I agree, the quoted statement by @rhettinger is just plain misleading. I didn’t even want to comment on this topic before I saw this quote.
I myself been a witness and even a target of a few abuse incidents (many of which I reported and still have evidence of) way before the SC became a thing. Some of which were way harsher than the links that @tiran shared. That said, this is a tricky topic to discuss openly because many here don’t want to publicly share the especially damning evidence as it will irreversibly harm the abusers. This is something that I, for example, don’t want to be responsible for, so I trust the SC to act on it.
The fact that those issues were essentially ignored in the past and that the abusers just continued the abuse is reprehensible. As is the fact that many core developers I know prefer to not open PRs against certain std lib modules because nothing but headache and shame would result out of that. I’m very happy that we started to pay attention to these issues. Those who cannot fathom that they behave wrong and that they hurt other people (sometimes continuously) for no reason whatsoever should not be missed.