I found that CHE article on this case so unsettling. The only thing I can say that's sympathetic to del Valle is that it's true that the 3rd party Twitter/X account by "David C. Porter" mentioned in the article is really weird and unsettling when you read back in its timeline and I guess I could see how someone who was in a paranoid frame of mind could let it seep into their brain. But all the conduct she acknowledges is really indefensible.
There are people who've actually stalked (multiple) individuals in various ways over the years--there was a person who hassled some of the earliest academic bloggers who then hung around for more than a decade afterwards and would do some pretty creepy stuff in terms of tracking their activities and lives, and that person almost certainly seems to have been an academic or former academic who was concealing his/her identity. So a reporter or investigator has to at least consider that someone who says they're being tracked/stalked/harassed might be right. But the things she's done are are a pretty hard indicator that it's a different kind of story.
I found that CHE article on this case so unsettling. The only thing I can say that's sympathetic to del Valle is that it's true that the 3rd party Twitter/X account by "David C. Porter" mentioned in the article is really weird and unsettling when you read back in its timeline and I guess I could see how someone who was in a paranoid frame of mind could let it seep into their brain. But all the conduct she acknowledges is really indefensible.
Yeah, and I thought the CHE article really bent over backwards to give her the benefit of the doubt about the various things she was claiming.
There are people who've actually stalked (multiple) individuals in various ways over the years--there was a person who hassled some of the earliest academic bloggers who then hung around for more than a decade afterwards and would do some pretty creepy stuff in terms of tracking their activities and lives, and that person almost certainly seems to have been an academic or former academic who was concealing his/her identity. So a reporter or investigator has to at least consider that someone who says they're being tracked/stalked/harassed might be right. But the things she's done are are a pretty hard indicator that it's a different kind of story.