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Notes -
You're of course right that there are unknowns and gray areas, but… I'm just stuck thinking of things like the "massage" anecdote summarized in this old effortspot. (Its central thesis that there were no "real" Epstein files has of course suffered just a bit lately, but that's not really relevant to the point I'm making.) By accounts like these, while not all the girls Epstein liked were necessarily that young, we are very much not talking about him sleeping with normal prostitutes some of whom happened to be younger than they looked. Epstein seemed to specifically get off on shocking and "corrupting" ingenues, breaking their boundaries.
If I learn that my good buddy Bill has romantically dated seventeen-year-olds, or that he once hired a busty prostitute and still went through with the act after learning that she'd lied about her age - then yeah, I might be inclined to leave it at a private admonishment. But if I learn that my good buddy Bill has been hiring ordinary teenagers he's never met before to give him massages, then exposing himself to them when they arrive and attempting to escalate from there? In that case he's not the Bill I thought I was friends with. In the name of the friendship we had, I might give him one (1) chance to mend his ways, but if anything about his apology sounds phony, if I get the slightest hint that he's carried right on in months or years to come - then yeah, I'm calling the cops, or at least a local paper or something.
Obviously Trump wouldn't have been privy to this specific kind of encounter. But when we talk about Epstein sleeping with teens, we're very much talking about him liking to prey on ingenues, about a kind of soft-coercion at best - about a pervy taste for deflowering the young. We are not dealing with a comparatively excusable scenario along the lines of "you're sleeping with a lot of cheap whores, and it's a fact of life that some whores are actually 17, and even if notice noticed, it'll be materially apparent to anyone who sleeps with a lot of prostitutes that sleeping with the 17-year-old isn't actually qualitatively different or more wicked from sleeping with her 18-year-old colleague, so you develop a kind of YOLO attitude about it". That very much affects the extent to which I would judge an associate of Epstein's for keeping silent about what was going on if he did know.
As to how plausible it is that Trump did know… again, this set of tastes doesn't seem to me like something Epstein was trying very hard to hide to people who came to the island. Surely you would notice that while you're leading your buxom beauty back to the bedroom, Jeff is pawing at a nervous-looking girl in more casual clothing (never mind whether you can tell exactly what age she is)? And this is assuming he doesn't actively hint at his ability to procure such girls to you when you first come to the island, because he doesn't know what you like yet and has to find out somehow. Besides, the apparent veiled references to it from Trump seem pretty believable. But I will grant you that it is the most tentative part of the chain.
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