Facts Conveniently Withheld

The Rest of the Julie Ann Horvath Story

Every story has two sides and for several weeks now Julie Ann Horvath has decided to share only the details of her side of her experiences at GitHub and the circumstances around her departure.

A few of us, those who knew Julie and the events that occurred, have decided that if Julie wants to share this story so publicly then everyone should at least have all of the story.

Here are some details that may help explain this story a little differently.

The Engineer

Julie calls out an engineer in her story. The engineer she alleges harassed her was in fact an ex-boyfriend that she was still friends with at the time, not a random coworker she barely knew. They had dated prior to working at GitHub and were on good terms at the time.

The project he “ripped out” code from was a small css refactoring on an internal side project that he was helping her with. At the time of the incident, she was not upset about it and it was quickly fixed. At the time of her departure, she was not on great terms with him and her public story changed.

The Cofounder and His Wife

Around the end of 2012, Julie started dating a close male friend of the cofounder’s wife and didn’t like that they were close. She asked them to stop being friends and when they would not end their relationship, Julie started telling coworkers that the wife had affairs and that the cofounder’s newborn child was not his. She told this to multiple coworkers directly and also to the wife through her boyfriend.

This is where the wife reached out to her and the rest of her story starts. All of Julie’s story involving the cofounder’s wife occurs only after Julie was spreading vicious rumors about him to even new employees.

Three months later, the first Passion Projects talk was held at GitHub. It’s difficult to know if this was a concession by the cofounder for her to stop threatening his family and undermining him to his employees, or perhaps just a way for him to try to get on her good side so she would not want to hurt his family.

We share this because reading through the TechCrunch article with this in mind changes the story for us. It seems less like a story of gender issues and more like a story of the problems that arise when employees date coworkers and cannot separate work and personal life.

We dislike that she is taking advantage of people’s trust in her in order to craft a message for which she wants to be the symbol. Good people are suffering for a story she knows is not fully true and she does not seem to care.