's taking lichess to disassociate with these organizations to attract attention to their lack of urgency and care for victims is deplorable.
Yep. Why should underage girls — or of-age women, or men, or anyone — have to be escorted around to keep them safe? The victims here aren’t wanting to walk around Mogadishu at night. They’re at a chess tournament.
Yeah I was typing up a response the inherent disconnect between taking the allegations seriously enough to provide an escort while still allowing the abuser free to assault other women is galling.
We know from painful experience that some accusations are baseless. there are people who will allege harm just to get rid of an opponent they do not want to play against. As such it is really hard to figure out what of the thousands of things they can do are really the right thing to do.
"Some accusations have at some point been baseless" is utterly irrelevant. Are these accusations baseless? Multiple ones, from multiple people, about the same person, over years? No, they're not. Done. End of story.
That would be like arguing: some logical statements are false, therefore the truth of logical statements is unknowable. Lol, no, it just depends on the statement.
(Nowhere in this article, by the way, did anyone allege harm to "get rid of an opponent they do not want to play against".)
The article didn't allege that. Probably that wasn't the intent for any case. However such things happen and so we must always be careful about allocations.
Yeah, too hard to figure out what the problem is here – might be all these women lying to ruin his life. Better do nothing about it until we're sure.
> 2011
> A woman alleges that she was sexually assaulted by Alejandro Ramirez at a chess camp in 2011, when she was 15 years old. (WSJ)
> Jennifer Shahade alleges that she was assaulted by Ramirez for the first time in 2011. (Lichess)
> 2014
> Jennifer Shahade alleges that Ramirez assaulted her for a second time in 2014.
> Claire Grothe alleges that in 2014 she was assaulted by Ramirez at a reception organized by STLCC, and that the incident (and Ramirez’s response to it) led to her leaving her job at the World Chess Hall of Fame later that year. (WSJ)
> 2015
> A woman who was underage at the time alleges that Ramirez encouraged her to drink alcohol, attempted to have sex with her, and initiated oral sex without her consent. (WSJ)
> 2016
> A woman alleges that in 2016, when she was underage, she was warned by STLCC employees to not allow herself to be alone with Ramirez. (WSJ)
> 2017
> A young player’s mother says that in 2017 she alerted top US Chess officials to Ramirez’s behavior, and overheard STLCC staff make jokes about his interest in young women. (WSJ)
> 2019
> A woman alleges that in 2019 she was sexually assaulted by Timur Gareyev while walking to her car from a hotel where a US Chess sanctioned tournament is taking place (in which Gareyev was playing). She submitted a complaint to US Chess shortly afterwards. The US Chess ethics committee declined to accept jurisdiction of the matter, as the alleged incident had occurred outside the hotel, and therefore (in the committee’s view) it could not be “directly connected” to the chess tournament. No action was taken against Gareyev. (Lichess)
> Another woman alleges that at a different US Chess sponsored tournament in 2019, Gareyev grabbed her and kissed her against her will. (Lichess)
> 2021
> In January 2021, Jennifer Shahade informed STLCC and US Chess of a case involving an alleged victim (of Ramirez) who said she was 15 years old at the time of the first alleged incident. She urged US Chess and STLCC to act against Ramirez. (Lichess)
You know those "code of conduct" pages you see a conferences, where you sigh and think this is obvious. Lamentably this is why you have them and you enforce them. If things get bad, people don't want to associate with your group.
One woman complained. USCF assigned her an escort. More women complained. USCF banned the guy.
This sounds completely reasonable, unless the first woman provided proof, you can't just ban someone because of an allegation. But they took steps to ensure her safety at future events.
What does Lichess want here? They say it's insufficient, but they never really say what should have been done.
Edit: to clarify, I'm talking about the incident with Timur