AITAH for publicly calling out someone at a networking event after she spent months telling people in our industry I had plagiarized her work
about eight months ago this woman i had met briefly at a conference started telling people in our professional community that i had lifted ideas from her unpublished work for a project id been developing independently for over a year. i found out through a mutual contact who felt i deserved to know
i had never seen her work. i couldnt have plagiarized something i had never accessed. my project had a paper trail going back fourteen months before id even met this person
so i reached out to her directly. she stopped responding after two messages. i reached out to the mutual contact to ask if there was any way to address it and i was told it had kinda faded and not to make it worse by pushing it
so i let it go.
i didnt want to look defensive and i was told it had died down
it had not fully died down. i kept getting slightly cool receptions from people in certain circles and i knew why even when nobody said it directly
then three weeks ago i was at a large industry event. i was mid conversation with someone whose opinion genuinely matters for my career when this woman walks over and inserts herself into the conversation with a big smile and introduces herself like we had never met
i said actually we have met, and then i said directly and calmly that this was the person who had told people in our community that id plagiarized her work, work id never seen, for a project id been developing for over a year before we met
she went completely still
the person we were talking to excused himself and i saw him speaking to her separately a few minutes later. she left the event early
my husband says i embarrassed her unnecessarily because it was months ago and mostly over. and i told him it wasnt over for me and i hadnt had a chance to say anything when it was actually happening
AITAH?