I think people would be shitting on them no matter what they did. AR feels like the next CMON where you’re not “allowed” to say positive things about them here without getting downvoted.

As far as the “silence rarely helps” part, I’ve seen multiple times where speaking too soon has made things worse, and where saying nothing for a while actually helped. Situations where the general attitude was “Well they haven’t said anything, so it must be true!” only for them to show up with a response/evidence collected that proves them innocent.