Swiss harassment judgment, paw behavior against black cats & Debian gossip
For about six years now, people have been creating gossip about harassment and abuse against various Debian co-authors. Nobody ever provided any evidence. Earlier this year, when I nominated in the European elections, the misfits were desperate to attack me but they didn't have any grounds to do so. They waited until the last minute before voting began and on 6 June 2024, the day before voting, they published a document that appears to be invalid, full of forgeries, racism and nonsense.
But wait, there really was a harassment case and a judgment. With the Irish General Election approaching, I am considering whether to nominate again and it is really important that people can see the truth about who really harassed who.
Swiss racism, cats of colour, women harassing women and a 10,000 Swiss franc settlement
The only mistake I made was taking black cats to Zurich.
The real Debian harassment story is about women harassing women and occasionally, a woman harassing our cats and women harassing men.
In Switzerland, both in the law and in the culture, when you have a harassment problem like this the matter is usually settled privately and everybody moves on with their life as quickly as possible.
Carla and our black cats, who are also female victims, were subject to racism from a white Swiss woman. We received a payment of CHF 10,000. Surely I would have rushed to publish that on my blog the same day. But I didn't publish it before. When the WeMakeFedora case was resolved, I immediately put it on my blog. But in the case of the harassment in Zurich, I wanted to respect all the parties involved, I wanted to respect the Swiss cultural approach to such disputes in Switzerland and just put it out of my mind and get on with serious problems.
Nonetheless, Debianists, including people like Axel Beckert at ETH Zurich and at the Google office in Zurich have been stirring up rumors about the harassment and paw behavior for six years.
Ironically, the Google engineering headquarters for Europe is located in Zurich and Google's role in spreading rumors about the harassment case had actually undermined the privacy that people used to take for granted in Switzerland.
Women harassing women: a common problem
In the case of serious violent crime against women, the majority of perpetrators appear to be male.
In the case of less tangible crimes, like harassment, stalking, racism and even sexism, we can find many cases where women are either protagonists or associates of an offender.
The recent Netflix series Baby Reindeer cast a spotlight on the story of a woman harassing a male employee at a bar.
In 2021, we saw a female volunteer, Molly de Blanc, started an online petition harassing her former boss, Dr Richard Stallman at FSF. Approximately three thousand people joined the petition but a petition about a person is not a real petition at all, it is harassment. de Blanc made the petition more than two years after leaving her job at FSF.
In a previous blog, I looked at the case of another non-developing Debian volunteer, Laura Arjona, harassing one of my female interns in the Outreachy program. After learning that this goes on behind mentors' backs, I didn't volunteer to be a mentor again.
Then there was Amaya Rodrigo Sastre who helped spread the rumors that Ted Walther's partner at the DebConf6 dinner was alleged to be a prostitute. In fact, the woman was a dentist and these rumors were disastrous for her reputation.
Ariadne Conill from the Alpine Linux project, which has no relationship to Switzerland as far as I can tell, was spreading the rumor that my intern in Google Summer of Code was my girlfriend. The rumor was offensive to me but even more offensive to the intern because that was the year she got married.
Shortly before DebConf15, we received nasty messages from Margarita (Marga) Manterola of Google telling us that Carla is not welcome to eat the food at DebConf, despite the fact that other woman like Marga go there with their husbands every year.
I've published a number of blogs recently about the role of female Albanian whistleblowers who exposed exploitation of women in the open source supply chain. In fact, two of the people responsible for organizing the exploitation were other women. We can see Silva Arapi was given permission to ask for travel funds while other female volunteers were told they had to go through Silva. Silva was listed as an employee of one of the male gatekeepers, a role that she had in parallel with her role at the Albanian hackerspace.
While waiting for the train to go down the Uetliberg one day, Carla and I were talking to a British woman in the playground beside the railway station. The woman told us about her Swiss landlady, a little old lady, who had been whinging and whining about the behavior of her small children. The Swiss landlady had become quite obsessed and had even been caught at the window taking pictures of the way the children played inside their home.
Looking at the invalid and falsified legal documents distributed by rogue members of Debian, we can find various references to my Irish heritage. Everybody seems to know that I was born and raised in Australia. I acquired Irish citizenship because my mother is from Ireland. We find that the racist women in Switzerland, and we'll see more of them in this blog, are not classifying people based on our skills and talents, they are obsessed about little things like my mother's Irish heritage. In fact, some of these documents were prepared by two women in Zurich, Pascale Koster and Albane die Ziegler. The documents don't mention that I am a citizen of three countries, they emphasize my Irish heritage as some kind of a hint to their racist colleagues that my mother and I should be treated badly in Zurich. What we see here is another example of women being offensive to other women.
One of the most well known examples of women exhibiting poor behavior to other women in Zurich was the infamous Oprah Winfrey handbag incident. A woman in the handbag shop refused to let Oprah look at a particular handbag. Oprah gives a testimony about her experience with the Swiss saleswoman (Kauffrau) in this video:
This brings us to the point where we will consider the paw behavior of a Swiss landlady towards Carla and our black cats, who are both female cats, so there was a female offender and three female victims.
I don't wish to make the generalization that all women are like this. I've worked with many professional women who act with integrity in everything they do. But when we see gossipmongers making up stories about harassment in groups like Debian, we need to remember the risk of listening to attention seekers and their paid lawyers/liars. Gossip and social engineering attacks go hand in hand and if we care about cybersecurity, we need to call out gossip behavior.
Harassment and racism are not only Swiss problems
Before rushing to any conclusion about racism in Switzerland, we need to remember that there is racism in every country.
When we look at the concerns about Brexit in the United Kingdom, there was a lot of racism during the campaign period before the referendum. Some of the practical changes in the UK, like canceling the driving licenses of foreigners, actually happened before the Brexit referendum. Likewise, whenever there is a Swiss referendum about the relationship with the EU, some people may voice racist opinions about the subject but there may be some valid political or economic discussions that take place at the same time.
We can also ask the question: are there times when Swiss citizens are subject to extreme acts of bullying or extreme injustice by employers, landladies or the public authorities? In fact, some examples do exist.
Looking at the JuristGate affair, we can see that the rogue legal protection scheme, which smells like a ponzi scheme, had both Swiss customers and foreign customers. All the customers lost their money at the same time. When FINMA shut down the rogue insurance, they hid the details from everybody, both Swiss and foreign clients were kept in the dark to an equal extent. Therefore, there was extraordinary injustice, there were some foreign clients but racism wasn't the main theme in JuristGate.
When I look at the case of Adrian von Bidder (avbb / cmot), the Debian Developer who died on our wedding day, I wonder if he had one of the same bad experiences that foreigners often complain about in Switzerland. For example, did one of the health insurance companies bungle a treatment for his wife or did an employer fail to make contributions to his pension scheme and then go into liquidation?
Here is a photo of Diana and Adrian on their wedding day:
In Swiss culture, sensitivity about the cause of death is an important cultural consideration. After blogging the initial evidence about how the death was discussed in the debian-private gossip channel, I came to realize that Adrian's widow, Diana, was listed as a member of the Basel City parliament. In such cases, there is obviously even more opportunity to ask questions about the interaction between the death, any environmental or cultural factors, whether in Debian or in his community but at the same time, the cultural aversion to asking those questions is a very steep obstacle.
Diana von Bidder is a candidate in the Kanton Basel Stadt parliament election on 20 October 2024. She is in the political party Evangelische Volkspartei (EVP).
Diana previously served in the Bürgergemeinde der Stadt Basel ( 2021 year book).
Adrian and his wife Diana von Bidder-Senn were both graduates of the computing school at the university ETH Zurich. More recently, we've seen how an ETH Zurich staff member, Axel Beckert, has signed documents denouncing our joint copyright interest in Debian as Debian Developers. This is an extraordinary act of bullying and deception. But does this only happen to foreigners in Switzerland or does this type of thing happen to Swiss citizens too?
Real harassment, real evidence ordered chronologically
Some time in 2017 or 2018, Chris Lamb, former leader of the Debian project, started making mischievous references to harassment. He didn't provide any facts, dates, victims or evidence.
Some people spent vast sums of money trying to find (or bribe) some evidence into existence. All they are doing is trying to undermine privacy experts who are speaking the truth about Google and social media.
Yet this is the real evidence. We have letters, photographs, recordings and a few dead bodies (mice, birds, Frans Pop and Adrian von Bidder, the Debian Developer who died on our wedding day).
In defence of Zurich landlords
Most of the larger property management companies in Zurich and Switzerland are somewhat consistent in their application of tenancy regulations.
When people find a nice apartment with a responsible landlord, they usually keep the apartment for a very long time.
Some smaller buildings, usually sized between five and ten apartments, are owned by a resident landlord/landlady. This gives rise to the phenomena where the landlady and tenant may cross paths almost every day.
It goes without saying that the turnover of tenants in some of these owner-occupier buildings is much higher than in the buildings owned by a silent investor.
Web sites advertising the apartments sometimes have a checkbox and filter option for potential tenants to exclude apartments with a resident landlady (Vermieter wohnt im Mehrfamilienhaus). Most people who have had a bad experience with one of these will go out of their way to avoid them in future.
Due to the very high turnover in buildings with a resident landlady, the number of advertisements for such apartments is disproportionate to the number of buildings that don't have a resident landlady.
Laundry duties & the status of women
Very new buildings in Switzerland have a washing machine and clothes dryer in every apartment. Most traditional buildings and some new buildings have a laundry room or drying room shared by all the tenants. Most buildings have a handwritten roster where the tenants can reserve the machines for a particular day.
You may only have one reservation to use the laundry every two weeks. If that reservation falls on a work day and you have multiple loads of washing to do then it can be very inconvenient. Nonetheless, nobody sees any urgency to change this system. There is a prevailing attitude that the wife or girlfriend will stay home on the laundry day and ensure that all the clothes are nicely washed, dried and folded and the laundry room is left in a proper state for the tenant who will use it on the following day.
Switzerland is notable for its neutral status and hosting diplomats from around the world at the United Nations in Geneva. But if the washing machine breaks down and one tenant's drying time runs over into the next day, there is anything but diplomacy and tenants regress to communicating with each other through handwritten notes written in one of the four official Swiss languages.
The application process, religious harassment and cats
When tenants arrive to visit a prospective apartment, they are given an application form that must be completed for the landlord or letting manager.
They tend to ask more questions than necessary. It is not unusual to find questions about your religious affiliations on the form. We can quickly find examples of these forms in a search engine by searching for words like Anmeldungformular and Konfession ( Example 1, Example 2, Example 3).
In effect, if your religion has been persecuted in Switzerland, you may well feel that filling out the application form is an experience of harassment.
News articles appear from time to time about whether or not you should declare your religion. ( Example 1, Example 2, Example 3).
Not every Anmeldungformular asks about religion but it is almost certain they will ask about your pets and musical instruments. It is a good idea to answer those questions honestly in any country. While some landlords and letting agents will decline certain requests, others will be quite happy to direct you to the most suitable apartments for your lifestyle.
Whenever we applied for any apartment in Switzerland, we did so with total honesty and integrity. We declared our cats (Katzen):
Specifically, we have written Hauskatzen, which literally translates to house cats. In other words, we are not talking about something exotic like a tiger or panther.
No room for undocumented aliens
The confession of cat ownership led to a flurry of paperwork mediated by the letting agent. Everybody who rents an apartment in Switzerland is expected to purchase a civil liability insurance and pay three months of rent as a security deposit.
In our case, that simply wasn't enough. The landlady insisted that we sign a guarantee against any paw behavior by our cats:
Costs anticipated by this document were already anticipated by the security deposit and our civil liability insurance. Therefore, I feel this additional cat contract was superfluous. Can we call it harassment or bullying?
Fair wear and tear
Switzerland has high standards for construction and due to the level of wealth, even the most mundane apartments typically have very high quality components in their bathrooms and kitchens. It is typical to have mixer taps on the showers and sinks, good water pressure and wall mounted toilets.
When tenancies are concluded in Switzerland, the apartment or house is subject to a forensic examination that may last several hours.
It is expected that the tenant leaving an apartment will arrange to have it cleaned back to the original state before the inspection day.
Even if the bathroom is 30 or 40 years old, the high quality components still look like new after each cleaning.
Nonetheless, internal components like washers and gaskets don't last forever, no matter how beautiful the sinks and toilet bowls appear on the outside.
In this particular apartment we experienced the failure of both the shower mixer and the gasket joining the cistern to the toilet bowl. Both of these things failed within a short span of time. The plumber came promptly to make the necessary repairs.
Nonetheless, after the drama about whether our cats were a national security risk, we were never on a good footing with this particular landlady. She was 76 years old and the far right party, of which she was a member, was constantly warning her to be on the lookout for mischievous foreigners.
If you look at the far right propaganda circulated in advance of referendums and elections in Switzerland, the foreigners are typically depicted in black, like our cats.
At Kaltbad on the Rigi, we found a white cat in the snow:
A large professional landlord company with thousands of apartments probably wouldn't worry about the cost of repairing these washers and gaskets. On the other hand, for these owner-occupier landladies who like to micro-manage their tenancies, some of them stay up all night worrying about whether tenants (or cats) do something like this as a prank.
Here is the report about the shower defect about two weeks after we moved in. There is no way that tenants or cats could have put rust into the pipes. These are simply the problems of an old building.
Subject: bath / shower water problems Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2016 09:39:29 +0100 From: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro> To: Letting agent Hi [redacted], The plumber visited today, he replaced the dishwasher door and the shower hose. He also looked at the flow from the hot water tap in the shower. He found a lot of rust inside the tap. He removed the hot and cold taps, cleaned out the taps and ran the water directly from the pipes in the wall. A lot of rust came out of both hot and cold pipes. - the hot water pipe is now flowing better, but it is still less than normal - water from both hot and cold pipes still has a slight red colour He said he will contact you to explain and discuss how it can be fixed. Regards, Daniel
Cat smell letter
While I was on a trip to the UK, Carla received this ugly letter:
It says there is an unknown smell in the common areas and it asks if the smell could come from our cats or deficiencies in cleanliness.
Carla and the cats were really sad.
We contacted our legal insurance and had a lawyer draft a response. We hoped that would be the end of the matter.
The window nazi
Then came the windows. There are 11 apartments in the building and somebody would sometimes open one of the windows in the stairwell and leave it open.
The landlady become obsessed with closing the windows and leaving handwritten notes on the windows.
Mediation requested
After some months of receiving insults in the post and in the common areas, it reached a point where we had to take legal action. We demanded a mediation session at the tribunal of Zurich.
Our cats were members of our family. Everybody loved our cats. My Italian cousin came to stay with them on several occasions:
Remarkably, the landlady sent an expensive lawyer to repeat the accusations about a cat smell, the window in the stairs and a dirty towel that another tenant found in the washing room.
There were no fingerprints, no paw-prints, no video evidence, no DNA evidence, not even a whisker to link any of these problems to us. It was just a witchhunt and as we had black cats, we were the most recent arrivals in the building, and we were foreigners, we felt we had been victimized.
Here is the accusation about a disobedient tenant who opens the window in the stairs:
Swiss lawyer tried to deceive Swiss judge about far right membership
Early in the mediation session, the lawyer for the landlady claimed that it wasn't clear whether or not she was really a member of the far right political party.
We were able to show the judge that the landlady had a web site promoting the party. Here is one of the photos, she is chairing a meeting and the poster attached to the table has her name and face on it. The filename tells us it is a meeting of the far right seniors committee (SVP senioren):
In this photo, she is standing beside then president of the Kanton parliament, Dr. Christian Huber:
Shortly after the photo was taken, Dr Huber resigned from the parliament and resigned from the SVP in mysterious circumstances. Dr Huber and his spouse spent the next ten years traveling around the European Union by houseboat. This is ironic of course, a leader from an anti-immigration/anti-EU party living like a refugee in a boat in the EU. In Australia the far right uses the term boat people as a derogatory term for immigrants who travel by boat.
Mystery smell: who is defaming who?
Here is the accusation about a mysterious smell. The lawyer is saying it is not clear where it comes from because he doesn't want to be caught defaming foreigners directly. He doesn't provide any expert evidence or witnesses, he basically says the landlady has a hunch about this smell and the judge should trust the landlady. The letting agent is also in the room and if the rumor was credible he would have surely commented on it. I don't think he wanted to comment about the smell at all so it came down to the expensive lawyer to talk this imaginary smell into existence. When I hear references to these mysterious smells, I feel it is a way for the jurists to give each other a wink and a nod and ask for the foreigners to be punished.
Women's work
It wasn't until 1990 that women could vote in all 26 cantons of Switzerland. For foreign women in Switzerland, they may feel like they are in a time machine.
Every time Carla went down to the laundry in the basement, the little old lady would appear. We don't know if she had video surveillance cameras or if she spent all her day going up and down the steps to check on the laundry.
Nonetheless, Carla had become quite upset about the cat letter and the intrusions in the laundry and at some point I had to start doing the laundry because it was impossible for Carla to go down there alone.
The landlady was taken aback by the sight of a man in the laundry. She started calling Carla's employer. We don't know what she was hoping to achieve. Was she trying to determine if Carla had absconded? Or was she trying to find out why the employer expected Carla to work on laundry day?
The lawyer sent a stern letter demanding that these phone calls to Carla's employer must cease immediately.
Frau [----] hat letzte Woche beim Arbeitsort meiner Mandantin angerufen und unter Vorwand, sie wolle mit ihr sprechen, gegenüber der Chefin meiner Mandnatin während ca. 30 Minuten meine Mandanten im Zusammenhang mit dem vorliegenden Verfahren angeschwärzt, resp. diese in ihrer Ehre verletzt. Ich fordere Sie auf, Ihre Klientin über die Tragweite der Bestimmungen über strafbare Handlungen gegen üble Nachrede und Verleumdung zu informieren. Es gab und gibt keinen Grund der direkten Kontaktaufnahme und insbesondere keinen Grund für Ihr Klientin, beim Arbeitsort meiner Mandantin anzurufen. Sollte es noch einmal vorkommen, dass Ihre Klientin gegenüber meinen Mandanten oder Dritten ausfällig wird und sich sonst rassistisch äussert, so wird dies entsprechende Konsequenzen haben. Ich denke auch nicht, dass das Verhalten Ihrer Klientin die Verhandlungsbereitschaft meiner Mandanten bezüglich des vorliegenden Verfahrens erhöht.
and translated into English:
Last week, [----] called my client's place of work and, under the pretext that she wanted to speak to her, spent around 30 minutes denigrating my client in connection with the current proceedings to my client's boss, and insulted her honor. I request that you inform your client of the scope of the provisions on criminal offenses against slander and defamation. There was and is no reason to make direct contact and in particular no reason for your client to call my client's place of work. Should your client become abusive towards my client or third parties or otherwise make racist comments, this will have the appropriate consequences. I also do not think that your client's behavior increases my client's willingness to negotiate with regard to the current proceedings.
Would a female judge in Zurich be any more sympathetic than a female landlady? Maybe not. Here, the landlady's lawyer is explaining that if the man (me) is busy with my job, the woman (Carla) can look for another flat. The judge and the translator are both female. Nobody calls out the sexism.
The search for a flat in Zurich is not a trivial task. In German, the press refer to it as the Wohnungslotterie. When a new building is about to be completed, hundreds of prospective tenants line up outside to submit copies of their Anmeldungformular in person.
What we see here is Swiss feminism, that is feminism for Swiss women. I don't think it's up to a man to give the definition of feminism. But I feel it is safe to say that Swiss feminism or Australian feminism are contradictions because it is basically privileged women from rich countries who go to university and become jurists and meddle in the lives of women from other countries.
One of the reasons we are in court in the first place is because Carla didn't feel comfortable being that woman from latin America who does laundry with the Swiss landlady looking over her shoulder. When Swiss families want to apply for apartments, they send their foreign nannies to stand in those queues and submit the forms.
This isn't just a Swiss problem. We had some very talented women in the engineering school in Melbourne. One of them was interviewed by the newspaper after she graduated:
"In the early days ... every client meeting I would be asked to get the coffee. The other male graduates were never asked to do such things,"
She's right: in more than twenty years since I graduated, nobody ever asked me to make coffee in the workplace. And when I tried to share responsibility for doing the laundry in Zurich, the landlady was opposed to the idea. She seemed to feel that women like Carla were easier to control.
In Renens, Canton Vaud, a white cat can sleep on the steps at the railway station and nobody complains about the risk that somebody might trip over the cat. Every ten minutes, the metro arrives at the top of the steps and hundreds of people come down the steps to search for their trains. There is a serious risk that somebody could trip over the cat and suffer an injury. If it was a black cat, would the police come with dogs to remove it?
Everybody in west Lausanne seems to know this cat but nobody knows who it belongs to.
Here is the part of the trial where they talk about the landlady calling Carla's workplace about the laundry:
Who owns that towel?
Given the lack of evidence about the imaginary cat smell, the landlady had tried to diversify her legal strategy by introducing a dirty towel that somebody found in the washing room.
Most landlords would simply provide a basket for lost property. Even at Swiss prices, the cost of a basket for these elusive towels and socks would be far less than the cost of the lawyers.
The cat smell trial consisted of four jurists, an interpreter, the letting manager and an engineer, myself. The combined cost of our time was over CHF 2,000 per hour for three hours in court debating the anxieties of a landlady who didn't show up. In comparison, many Swiss residents drive over to Germany or France each weekend for shopping. At Action in France, you can buy another towel and a lost property basket for a combined cost of less than ten Swiss francs.
The fact they tried to bring this towelgate affair into the courtroom only proves that they had no serious case in the first place. They were clutching at straws.
Speaking English in a Zurich courtroom
I think the judge realized that the landlady had a very weak case and on top of that, the landlady's lawyer had been somewhat deceptive about the political connection. The judge decided to continue the mediation session using the English language.
I have studied some German and I even have a certificate confirming an A2 level of German on the European scale.
The far right Swiss landlady was unable to sleep due to the imaginary smell, the sight of a man doing laundry and our stubborn refusal to take phone calls during our working hours about every little drama in the missing towels department. Yet my family had far more serious concerns due to my father's health. I tried to explain that in the court but were they listening?
Switzerland is a very small country and many people live in the same valley where they grew up with their parents. Even if they move from their valley to a city like Zurich, they can always reach most of their extended family with a short journey by train.
In the most hostile company where I worked in Switzerland, a line manager's mother had developed a terminal illness and had less than six months to live. The manager went back to his country for a number of months and the company strategy, organization and culture was totally unable to cope with this situation.
Nonetheless, in our case, Carla's aunt was getting very old and my father was very ill. The financial cost of the mediation session where we spoke about missing towels and the imaginary cat smell was greater than the financial cost of a trip to Australia to see my father.
The judge and I seem to agree there are cultural differences but the extent to which some people react to small differences is extraordinary:
Defending the honor of black cats before a Swiss judge
When I was granted Swiss citizenship, I had to take an oath of citizenship (la promesse solennelle vaudois, Loi sur le droit de cité vaudois 2018). Here is the text of the oath in French:
Vous promettez d’être fidèle à la Constitution fédérale et à la Constitution du Canton de Vaud. Vous promettez de maintenir et de défendre en toute occasion et de tout votre pouvoir les droits, les libertés et l’indépendance de votre nouvelle patrie, de procurer et d’avancer son honneur et profit, comme aussi d’éviter tout ce qui pourrait lui porter perte ou dommage
and translated into English:
You promise to be true to the federal constitution and the constitution of the Canton of Vaud. You promise to maintain and defend on every occasion and with all your powers the rights, freedoms and independence of your new country, to develop and advance her reputation and wealth and equally to avoid all that could cause her loss or damage.
What does an oath like this mean in practice? In the Zurich courthouse, I defended the honor and reputation of our black cats before a Swiss tribunal:
Remarkably, the judge repeats the question about whether there could be a smell. This was so offensive to us as a family.
In fact, these rumors about smells have Holocaust origins. Hitler commissioned significant scientific research to determine if the Jews have a distinctive smell. When the judge tried to legitimize these black-cat-smell comments in Zurich, I couldn't believe what I was hearing.
When the Albanian whistleblowers came to Zurich, they slept with the cats. Here is Anisa Kuci from OpenStreetmap, Wikimedia and GNOME Foundation on our sofa bed with Buffy the black kitten sleeping beside her:
If people want to confirm the cat smell was a lie, just ask Anisa.
Switzerland vs Australia, which country is more beautiful
I feel that honesty is always important in any relationship.
When we see courtrooms on television, the witnesses promise to tell the whole truth, the complete truth and nothing but the truth. I guess that mantra stuck in my head. I simply told the tribunal that I didn't really want that apartment anyway because Australia is more beautiful. At that very moment, the jurists stop speaking English and revert to German.
In fact, both Switzerland and Australia have some amazing geographic and cultural features and I think we were just unlucky with this particular landlady from the SVP senioren (far right seniors) cabal.
Far right dictator or eccentric old lady?
While this landlady was definitely a member of the far right party, her behavior was rather foolish and I don't think every member of the far right party behaves like this. Many of the people in the far right party own small businesses and they don't want to start silly disputes with their customers and tourists over things like a missing towel.
In this case, I suspect the propaganda of the far right party has become mixed up with the aging process and contributed to behavior that is erratic.
Most political parties and religions try to exploit the insecurities of little old ladies like this in the hope little old ladies will leave bequests to the party or the religion in question.
With that in mind, I don't blame the landlady alone for the pain my family experienced in Zurich.
Google and Debian forcing the harassment verdict into the spotlight
While we had to collect a lot of evidence at the time of the dispute, I never imagined publishing this case on my blog.
The only reason I am publishing this is because of vague rumors about a harassment case being distributed on the web sites of Debian, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva and some other web sites. I don't want to encourage cat enthusiasts to seek revenge against this little old lady. If she is still alive today, and I haven't even bothered to check, she would be well into her eighties and there would be no benefit whatsoever from harassing her.
The case was resolved with a cash settlement of CHF 10,000, equivalent to EUR 10,500 or USD 10,000.
The cats were transported in a box to a new home:
Here is the judgment in German. We've redacted parts of it to avoid identifying anybody. Ultimately, this was another case of a woman instigating harassment, a lot like Baby Reindeer:
Chris Lamb and Molly de Blanc violated Swiss privacy
Soon after the harassment case was finished, it was Chris Lamb and Molly de Blanc who started a gossip campaign.
Some of these women spreading rumors in the free software community are particularly vicious.
One of the cats, Floe, died shortly after the relocation.
de Blanc then showed up at FOSDEM in Brussels with her infamous speech about putting cats behind bars:
de Blanc's behavior was a horrible act of trolling after the death of our beloved cat.
Carla and I did not choose to make the harassment verdict public. We didn't have any vendetta with that little old lady. We just wanted to get on with our lives.
The far right landlady paid the compensation money on time. She has a right to get on with her life too. She is well into her eighties now and Google is violating her privacy with the ongoing gossip about harassment.
The ten thousand Swiss francs we received is less than half the cost of the handbag that Oprah Winfrey wanted to see in Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich.
What we see is a range of women, both the landlady and Molly de Blanc, meddling in peoples' lives. Women and female cats are victims of these stalkers but the stalkers are women too.
Footnote (paw note?): law of the jungle
In 2020, a tiger at the Zurich Zoo killed a female zoo keeper.
Swiss prosecutors conducted an investigation and concluded that the tiger was not guilty.
The protagonist, the tiger Irina, was also female, as in many of the female-initiated harassment cases considered in this blog.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.