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The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.
I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.
EDIT: Trump has responded, and he's furious. It appears he desperately tried to have Rupert Murdoch crush the story, but that Murdoch apparently wasn't able to do so. Now he's promising to sue. Also, Hillary.
It also looks like he might cave and actually publicize it? I don't know if the grand jury stuff is all that people are interested in or what:
It’s funny to me that in real life, many a man will cop to being friends with various kinds of scumbags with the “yeah, I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister, but he never did anything to me” reasoning, but somehow when it comes to celebrity I’m expected to be scandalized that people stayed friends with Epstein even though he had a thing for 16 year old girls (whom they may well have believed were 18 anyway).
Even a thousand Epsteins wouldn’t be as bad as, say, the Rotherham scandal where 12 year olds were being sexually tortured and pimped to hundreds or thousands of strangers, sometimes dozens a day. Yes, what Epstein did (paying 16 year olds for sex and having them recruit their school friends for the same purpose) was cruel and wrong - and he deserved jail for it - but in the grand scheme of all sexual crimes it was far, far from the worst.
A surprising number of people just literally don't know that Eptstein's victims were adult-presenting teens who were mainly 16-17 and performed escort work. They think it's Rotherham, where elementary and middle school aged girls were used as brothel prostitutes.
Every society has distinguished between hetairia and porne. People are fine with the former as a vice other people engage in but furious at the latter involving citizen women.
Western society has been on a media diet of near-constant agitprop over at least the last 100 years equating 17 year olds with 7 year olds, and most people unironically believe it, including said 17 year olds.
Why on Earth would we start drawing the distinction now, especially when the delightful moral treat of getting to call public figures pedophiles presents itself (or at least, presents itself to a media who knows its audience has been sufficiently mindkilled to parrot it uncritically)?
These people mostly have nuanced-if-not positive views on grown men dating sixteen year olds. They are simply mistaken as to the actual ages of Epstein's victims.
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