Variety‘s Brent Lang is reporting that Birth.Movies.Death editor-in-chief Devin Faraci has stepped down after being accused by Caroline Contillo, a sometime blogger and meditation teacher who self-identifies on Twitter as “spacecrone“, of a sexual assault incident that happened 12 years ago.

Over the weekend some in the Twitterverse called for Faraci’s head, and now they have it. The only question I have is one of proportionality.

Apart from the issue of whether or not Faraci is widely liked or has created enemies, does an intelligent if abrasive writer-columnist deserve career ruination because of an unmistakably odious incident? Is it fair to send a drunken driver who has hit a pedestrian and who may be suffering from alcoholism…is it fair to sentence this offender to a long, life-destroying stretch in San Quentin? Some out there feel that severe punishment is the way to go, but I don’t know.

Faraci has written the following: “This weekend allegations were made about my past behavior. Because I take these types of claims seriously I feel my only honorable course of action is to step down from my position as Editor-in-Chief of Birth.Movies.Death. I will use the coming weeks and months to work on becoming a better person who is, I hope, worthy of the trust and loyalty of my friends and readers.”

Lang reports that “other women [have] offered their own stories of Faraci’s inappropriate behavior. He did not deny @spacecrone‘s accusations, tweeting, ‘I can only believe you and beg forgiveness for having been so vile.'”

On 10.11 The Hollywood Reporter‘s Seth Abramovitch posted Contillo’s account of the assault incident, which happened in a downtown jukebox bar in 2004.

“In an exchange with Variety, @spacecrone said that Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League, whose company owns Birth.Movies.Death, spoke with her about her allegations and was “empathetic.”

“I am really happy that it sounds like Devin is interested in getting help about this, and I’m open to any accountability processing that might be part of his treatment,” she wrote. “I really hope this can be a moment of self-interrogation for all of us, myself included, about the ways we might use positions of power to silence people, and the ways we all turn away from things that might seem a little too complicated to deal with.”