The nagging issue for me is the extremely unusual eloquence of the victim. I wanted to believe this was just another online echo-chamber shit-show until I read her blog posts and found EJ to be a level-headed, articulate and eminently reasonable person.
EJ says that AirBnB didn't offer to help and stopped communicating with her after the 25th of June. That's in direct conflict with pg's report to TechCrunch.
It's one thing for AirBnB to say "hey, buyer beware – you know the risks". (In fact, that's a perfectly valid response, albeit not a great business move.) But it's an entirely different thing to dispute the victim's story.
Now we're in a situation where someone is not telling the truth. On one side, you have a group of people with a lot of money and time invested into a business. On the other side, you have an extremely sympathetic victim of a crime. And somewhere in the middle is the fact that these kinds of unfortunate eventualities should have been obvious to both AirBnB and to their users.
EJ says that AirBnB didn't offer to help and stopped communicating with her after the 25th of June. That's in direct conflict with pg's report to TechCrunch.
I don't think that's factually correct. I believe she says communication stopped after the 30th of June.
pg says this, "I’ve just learned more about this situation, and it turns out Airbnb has been offering to fix it, from the very beginning. From the beginning they offered to pay to get her a new place and new stuff, and do whatever else she wanted."
I suspect they may have said that on June 30th. And then they went dark. It seems no one at AirBnB has actually said they made contact with EJ during the month of July at all, until the night before her second blog post on this incident.
To me it sounds like it may not have been malicious on AirBnBs part, but rather a dropped ball. Someone probably had tons of other work on their plate and didn't follow-up with her. After a week forget about it. Until her first blog entry went up...
EJ neither said communication stopped after the 25th, nor stopped after the 30th. She said the communication was very frequent and emotionally reassuring before the 30th. After the 30th – about when she wrote her 1st blog post – it was more 'occasional' with a cofounder.
Lots of people (including the parent and grandparent post here) have been treating this as a 'cutoff'. That's how EJ felt. That feeling comes across in how she chose to describe everything, but the real message she's sending is that she stopped liking the communication after June 30th, not that it ended.
My theory is that's because some initially empathetic support people were replaced with a 'just-the-facts' cofounder. Let's say he's trying to help by concentrating on the tangibles – do you have a place to stay? ok. is the perp caught? ok. will you call if you need anything? ok. is there any way we can twist this ending for you so you wrap things up on your blog more positively so people know AirBnb helped? er...
That style of communication could rub a still-stressed victim the wrong way. And a request like the last one could have been intended as a way of asking, "how do we help you so much that you can balance the fear and anger of your June 29th post with something better in an update?"... but instead be misinterpreted as untoward pressure.
That's just a theory, but it's a better theory than the one that AirBnb are jerks, or the false idea (based on various misreadings of EJ) that no offer of financial support was made and no communication happened for weeks. EJ's own posts refute those ideas.
When dealing with contentious, emotionally-charged situations, give everyone involved the benefit of the doubt.
I really don't believe it would be possible to "drop the ball" on something like this. They knew from the start this could destroy their business, they are working with the police, they won't just "forget" the victim.
Now, if they tried to wash their hands by handing it over to their lawyer to "solve", that might be different, but still reprehensible.
I think the big issue is whether or not AirBNB offered assistance or not and if they did if it was unconditional.
If it turns out they attached a bunch of conditions to their offer (for instance: you have to remove your blog posts or you have to write something positive) then they might as well not have made these 'offers'.
An offer of help should be unconditional. And from EJs point of view being muzzled would obviously be unacceptable.
That's pure speculation on my part, but it is one interpretation that would be consistent with what everybody has said so far with nobody having told a falsehood.
EJ says that AirBnB didn't offer to help and stopped communicating with her after the 25th of June. That's in direct conflict with pg's report to TechCrunch.
It's one thing for AirBnB to say "hey, buyer beware – you know the risks". (In fact, that's a perfectly valid response, albeit not a great business move.) But it's an entirely different thing to dispute the victim's story.
Now we're in a situation where someone is not telling the truth. On one side, you have a group of people with a lot of money and time invested into a business. On the other side, you have an extremely sympathetic victim of a crime. And somewhere in the middle is the fact that these kinds of unfortunate eventualities should have been obvious to both AirBnB and to their users.