Last spring, Jennifer Allen began sharing a harrowing tale of abuse she said she had received at the hands of a former boyfriend — Michael Arrington, the tech investor and blogger.
In posts on Facebook, Twitter and the comments section of a news article on Valleywag, the tech gossip site, Ms. Allen accused Mr. Arrington of abusing and raping her. Her accusations generated a swell of media coverage, culminating in a Vanity Fair article.
Now Ms. Allen has taken back her accusations.
In a blog post on his site on Tuesday, Mr. Arrington said that he had dropped a defamation suit that he filed over a year ago against Ms. Allen after she agreed to retract her accusations against him and apologize. He posted a copy of a settlement agreement, signed by Ms. Allen, that says neither party paid the other any money as part of the agreement.
Mr. Arrington declined to comment about the agreement beyond his blog post, referring further questions about the case to his lawyer. “This is a complete vindication for Michael,” said Eric George, Mr. Arrington’s lawyer. “He dealt with the ugliest of accusations in a principled way and, as soon as he received the retraction he had sought from the beginning, he kept his word and dismissed the lawsuit.”
Ms. Allen’s lawyer, Kelby Fletcher, said in an email that Ms. Allen “did not want to endure the expense of further litigation with Mr Arrington and she therefore decided to tell him that she retracted her statements. She did not pay him anything.”
Ms. Allen’s accusations drew an unusual amount of attention because of the high profile of Mr. Arrington, who founded the TechCrunch technology news site and eventually sold it, in 2010, to AOL for $30 million. Mr. Arrington is a polarizing figure in the media world, partly because he sought to juggle roles as an investor in start-ups and as the editor of TechCrunch, before leaving that role.
In his blog post, Mr. Arrington offered his own theories about why Ms. Allen accused him of rape, including “because I was in a stable and happy relationship, and would no longer communicate with her.”
He said that Ms. Allen had sought to destroy his reputation, and he seemed keen in the blog post to return the favor. He said Ms. Allen suffered from mental health issues and had showed up to a deposition in the case late and “appeared drugged.” During the deposition, Mr. Arrington said in the blog post, she admitted to being on anti-psychotic medication.
Mr. Arrington also said that another former boyfriend of Ms. Allen’s provided a statement in the case saying that Ms. Allen had been abusive to him, too. (The former boyfriend, Scott D. Sullivan-Reinhart, made a brief post about Ms. Allen on his Facebook account.)
In a conversation over Facebook’s messaging system, Mr. Sullivan-Reinhart said he dated Ms. Allen during the last three months of last year. Mr. Sullivan-Reinhart, an independent software and hardware engineer in Los Angeles, said he only became aware of her battle with Mr. Arrington in November after an article about it came out.
Mr. Sullivan-Reinhart told Mr. Arrington’s lawyer that Ms. Allen, who lives in San Francisco, insisted on communicating with him by video conference instead of telephone because she thought Mr. Arrington could use technology to disguise his voice. “She had been making claims that Michael basically controlled all means of communication and could monitor people using his mastery of technology,” said Mr. Sullivan-Reinhart.
Mr. Sullivan-Reinhart said he provided the statement to Mr. Arrington’s team because he was concerned that, after he broke up with her, Ms. Allen might make false claims of abuse against him.
After avoiding any mention of the settlement on social media, Ms. Allen on Thursday finally broke her silence to respond to someone who mentioned the case on Twitter in a manner sympathetic to Mr. Arrington. “Dr. Drama, he sued me to cover, was discovered to be true, hence paid him nothing as he orig. requested,” she wrote. “It’s obvious. Enough.”