1. I think it's very hard to get someone drink alcohol against their will. You have to either force them, or to threaten them. Also Avellone was probably drunk as well, as he is known as a heavy drinker, according to the article. You can pressure someone, if you have a clear authority over them: Boss, parent, etc. But apparently that is not the case here.
2. So if you are more intelligent, you can make people to drink against their will? Or Avellone used his physical size to intimate the woman in a bar and made her drink against her will? Or because he is more rich than the woman she felt that she had to drink, or otherwise Avellone was going to use his money to cause her harm? Doesn't sound like a proper argument to me. If it were an employer/employee relationship, then there would be a point, but if there was such relationship, it most likely would have been mentioned. After all the woman is trying he best to show Avellone in bad light, and it would certainly help her agenda, if it were an employee/employer relationship.
3. No comment on this, as I don't really know Avellone's public persona.
4. You can cite personal experiences if they make an overall, generalized point. Which is what I did. If you do consensual kissing with someone when you are drunk, it's still consensual.
…Guy could be a sleaze and a bully for all I know. But so far there haven't been anything but empty words.
You misunderstood most of my post. Maybe I wasn't expressing myself clearly. And it wasn't aimed at you specifically. Let me try to write it better:
1. If someone intends to drink nothing it would be hard to mage then drink, yes. However if someone intends to have "a few drinks" it is pretty easy to get them to drink more, hence why I wrote "drunker": fill up their glass, say cheers a few more times, make it a game, challenge them, order a big bottle, bring some shots, say "don't be boring" or "one more drink isn't gonna hurt" and so on.
I mean, this is what drinking buddies usually do to each other, albeit usually not with any malice behind it.
2. My point wasn't about drinking or about avellone. It was about how power imbalance in general makes it harder to say no. It can be in a situation with alcohol, with sex, with asking favors or something else.
It is hard saying no in general (most people prefer to make other people happy. In general saying yes makes people happy, no makes them disappointed), and even harder saying it to someone with more power than you. When someone says "why didn't they just say no?" they miss this part.
For example: If a woman grabs a man's ass, the man can be pretty certain that she can't force him to do anything physically, but if you turn it around, the man usually can force the woman. Therefore women get more scared, in general, by having their assess grabbed.
3. Same for me. It was just a comment on it being irrelevant anyway. Lots of "stand up citizens" have done shitty things.
4. Yes, you can use personal experiences to try to make a generalized point (even though one data point is shaky ground to generalize from). What one shouldn't do, though, is to apply that generalization to another specific situation. Because the conditions can be vastly different. And even if they aren't, people react differently.
For example : Only about one in seven to one in six of victims of severe violence get PTSD (a lot more do get PTSD if the crime is sexual in nature, though) . Is one reaction more valid than the other just because it is more common? Should a person who had an easy time forgetting/dealing with the problem, claim that their experience and reaction was more valid than the person who reacted more strongly? Personally, I think not. Anyone is free to disagree, though.
Please note that the examples I use are not in any way related to what avellone did or did not do. I have no clue about that. They are simply there to illustrate what I was trying to communicate in my earlier post.
And they are also not aimed at anyone in particular in this thread. I just read similar opinions whenever similar news surface and thought I should write something for once.