HereAndGone
27d ago
Had experience a couple of years back with a family member who tried suicide, and despite their protestations, it was one of the "cry for help" types rather than genuine "will kill myself for sure". They certainly intended to die, but the method they picked wasn't 100% fatal (indeed, looking it up, it wouldn't have been fatal at all but they didn't know that).
So yeah, people can try and kill themselves and even be serious about it, but not so serious as to pick a really working method. I think Epstein was the kind of guy who would try and use a suicide attempt to bargain his way out of things, he just mis-timed it and it turned out it worked.
HereAndGone
27d ago
I remain impressed by how you manage to drag abortion in to any discussion whatsoever. Nobody was talking about 19th century attitudes to the personhood of the foetus, but there you went!
HereAndGone
27d ago
He got off the hook in 2008 and pled not guilty here. I don't see why he wouldn't at least fight the charges.
He got off once. He'd used up all his favours. It was likely the truth was going to come out about how he'd been lying all along, and the entire house of cards had collapsed.
HereAndGone
27d ago
The good times were over. There was no way he was rebuilding from this. And he was a guy who had spent his entire adult life re-inventing himself so he could clamber up to the circles of the rich and powerful. Now he had a future of jail time, then going back to being poor and obscure. Just being depressed and despairing for a short time, suicide in that time could have seemed the best option. Yeah, if he had lived till the next day, he might well have changed his mind about trying to kill himself - but he didn't live.
HereAndGone
27d ago
Or he's just really fed-up with people winking and nudging that he was fucking 14 and 15 year olds. I can see him being defensive about "so I hung out with him, so what? So did a lot of people back then, there were a lot of people in those social circles" and "yeah there were girls at those parties, there's always girls at those parties, attractive young women like rich and powerful men, why are you making such a big deal out of this?".
Trump is not somebody to sit back coolly and take a rational approach to this kind of constant dripping of irritation and reporters and others harassing him about Epstein. Particularly after the E. Jean Carroll case where he wasn't convicted of rape but the judge then came out and said "yeah you can say it was rape". People really are out to get him, even if he is being paranoid.
HereAndGone
27d ago
No, that can't be it, because there's one alleged victim who has been trawling the story around for years (and failing in all the law suits) that Trump and Epstein raped her when she was 12/13:
A federal lawsuit filed in California in April 2016 against Epstein and Donald Trump by a California woman alleged that the two men sexually assaulted her at a series of parties at Epstein's Manhattan residence in 1994, when she was 13 years old.
It may well be that there is no convenient little list or black book of clients that can be produced, and any records available are tangled up in "yeah but if you go ahead and say X was an Epstein client they will immediately drag you into court" so that the promised Big Reveal can't be made after all.
The trouble with high-profile cases like these is that there are then a lot of people happy to come forward with claims from "back in the day" which can't be substantiated (but they can peddle them to the media for nice sums of money):
On October 25, 2016, allegations were made by two men stating that Trump had attended and partaken in sex parties filled with underage minor females as young as 15 years old who were induced with promises of career advancement. Illegal drugs were also alleged to have been provided to the minors.
One man was identified as model and actor Andy Lucchesi, while the other was identified as a fashion photographer who spoke on condition of anonymity. Both men claim to have been acquaintances of Trump during that decade, which one described as his "Trump days".
Lucchesi, for his part, claimed that he saw Trump engage in sexual activity with the girls but did not witness him taking illicit drugs. Regarding the age of the girls, Lucchesi said he himself never specifically asked about their ages, only remarking of the attendees "a lot of girls, [aged] 14, look 24."
That part seems like careful legal advice about skating past any direct accusations and then counter-accusations of libel - after all, you never said X knowingly fucked a 14 year old when she could convincingly pass for 20, now did you? But it's sufficiently juicy a claim for the paper to run with the story.
HereAndGone
28d ago
On a cursory reading, it seems to be more that it was Epstein who liked them very young, and the other girls were recruited around ages 14-16 or so by other girls or by Maxwell and then groomed into being the party favours by promises of modelling careers and the like, with threats then if they tried leaving.
HereAndGone
28d ago
Paedophilia is the term that needs definition. There have been some extreme claims of 12-14 year olds being raped, but it seems in the main to be more "underage by American law" which is "not 18 yet" (in other countries, age of consent is 16, for example).
So he was operating off "all men are attracted to hot young things" and throwing parties where there would always be a supply of attractive young women to pay attention to the guests and to act as arm candy. Pimping them out? Yeah, that's the big question here. If you're at one of these parties and the attractive young woman expresses interest in being your one night stand, do you take that as "this is a sex worker operated by my host" or the general "yeah attractive young women do throw themselves at me because I'm rich/important"?
Epstein was a creep, and he was recruiting vulnerable young women to exploit, and he probably wasn't adverse to gathering intelligence/kompromat on the people he invited to those parties as blackmail material and insurance. Epstein himself probably liked them young, and the younger the better (see the rumours about him as a teacher at that private school). But was he deliberately pimping out underage girls to people who knew they weren't 18/17/16? That is the entire rationale for the scandal and the conspiracy theories and the "he didn't really commit suicide" allegations, and that is what remains to be proven.
Similar cases of accusations of child sex abuse against high profile people in the UK have been tainted by fraudsters such as Carl Beech and by an atmosphere of over-correction, where police forces swung from dismissing accusations against celebrities to taking prosecutions on the basis of flimsy accusations which later collapsed.
Things such as the following - how credible are they? Could they have happened? Were they just people trying to jump on the bandwagon like Beech did in the UK?
Julie Brown's 2018 exposés in the Miami Herald identified eighty victims and located about sixty of them. She quotes the then police chief Reiter as saying "This was 50-something 'shes' and one 'he'—and the 'shes' all basically told the same story." Details from the investigation included allegations that 12-year-old triplets were flown in from France for Epstein's birthday, and flown back the following day after being sexually abused by the financier.
They should be able to find out if 12 year old French triplets flew in and flew out of Florida, but did anyone do so?
HereAndGone
28d ago
Also sounds more like a stalker who followed her during periods of activity and went inactive when she was inactive? There's a lot of crazy people out there, someone obsessed with Ghislaine Maxwell who persuaded themselves into a fantasy life version of her (see the movie Single White Female for a fictional version of this) isn't the most implausible thing.
HereAndGone
28d ago
It might be easy for a "boy toy" to get himself in a good position, staying there isn't easy, and you've described a competent man.
I think Epstein was competent (he managed to get and hold that job at Bear Stearns) but he was also greedy and couldn't stop himself from ruining a good thing by trying to profit even more out of it. His fundamental untrustworthiness meant he couldn't hold down anything honest, and he got himself entangled in his whole web of fake stories, deceit, and trying to find shortcuts to easy money.
Did he really commit suicide or was he killed? Suicide is odd. He might indeed have done so, because even if he survived all the scandal, he was looking at years in prison and once he got out, he would have nothing left. No money, no contacts, no chance of rebuilding his fortune and status. This was not a man who would be content to live a poor, obscure life. Momentary despair and seeing no other way out? That's plausible.
(Also plausible: he didn't intend for it to be successful but rather a 'cry for help' suicide, banked on the guards finding him in time and then he'd maybe be moved to better conditions or his lawyer could argue for clemency from the court due to his mental distress, but it didn't work out for him that way).
HereAndGone
28d ago
Regarding Maxwell, I think that was two con men trying to exploit one another. As mentioned in the original post, Maxwell had few connections in the USA and his media empire was built on sand (see the pensions fund scandal) and he wanted to use Epstein's contacts to get a foothold in the US, and Epstein of course wanted to use another rich guy for whatever he could extract out of him.
HereAndGone
28d ago
I agree that Epstein was a fabulist so we can't trust any claims he might have made. I think if there was any 'intelligence gathering' it was more akin to him trying to shop gossip around to anyone who would pay for it ("hey I have all these connections with rich and important people, you might be interested in what I can find out") because he was that sort of untrustworthy little toad, and that the best/only connections he had as contacts were Mossad or somebody who knew somebody who was connected to Mossad, and they might have bought bits'n'scraps because hey, why not? this guy might turn out to be useful sometime if he ever does stumble across anything important or we can finally find a use for him (I have no doubt, for instance, that they'd be happy to gather blackmail material on the Royal Family via 'Randy Andy' just because).
HereAndGone
28d ago
I don't think anyone should aspire to those kinds of occupations, nor romanticize or fetishize them.
And yet the work has to be done, and we don't yet have the robots to do it. All the unglamorous necessary toil to support civilisation.
HereAndGone
28d ago
The running plot, such as it is, throughout the books is good but it's mostly "the Napoleonic Wars at sea" so unless you're absolutely fascinated by the minutiae of naval campaigns, the real interest is "ooh so this was what life was like on a ship at that time" and then it's "will Jack advance his career, will Stephen ever have a happy relationship, never mind they're best bros and we all love learning natural history".
There are just so many great lines (everyone's favourite is this one) (warning: TV Tropes link):
Stephen acquires a sloth in South America, and it immediately befriends everybody aboard. Except Jack, who for some inexplicable reason gets rebuffed- the poor thing cried when it first saw him. When he finally resorts to feeding the sloth bits of ship's biscuit soaked in rum, he soon wins its friendship but ends up turning it into an alcoholic. Thus leading to a line found nowhere else in literature: "Jack, you have debauched my sloth."
But Stephen is like me - all the nautical terms and explanations just go right over my head and don't lodge. Gluppit the prawling strangles, indeed!
Stephen: The moment you are afloat you become pragmatical and absolute, a bashaw —do this, do that, gluppit the prawling strangles, there—no longer a social being at all.
You start off reading for the "Napoleonic Wars at sea" but then you sort of forget about that and treat it like 'Stephen's Big Natural History Expedition' and 'Jack climbs the ranks' so that the great world-shaking events become background, almost, to the little dramas played out in their world.
HereAndGone
28d ago
I keep forgetting the Zoomers are now old enough to be making dubious fashion choices of their own. And Alpha are the upcoming new generation!
HereAndGone
28d ago
Please tell me it was at least (1) his ex wife and (2) this bint wasn't the reason the marriage broke down. Because otherwise, if frying pans were meeting crania, I would not blame the (ex) missus one iota for the idiocy of both (ex) husband and new squeeze.
HereAndGone
28d ago
Only one tattoo? How big? How tasteless?
It's not all tattoos, it's the "covered head to toe in badly drawn, stereotypical crap" tattoos.
And now I realise I've wandered into the minefield of deporting immigrants based on tattoos: no, that's not a gang symbol or a drug symbol, he just, er, likes nature which is why he has plant leaves tattooed on his hand! 😁
HereAndGone
28d ago
Does anyone who isn't a full on progressive zealot disagree with you that a person tatted up that that guy is probably bad news?
Tattoos, and lots of tattoos, and prominently visible tattoos, are now socially acceptable in more and more milieus. You can even do social psychology about the prejudice!
HereAndGone
28d ago
Hey, I come from a time and place when teething remedies were "some whiskey in the milk". But when you have eight kids, the older kids are doing a lot of the work minding the younger ones. It's the first one or two need the most attention. And it was not commonplace for everyone not wealthy/high status to put their babies into an entire separate room on their own (and the people who did do that, also employed nursemaids and/or nannies to attend to them during the night):
In Edwardian times, for the wealthy and mid-tier classes, a nursery was a suite of rooms at the top of a house, including the night nursery, where the children slept, and a day nursery, where they ate and played, or a combination thereof. The nursery suite would include some bathroom facilities and possibly a small kitchen. The nurse (nanny) and nursemaid (assistant) slept in the suite too, to be within earshot of the sleeping children.
HereAndGone
28d ago
Yeah, the victim isn't 100% blameless either, he was an unmarried father-of-two (it's unclear if he was living with his partner or separated from her) and he was buying drugs from his 'friend'. But he might have been going to change his life around (he was working as a chef), it's hard to know because of course the family will always say the victim was a great guy.
He wasn't covered in tattoos and crazy looking like his drug-dealing friend, though.
HereAndGone
28d ago
Yeah, but a lot of these women grew up in shitty conditions of broken families, single mothers, drugs and petty crime in the environment. They should know better. They seem not to, and I can't figure it out.
I see the same in reporting of abuse cases, where the current girlfriend gives a character reference to the guy accused of stalking/beating his ex. I do not understand the mindset. "Oh yeah, he beat her up but he'll never do the same to me!"
Then again, there are women out there in affairs with married men convinced that any day now he'll get that divorce and marry them, or they are weeping over how he's been lying to them. Yeah, imagine that: a guy who has demonstrated he will cheerfully lie to his wife about what he's doing and is willing to cheat on her then turned around and lied to you/cheated to you, his adulterous affair partner. Whoever could have seen that coming?
HereAndGone
29d ago
the Zoomer broccoli haircut
Is that the same one as the undercut hairstyle? Because I can't stand that, especially when partnered with the hair dye. It screams "I am a Special Snowflake, dare not to impugn my Queerness!"
HereAndGone
29d ago
Yeah, I'm coming around to "by the time you rack up your tenth conviction for a violent crime or you have a proven track record of being a professional shop lifter, no more 'second chances' or out on bail early, you go to jail and do your full time".
There's just too many "and the guy who raped/murdered/did bad thing was found to be on early release/out on bail for a previous charge of rape/murder/doing bad thing" instances. Maybe that's because those are the ones who get reported so it's a Chinese Robber Fallacy, but you know what? I don't care if it's a fallacy. This pitbull mauled fifteen other dogs before, I'm pretty sure it's going to maul a sixteenth if given the chance.
HereAndGone
29d ago
I'm a woman myself, I don't understand it, but I've seen enough of women who do hang out with these kinds of guys and shack up with them and have kids by them.
I don't know if it's because they've grown up where all the men around are like this, or what.
Oh, yeah. "He's not like that with me" up to the minute he is like that.
I don't get it, I genuinely don't. "Love" must be one hell of a drug, to hollow your brain out like that.
Also, in a lot of these situations and that class, the guy doesn't give a damn about if the woman gets knocked up or what. If she wants babies, fine. If she doesn't want babies, fine. It's her job to ensure she doesn't get pregnant. So it's perfectly plausible he'd threaten to kill the baby because it isn't his baby to him in any meaningful way. (The only use of "my client is a father of three children" to the likes of those scumbags is so their lawyers can plead them off in court).
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