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I think the primary beneficiary of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation was himself and maybe a small handful of actual friends, who he probably didn’t care to blackmail but may or may not have kept kompromat on. Separate to that was his love of the game and of impressing successful and powerful people, which he enjoyed doing his whole life, regardless of whether or not they shared his sexual proclivities. In the course of the latter he may have traded in secrets, although it was never close to being his main line of work.
We need to get to the bottom of this. Were there any pedophiles in the pedophile cabal, or was it wholly infiltrated by blackmailers with no authentic dedication to pedophilia at all?
Is there any gold in Fort Knox?
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?
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?
Actually, the age of consent in America varies by state, from 16 to 18. The myth that it's a flat 18 across the country is due to the fact that virtually all television and movies are made in California, where it is indeed 18.
That's another odd thing about this case, the operation regularly too great pains to hold their events in places where the age of concent was 18 (Florida and the USVI). It's odd that potentially two people from states where they are above the age of consent were brought together in a state or territory where the age of concent is 18 specifically to have carnal relations.
Not odd at all? If the whole point is blackmail, the of course you move the operation to where it is illegal.
Exactly! It's odd if we accept OPs framing that Epstein is a simple conman.
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My understanding (perhaps wrong) is that there was no actual pedophilia on Epstein’s island of the form that give people nightmares.
Forgive me for being lurid but I would have thought that if Epstein were deliberately luring in pedos there would be more 13-year-olds and 8-year-olds and fewer ‘haha she’s 17 years and 11 months old, pay up or I tell the police’ girls.
I can absolutely believe that Epstein found such entrapment to be a useful extra string in his bow but I doubt he was specifically advertising it as pedo paradise.
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.
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