*please forgive my blanket-binary gendering. I know it sucks, but this is predominantly about how "men" treat "women" and vice versa, so I hope you'll be patient with me. I believe in the spectrum of gender, nonetheless.*
If FV is a part of a community, it is very much political. This was private until they made it public. It has the appearance of making it public for some sort of revenge for him initially saying he wasn't interested.
This has been public for a lot longer than the point at which we began to engage as we did: Franklin Veaux has been writing about his relationships and positioning himself as an arbiter of how relationships ought to be conducted for a long, long time. The correction of status quo that we are attempting to make with our work is to give the other people involved in those relationships an opportunity to speak with a reach that compares to his.
Ideally, this should all have been done in private with an eye toward conflict resolution. Then, since all these people do live a somewhat public life in poly circles, a statement could be released once resolved. It was irresponsible to proceed the way they did.
A note on keeping things "private": who is the beneficiary of that privacy? Certainly not the people experiencing harm in this context. Silence perpetuates trauma, to (all too hastily) sum up Judith Herman's work in "Trauma and Recovery", and we are disrupting that norm, which seems to be striking some nerves. Keeping the "private" separate from the "public" is such old school misogyny 101 I am surprised to see it manifest here.
Another note on my position of believing women: there are mountains of cases to show the blatant disadvantage and perpetuated harm that women are subject to for speaking out against ill treatment they have suffered, and plenty of studies to suggest that the rate at which they would falsely accuse is so incredibly minuscule, we are much safer to assume they are telling the truth and repair the mistake, later, should it happen to be such. The fact of the matter is that when men are accused of abuse, little detriment actually happens to them, most of the time. The tangible damages to someone falsely accused are easily repaired, once investigated and found to be the case (how any investigation is expected to go through due process with all these scripts unnoticed, I have no idea), whereas the perpetuation of silencing and ignoring women's voices ripples through us all, reminding us of the futility of opposing patriarchy, and driving us further underground. My cost-benefit analysis of whether to believe women or not is measured based on this. I know the men falsely accused will recover quickly. I know the women who are silenced and ignored will surely not.
One more on bias: of course I have bias. I am a person. So are we all. It is _so easy_ for me to see where the Patriarchal biases in some of the commentary here and elsewhere, I am at times full of despair and hopelessness. I have much still to learn, and much I do not fully understand, but I have made it my business to understand this. I do not actually wish that on anyone, in the current climate of seeming progress, as it is devastating. Things have changed, but not that much.
The assumption that credentials and expertise look a certain way (namely, diplomas and certificates indicate such) is a colonizer ideal, and often meant to exclude voices who are marginalized in many different ways. The same could be said for any construct of objectivity. I would also love it if people would consider that any discourse about relational life is extremely personal to us all, hopefully, so dispassion is a privilege afforded to few, and indicative of power held. Turns out, people who care less are in more power most of the time, truly or in projection.