Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I still have a hard time believing the average person would not accept an invite to a party at a rich guy's mansion if it had a few household names in attendance. And feel chuffed to bits if Epstein took a liking to them and wanted to introduce them to more people, and would easily look past his minor legal trouble.
97% is hyperbole but it would be high.
I think there's a difference between accepting one-time invitation - which I'd accept from a lot of people, if only out of (somewhat morbid) curiosity - and entering a prolonged association while receiving tangible benefits. I wouldn't fault a person who met Epstein once or maybe got introduced by a common acquaintance and didn't immediately threw a drink in his face and run away screaming. People don't do such things. But I would fault a person who had prolonged, extended, beneficial relationship with Epstein while fully knowing who he is. You can't really control who you meet. But you can control who you maintain friendship with.
That's the key here. How do you prove someone fully knew who he was? My contention is that the people who were curious about it were probably satisfied pretty easily. From my original comment:
Absent seeing him mess with underage girls, or noticing a lot of underage girls in his company, it's probably not that legible.
For example, AFAIR we have communications from Chomsky where he specifically discusses Epstein's troubles and gives him advice as to how to handle it. I think it's sufficient to establish he knew. There other pieces of evidence which mention specific details enough to establish knowledge. In some other cases, the perp just brags about it - like Polanski, who AFAIR said something like "everybody wants to do it, they are just jealous I got to do it".
Then there's a plausibility criteria. As they say in the legal speak, "knew or should have known" - we're not talking about some naive children, a lot of these people are mature, experienced adults who have a top positions in some very competitive fields and have considerable power. You don't get this by just stumbling around blindly. You get this by acquiring, processing and using a lot of information, and the information about who Epstein was were widely available in public at least since his first conviction, and a lot of non-public information was definitely also available for anybody who knows how to ask and has access - and those people were exactly the people who had access and knew how to ask - otherwise they would never achieve the position they were in. There could be an occasion case of genius savant who achieves high position somewhere but is entirely naive in the ways of the world otherwise - but that could not be the case for dozens of people for decades. Virtually all of them were in the position where you know such things, and thus it is proper to conclude they knew - or were willfully blind, which is the same as knowing because to purposely not to look into something you need to know there's something there you don't want to look at.
With Epstein, just as with a number of others, it never was one thing. Even in initial conviction in 2008 there were 36 identified victims. You don't get a party island and a plane called "Lolita express" for an one-time thing. And that thing continued after he got his wrist slap. When you're doing it constantly, there's always a pattern. And if the pattern keeps for years, it becomes noticeable. He didn't do it alone in the dark basement. That was the point - he invited people. And eventually it becomes common knowledge to people who are in the same circles as the perpetrator is. The whole point is Epstein did not move on, he kept on, and a lot of people were involved too.
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