Conspiracy or grooming? Alex Jurado, Voice of Reason compared to Outreachy
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
In June 2025, there was a lot of media attention on the case of Alex Belfield, a former BBC presenter who set up his own podcast using the name Voice of Reason since 2007.
In the US, Alex Jurado is a Catholic influencer who also uses the name Voice of Reason since 2023.
On the weekend from 11 to 13 July, protestants in Ireland celebrate the Williamite conquest of the 1690s. A key feature of the celebration is the burning of huge bonfires in the regions controlled by loyalists.
On 14 July, a protestant web site, Protestia, attacked a Catholic influencer, Alex Jurado with accusations of grooming. Is this a new phase of the institutional abuse crisis or is it another example of social control media out of control, a world where gossip spreads at the speed of light and truth is optional?
Given the timing of the report, could it be a hoax on the back of the bonfire weekend? Some hoaxes are totally false. Many hoaxes take real documents or photographs and introduce very small changes to fool people or misrepresent what really happened in some way.
The Protestia article includes the words "grooming" and "teen" in the title and it features an undated picture of Jurado at the top of the page. Jurado told another podcast he is 30. Anybody who only takes a brief look at the article will form the impression that the alleged grooming happened recently.
It reminded me of the way accusations are being falsified in free, open source software communities, especially the high profile example where people were fooled and bullied into accepting rumors about Dr Jacob Appelbaum.
Two days later somebody added a footnote at the bottom of the article explaining they don't really know when the messages were sent and they don't know the age of the girl.
Update: The original complaintant has issued a retraction, writing “Upon reflecting on the legal safeguards involved—as well as recognizing a failure on my part to ensure full due process—I acknowledge that I cannot definitively label the victim as 14…..After consulting with other mediators involved in the matter, we have agreed that the more accurate and appropriate terminology at this stage is to refer to the victim as a minor as a blanket term between the ages of 14-15-16.
In the same article, they told us that Jurado started teaching Catechism when he was 16 years old. We could be looking at messages sent more than ten years ago between an 18 year old voluntary Catechism teacher and a 16 year old girl. It is definitely not a relationship between a 30 year old man and a 14 year old girl.
When you accuse somebody of grooming, you are accusing them of a serious crime. You need to prove the year when the messages were sent, you need to prove the age of the woman and in New Mexico, where Jurado is based, you need to prove the person sending the messages was more than four years older. These three key facts are all missing from the Protestia web site.
If the messages are real then it is highly unethical to mix the relationship with a student/teacher relationship in Sunday school. Parents would expect the church to detect and prevent unethical behavior like that. Nonetheless, if they had similar ages we can't call it grooming.
Fact check: did Prince Alfred date a 14 year old?
Take a look at the report I prepared about Prince Alfred. A research paper published by University College London (UCL) claims the Russian princess was 15 when she met her future husband. When a specific number like that is provided in a research paper it provides a legitimate reason to publish evidence that may contradict the publisher. I did that meticulously by publishing a list of every date from the moment each of them was born. Therefore, we can say that the journal article was wrong, the princess was not 15, she was 14. I reached that conclusion by presenting all the evidence in the correct sequence. We don't know nearly enough about the age of the woman Jurado dated and maybe it didn't even happen at all.
Lessons for the church
The real lesson here is for the church: it is time to ban phones and social media for kids. What is the use of sending children to spend an hour at Sunday school once per week if they are staying up in bed for two or three hours every night with a phone under their blanket being monitored and brainwashed by a much older man, Mark Zuckerberg?
How insane is it that the messages this girl wrote as a child have been trusted to some third party, leaked and then published for the whole world to see? The only way to prevent that type of thing is to snuff out the phones.
There are millions of young men under 30 who had these sexting relationships as teenagers. Most of them grew out of it in their early twenties. Any man under 30 could be ambushed like this at any moment. What happens when a young Catholic is ordained as a priest or elected into Congress and somebody spoils the party with copies of messages from his first teenage romance?
Outreachy grooming saga: vilified for proof
The proof in the Outreachy grooming saga was much more significant. While Jurado may have only been two years older than this woman, the Albanian man Elio Qoshi was 24 when people told me his girlfriend was 16. That is eight years difference. Both of those dates can be confirmed in various ways. The woman told me herself that she was 16 when I first met her in July 2017. I don't know if they started the relationship before she turned 16.
The second big proof in the Outreachy grooming saga is on the archived copy of the web site for Ura Design. It shows us very clearly that each of these women, including a former Outreachy and the 16 year old girl, were listed as employees of the Albanian gangmaster. This proves the man had financial influence over all the women.
If a 24-year-old manager at McDonalds is dating a 16 year old employee he gets sacked. Its that simple. When the CEO of McDonalds dated an employee, he got sacked too.
We can see that Ura Design and the Tirana hackerspace were both enabled by donations and small projects from larger open source software organizations in Europe and the US. I promptly informed Mozilla Foundation about my concerns. We discussed it in Debian. People didn't want to rock the boat. The third piece of proof are the emails I sent and the responses.
Here is the internal complaint about the harassment. The date is 12 October 2017 so the misfits publishing alternative statements about harassment are lying. I have redacted the section that identifies underage victims.
The next internal email from Larissa Shapiro at Mozilla admits that kids are at risk.
Emma Irwin from Mozilla admits this is a serious matter and asks me to speak to Marta, Mozilla's HR investigator.
Instead of thanking me, they vilified my family.
Why does McDonalds protect their brand from this type of thing but open source software organizations spend over $120,000 on legal fees to cover it up?
The community elected me as a representative in April 2017. As a representative, I took reports from victims and then I even witnessed this behavior with my own eyes. The people accusing Alex Jurado are all remaining anonymous and hiding behind a protestant web site. I publicly identified myself as a witness to give my support to the women and other men have vilified my family for that.
The next piece of evidence in the Outreachy grooming scandal is that women were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). I never saw an NDA in any other voluntary open source software organization. What are they trying to hide with that?
A fifth piece of evidence is the witness statement of Arjen Kamphuis. He sent me the message with a digital signature so even though he disappeared, the digitial signature proves he is an independent witness and it is not a message forged by somebody else.
A sixth piece of evidence is that the Albanian female whistleblowers created an association in Switzerland, Open Source Diversity and the association opened a Swiss bank account. Kristi is now employed at the GNOME Foundation. Jona was a finalist in Red Hat's women in open source awards.
We took a copy of the Debian.ch Swiss constitution and adapted it to create Open Source Diversity as a Verein under Article 60 of the Swiss Civil Code.
Then we went to Swiss PostFinance and opened an account:
When I created the Software Freedom Institute, I felt that I had a conflict of interest with Open Source Diversity so I resigned from that other role.
The signature forms for the bank account show that each of the women had individual signing authority. They did not depend on me as a gatekeeper for anything.
Under Australian law, coercive control of women is a crime. The Non-Disclosure Agreement is a clear example of coercive control.
The creation of a separate association and the opening of the bank account was undertaken to help female victims of crime to avoid coercive control by the local Albanian men.
Other people in Debian violated the privacy of the Albanian female whistleblowers by leaking rumors about abuse.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. █