I posted in the original thread, but my post was largely ignored. I apologize if this comes off snooty or pretentious, but I am an attorney who works on these type of cases regularly and I have worked on both sides of them - representing plaintiffs and defendants. Simply put - there are likely two, three or four individuals that know exactly what happened here. Speculations, accusations, assumptions, and all the chaos that has gone on in the numerous threads about this is foolish. My job often requires me to speculate on fact patterns like this - and trust me it is incredibly difficult/nearly impossible to do so accurately. None of us know what happened here. This also does not mean that anyone is lying as there are numerous situations where every single thing said about this matter on both sides is actually the truth.
For example - everything David Ballard said happened might have indeed happened - he may have been harassed in a completely inappropriate manner, complained about it, been terminated shortly thereafter, and contemporaneously with his termination he may have been presented with a proposed severance/release form, and is justified in his feelings that the termination was the result of his complaints. On the flip side - Naughty Dog/Sony may have had other employment related issues with Mr. Ballard for some time, been considering terminating him, then when on the eve of doing so received notice from him that he was harassed by a co-worker, conducted an inconclusive investigation about this, decided based on the prior employment issues they wanted to terminate Mr. Ballard, and then decided that due to his allegations the termination was going to look ill-willed (even if it was potentially not), was a "high-risk" termination, and thus their attorneys advised them to offer a severance to potentially resolve things before they led to litigation. If you think this sounds far-fetched, similar scenarios occur all-the-time at tons of companies (and if you want to boycott all of these companies, good luck to you).
Or, what actually happened might be totally different, and we have no idea what the truth is. The above is a speculation - which as I said before is foolish (and yes I understand the hypocrisy in then laying out a hypothetical explanation, but that was to illustrate my point).
Now, of course it is reasonable to post something like "well, if what Mr. Ballard said occurred actually happened, that is horrible and I feel for him" but people desperately need to keep themselves in check here - on both sides. And if the mental breakdown stuff now being tossed out is true - do you really want to be on a message board denigrating someone suffering from something like that? I would hope not.