Alex doesn’t link to Shekinah’s original letter. Here it is. In response to this post, she has also written a second post explaining why she defines her experience as sexual assault. Alex blocked Shekinah from contacting him or commenting on this post, which is why I am replying here instead of Shekinah.
I have been Shekinah’s friend for years before encountering the LessWrong community. I have never met Alex, and have no personal connection whatsoever with Monastic Academy.
Alex had access to the first draft of this comment throughout the writing process, and had access to the final draft for several days, as well as notice that it would be posted, prior to my posting it in public here. He and I exchanged some polite messages during this period. Shekinah had access to the evolving draft of this comment throughout the writing process. Shekinah explicitly consented to me posting it. Alex and Shekinah both had the ability to comment on it, although only Shekinah did.
Editorial approach in writing this comment
Because my memory is limited and I was not a witness to any of the incidents that Alex and Shekinah discuss, I think the best thing I can do here is to gather and align their descriptions of the major events from their public writings. Therefore, I will lean heavily on verbatim quotes from Alex and from Shekinah. Shekinah has suggested I might contribute my impressions of our first discussion on her return from Monastic Academy. Those are in a footnote at the end of this post.
Alex says that “Shekinah makes many specific accusations in her post, but does not give very many details about specific events that gave rise to these accusations.” Shekinah disagrees, saying that she provided “quite a lot of detail in [her] letter,” which is “about half an hour long.”
To try and address the issue of concrete details about specific behaviors, I will be focusing on text that supplies details about specific events giving rise to Shekinah’s accusations. Some text regarding meanings, motivations, and impressions will be retained, either because it is contained in an otherwise detail-heavy passage, or because I believe that the specific impression is particularly pertinent.
I will be putting in bold text language that describes specific actions (or specific actions that were left undone). I will not be putting in bold text descriptions of meanings that were conveyed in language, unless specific quotes or paraphrases are included. These are my editorial choices, and I hope these choices are the right ones.
Alex says that “There are some very significant facts that Shekinah omitted in her essay that I will not describe here…” I do not know what facts he means, or what they are relevant to.
One of the challenges here is that we are dealing with a problem of feelings, perceptions, and psychological impacts. Detailed descriptions of what physically occurred may be insufficient to describe “what happened,” or to properly evaluate the morality of people’s behaviors. For both Alex and Shekinah, the interpretation of what they experienced occurred in a complex context. Yet both sexual assault and mischaracterizations of sexual assault can occur in complex contexts.
Here, I have attempted to provide the quotes, links, and outside information that seems most relevant to parsing the central claims made both by Alex and by Shekinah. Much of their original posts have been left out, but the texts of both posts are publicly available. I have made editorial choices about what to emphasize and include. My intention is to make it easier for concerned readers to navigate these two posts, and to compare and interpret their texts, while being as transparent as possible about my friendly relationship with Shekinah.
Definition of rape in the state where the sexual incident occurred
Alex and Shekinah’s first sexual encounter, which Shekinah considers to be sexual assault, occurred in the state of California. Legal definitions of sexual assault are not identical with moral definitions, but I think that legal context is highly relevant here. I am not a lawyer, but I will be leaning on verbatim quotes from lawyers and law services here.
According to RAINN, California defines “consent” as “positive cooperation in act or attitude pursuant to the exercise of free will. The person must act freely and voluntarily and have knowledge of the nature of the act or transaction involved.”
“All forms of nonconsensual sexual assault may be considered rape.
The essential determination of whether an offender is guilty of rape lies in the outrage to the victim’s person and the feelings of the victim of the rape.
Any sexual penetration, however slight, is sufficient to constitute rape.”
Shekinah’s description of the event that she characterized as sexual assault was written as follows:
… later while walking along a beach in Santa Cruz, he asked me spontaneously to go swimming. After which we laid on the beach. Without any conversation about consent, without any kissing or foreplay, or any previous sexual engagement anddespite the boundaries [“my desire then that we not cross anymore physical boundaries”] previously stated; he then jumped on top of me and entered my body. This encounter was over before I could even react. I did NOT have an opportunity to make a choice and I did NOT give my consent.
Alex says that “I believe that her accusations are straightforward mischaracterizations,” and “that sexual assault is a completely inappropriate way to describe it.” He does not supply any additional details to explain why he holds this belief. Alex also does not claim that he received affirmative consent from Shekinah prior to initiating this sexual encounter.
Descriptions of the monastery’s response to the sexual incident and relationship
Another accusation Shekinah made in her Open Letter was about the circumstances of the letter the monastery had asked/pressured her to sign:
A couple weeks later my Beloved [Alex “Kōshin” Flint] came to me saying that Soryu Forall had personally asked him to write a letter to the leadership and board of directors stating that the described incident was loving and consensual, that we are abiding by the rules of the monastic container, and that we were not engaging in a romantic relationship. Most of that was true accept the piece around consent which I was still very confused about ( as commonly happens in the aftermath of sexual assault). I expressed that I felt unsure of this and hesitant about this letter. Several more times he talked to me about and showed me this letter. He expressed that the organization was afraid that I might sue them or that this might get out to the public. He also said something along the lines of this was what everyone in the organization needed to relax and feel safe, after which we could put this incident behind us and resume our focus on practice. It was also framed to me as a letting go of this connection and a demonstration of our commitment to the training. One day I came back from a walk in the park and I was informed that we would be signing this letter in front of the entire community. I said No to this and still felt pressured by leaders to sign this letter. At that point in time, feeling both overwhelmed within the training environment and pressured by someone I love, other leaders and community members I did sign this document. When I look back on this; I feel that the organization saw the issue from the beginning and intentionally covered it up.
The way Alex characterizes this same experience is as follows:
Around the same time, the head teacher asked Shekinah and I to write a letter clarifying the status of our relationship and our intention to stay in or leave the community. This is important in a monastic setting because when a whole community has agreed not to have romantic or sexual relations with each other, any breach cannot be left in an ambiguous state or else everyone will question whether the rules still apply to anyone. Shekinah describes being coerced into signing a letter, but when I reflect on the conversations between us I cannot think of a way that I could have explained more gently why we were being asked to write such a letter, nor made it clearer that it was up to her whether she did so or not. Shekinah was not an employee of the organization and was nearly at the end of her one-month visit, so there was little room for implicit leverage.
My conversations with Shekinah after her return from the Monastic Academy
I picked Shekinah up from the train station on her return trip from her experience at the Monastic Academy, and listened to her for hours as she processed her experience with me. This was about a year and a half ago. My memory is that Shekinah was very distressed, both with regard to her experiences one-on-one with Alex, and even more so with the way it was handled by other authority figures at Monastic Academy. I’ve also discussed this incident with her several times since then, both before and after the breakup of her relationship with Alex, and since the first drafting of this response.
My interpretation of Shekinah’s feelings about Alex and the first sexual incident between them is that it has taken her considerable time to parse her feelings and articulate them. When she first came back from Monastic Academy, she was simultaneously processing this sexual incident, the treatment of herself and Alex by Monastic Academy, her romantic feelings about Alex, her broader concerns about the organizational failures she perceives at Monastic Academy, her distress about being separated from Alex, and the traumatic experiences that occurred prior to her time at Monastic Academy that the meditation had brought up. In my opinion, it’s only natural that she has needed some time to figure out how she feels about this incident, and how best to articulate the events being discussed to others.
Because it has been a long time, I cannot remember the specific language she used during our conversations. Her feelings about Monastic Academy have been consistently negative, and the main reasons for that negative impression have been in connection with the way they treated her during her stay at the Monastic Academy.
I’m strongly disinclined to delve into the matter of consent in the sexual encounter, as it primarily pertains to (alleged) misconduct by Alex/Koshin (who I don’t really know), whereas the accusations of organizational malfeasance (e.g. a cover-up) pertain to all of MAPLE/OAK/CEDAR (where I do know several people, and which I’m just going to call MAPLE going forward).
In particular, I’m noticing that Koshin described having been asked to write a letter with Shekinah, describing their relationship status and intentions, while Shekinah described having been pressured into signing a letter which Soryu had instructed Koshin to write. Shekinah also described various statements in the letter in a way that leaves it ambiguous whether or not those statements were included in Soryu’s instruction to Koshin.
My own experiences with MAPLE track more closely with the interpretation that the statements in the letter were not included as part of Soryu’s instruction to Koshin, and since Shekinah does not describe interacting with Soryu on this point, I don’t really see any support in the provided texts for the interpretation where Soryu included those statements in his instruction. I’m open to correction, but for now I’m going to work forward from the assumption that Soryu did not provide such detailed instruction.
In Shekinah’s account, she was clearly uninvolved in the drafting of the letter, and Koshin’s account provides no conflicting information about her involvement. So given the assumption already made, it looks very much like Soryu asked for a formal account of what happened, and Koshin wrote his account and got Shekinah to co-sign it.
Shekinah describes having felt “pressured by leaders” to sign the letter in question, and to do so in front of the community. From what she writes, it sounds like the reason she didn’t want to sign the letter is because she believed its contents to be untrue. I don’t know what steps were taken to ascertain Shekinah’s belief in the truth of the statements she describes herself as having been pressured to sign. That said, my experiences don’t track with the idea that any leaders within MAPLE would encourage someone to sign something that is not true.
However the narrative of a cover-up, and of organizational malfeasance more broadly, seems to rely on an acceptance of the premise that the organization was involved in ways like this, which there’s no evidence provided to support. I certainly see mistakes being made, but I don’t see a reason to believe that those mistakes were bigger than trusting Koshin to engage Shekinah adequately in the process of drafting the letter that she would later sign (to ensure that the text of the letter reflected her understanding of the truth of the matter), or trusting Shekinah not to sign off on statements that she believed to be untrue. As far as I know, the rationale for the signing being done in front of the community may have been an effort to promote honesty rather than compliance (and promoting honesty tracks much more closely with my experiences with MAPLE than promoting compliance does).
On an even more basic level, MAPLE’s error may simply have been to have seen an applicant so damaged by her past experiences as to be unable to see the people around her as anything other than threatening figures demanding compliance, and not to have told that applicant “sorry, you’re not ready to train with us”.
As I mentioned when doing so, I’ve made a couple of assumptions based on my experiences with MAPLE, or on what seems to me to be common sense. These assumptions may be wrong, and I hope that if they are, someone can provide the missing details to illustrate how, so that they can be corrected.
That said, my experiences don’t track with the idea that any leaders within MAPLE would encourage someone to sign something that is not true.
To know whether or not a letter that claims that the experience was consensual is actually telling the truth, Soryu would need to have actually cared enough to find out what the truth happens to be.
It seems he decided that knowing that isn’t important to him and thus didn’t speak to Shekinah. The lack of caring about the truth enough to have that conservation is one of the particularly troublesome parts of this episode.
I’m strongly disinclined to delve into the matter of consent in the sexual encounter, as it primarily pertains to (alleged) misconduct by Alex/Koshin (who I don’t really know), whereas the accusations of organizational malfeasance (e.g. a cover-up) pertain to all of MAPLE/OAK/CEDAR (where I do know several people, and which I’m just going to call MAPLE going forward).
Yeah thank you for this.
In particular, I’m noticing that Koshin described having been asked to write a letter with Shekinah, describing their relationship status and intentions, while Shekinah described having been pressured into signing a letter which Soryu had instructed Koshin to write.
Basically what happened is that Soryu asked us to write a letter together (on a phone call with me), then I told Shekinah that we had been asked to write a letter together, that she wasn’t obliged to, that we could write it as we saw fit, and she said okay. Then I wrote a draft and asked Shekinah what she thought, whether we should change anything etc etc, and she said no it’s fine, and then we signed it.
Context for this discussion
Alex doesn’t link to Shekinah’s original letter. Here it is. In response to this post, she has also written a second post explaining why she defines her experience as sexual assault. Alex blocked Shekinah from contacting him or commenting on this post, which is why I am replying here instead of Shekinah.
I have been Shekinah’s friend for years before encountering the LessWrong community. I have never met Alex, and have no personal connection whatsoever with Monastic Academy.
Alex had access to the first draft of this comment throughout the writing process, and had access to the final draft for several days, as well as notice that it would be posted, prior to my posting it in public here. He and I exchanged some polite messages during this period. Shekinah had access to the evolving draft of this comment throughout the writing process. Shekinah explicitly consented to me posting it. Alex and Shekinah both had the ability to comment on it, although only Shekinah did.
Editorial approach in writing this comment
Because my memory is limited and I was not a witness to any of the incidents that Alex and Shekinah discuss, I think the best thing I can do here is to gather and align their descriptions of the major events from their public writings. Therefore, I will lean heavily on verbatim quotes from Alex and from Shekinah. Shekinah has suggested I might contribute my impressions of our first discussion on her return from Monastic Academy. Those are in a footnote at the end of this post.
Alex says that “Shekinah makes many specific accusations in her post, but does not give very many details about specific events that gave rise to these accusations.” Shekinah disagrees, saying that she provided “quite a lot of detail in [her] letter,” which is “about half an hour long.”
To try and address the issue of concrete details about specific behaviors, I will be focusing on text that supplies details about specific events giving rise to Shekinah’s accusations. Some text regarding meanings, motivations, and impressions will be retained, either because it is contained in an otherwise detail-heavy passage, or because I believe that the specific impression is particularly pertinent.
I will be putting in bold text language that describes specific actions (or specific actions that were left undone). I will not be putting in bold text descriptions of meanings that were conveyed in language, unless specific quotes or paraphrases are included. These are my editorial choices, and I hope these choices are the right ones.
Alex says that “There are some very significant facts that Shekinah omitted in her essay that I will not describe here…” I do not know what facts he means, or what they are relevant to.
One of the challenges here is that we are dealing with a problem of feelings, perceptions, and psychological impacts. Detailed descriptions of what physically occurred may be insufficient to describe “what happened,” or to properly evaluate the morality of people’s behaviors. For both Alex and Shekinah, the interpretation of what they experienced occurred in a complex context. Yet both sexual assault and mischaracterizations of sexual assault can occur in complex contexts.
Here, I have attempted to provide the quotes, links, and outside information that seems most relevant to parsing the central claims made both by Alex and by Shekinah. Much of their original posts have been left out, but the texts of both posts are publicly available. I have made editorial choices about what to emphasize and include. My intention is to make it easier for concerned readers to navigate these two posts, and to compare and interpret their texts, while being as transparent as possible about my friendly relationship with Shekinah.
Definition of rape in the state where the sexual incident occurred
Alex and Shekinah’s first sexual encounter, which Shekinah considers to be sexual assault, occurred in the state of California. Legal definitions of sexual assault are not identical with moral definitions, but I think that legal context is highly relevant here. I am not a lawyer, but I will be leaning on verbatim quotes from lawyers and law services here.
According to RAINN, California defines “consent” as “positive cooperation in act or attitude pursuant to the exercise of free will. The person must act freely and voluntarily and have knowledge of the nature of the act or transaction involved.”
In defining sexual assault and rape, RAINN says that in the state of California:
According to the website of lawyer Eric M. Davis, California has no statute of limitations on sexual assault.
Description of the sexual incident
Shekinah’s description of the event that she characterized as sexual assault was written as follows:
Alex says that “I believe that her accusations are straightforward mischaracterizations,” and “that sexual assault is a completely inappropriate way to describe it.” He does not supply any additional details to explain why he holds this belief. Alex also does not claim that he received affirmative consent from Shekinah prior to initiating this sexual encounter.
Descriptions of the monastery’s response to the sexual incident and relationship
Another accusation Shekinah made in her Open Letter was about the circumstances of the letter the monastery had asked/pressured her to sign:
The way Alex characterizes this same experience is as follows:
My conversations with Shekinah after her return from the Monastic Academy
I picked Shekinah up from the train station on her return trip from her experience at the Monastic Academy, and listened to her for hours as she processed her experience with me. This was about a year and a half ago. My memory is that Shekinah was very distressed, both with regard to her experiences one-on-one with Alex, and even more so with the way it was handled by other authority figures at Monastic Academy. I’ve also discussed this incident with her several times since then, both before and after the breakup of her relationship with Alex, and since the first drafting of this response.
My interpretation of Shekinah’s feelings about Alex and the first sexual incident between them is that it has taken her considerable time to parse her feelings and articulate them. When she first came back from Monastic Academy, she was simultaneously processing this sexual incident, the treatment of herself and Alex by Monastic Academy, her romantic feelings about Alex, her broader concerns about the organizational failures she perceives at Monastic Academy, her distress about being separated from Alex, and the traumatic experiences that occurred prior to her time at Monastic Academy that the meditation had brought up. In my opinion, it’s only natural that she has needed some time to figure out how she feels about this incident, and how best to articulate the events being discussed to others.
Because it has been a long time, I cannot remember the specific language she used during our conversations. Her feelings about Monastic Academy have been consistently negative, and the main reasons for that negative impression have been in connection with the way they treated her during her stay at the Monastic Academy.
I’m strongly disinclined to delve into the matter of consent in the sexual encounter, as it primarily pertains to (alleged) misconduct by Alex/Koshin (who I don’t really know), whereas the accusations of organizational malfeasance (e.g. a cover-up) pertain to all of MAPLE/OAK/CEDAR (where I do know several people, and which I’m just going to call MAPLE going forward).
In particular, I’m noticing that Koshin described having been asked to write a letter with Shekinah, describing their relationship status and intentions, while Shekinah described having been pressured into signing a letter which Soryu had instructed Koshin to write. Shekinah also described various statements in the letter in a way that leaves it ambiguous whether or not those statements were included in Soryu’s instruction to Koshin.
My own experiences with MAPLE track more closely with the interpretation that the statements in the letter were not included as part of Soryu’s instruction to Koshin, and since Shekinah does not describe interacting with Soryu on this point, I don’t really see any support in the provided texts for the interpretation where Soryu included those statements in his instruction. I’m open to correction, but for now I’m going to work forward from the assumption that Soryu did not provide such detailed instruction.
In Shekinah’s account, she was clearly uninvolved in the drafting of the letter, and Koshin’s account provides no conflicting information about her involvement. So given the assumption already made, it looks very much like Soryu asked for a formal account of what happened, and Koshin wrote his account and got Shekinah to co-sign it.
Shekinah describes having felt “pressured by leaders” to sign the letter in question, and to do so in front of the community. From what she writes, it sounds like the reason she didn’t want to sign the letter is because she believed its contents to be untrue. I don’t know what steps were taken to ascertain Shekinah’s belief in the truth of the statements she describes herself as having been pressured to sign. That said, my experiences don’t track with the idea that any leaders within MAPLE would encourage someone to sign something that is not true.
However the narrative of a cover-up, and of organizational malfeasance more broadly, seems to rely on an acceptance of the premise that the organization was involved in ways like this, which there’s no evidence provided to support. I certainly see mistakes being made, but I don’t see a reason to believe that those mistakes were bigger than trusting Koshin to engage Shekinah adequately in the process of drafting the letter that she would later sign (to ensure that the text of the letter reflected her understanding of the truth of the matter), or trusting Shekinah not to sign off on statements that she believed to be untrue. As far as I know, the rationale for the signing being done in front of the community may have been an effort to promote honesty rather than compliance (and promoting honesty tracks much more closely with my experiences with MAPLE than promoting compliance does).
On an even more basic level, MAPLE’s error may simply have been to have seen an applicant so damaged by her past experiences as to be unable to see the people around her as anything other than threatening figures demanding compliance, and not to have told that applicant “sorry, you’re not ready to train with us”.
As I mentioned when doing so, I’ve made a couple of assumptions based on my experiences with MAPLE, or on what seems to me to be common sense. These assumptions may be wrong, and I hope that if they are, someone can provide the missing details to illustrate how, so that they can be corrected.
To know whether or not a letter that claims that the experience was consensual is actually telling the truth, Soryu would need to have actually cared enough to find out what the truth happens to be.
It seems he decided that knowing that isn’t important to him and thus didn’t speak to Shekinah. The lack of caring about the truth enough to have that conservation is one of the particularly troublesome parts of this episode.
Yeah thank you for this.
Basically what happened is that Soryu asked us to write a letter together (on a phone call with me), then I told Shekinah that we had been asked to write a letter together, that she wasn’t obliged to, that we could write it as we saw fit, and she said okay. Then I wrote a draft and asked Shekinah what she thought, whether we should change anything etc etc, and she said no it’s fine, and then we signed it.