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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14297 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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The FBI says Epstein wasn't trafficking women for powerful men.

It's tempting to say "cover up", and this saga has united all camps on the lurid "pedo cabal" narrative. We were told back in November that journalists weren't allowed to ask questions to the alleged survivors, and it seems at least one of the survivors' testimony at Maxwell's trial was questionable:

Members of the jury, I have a limiting instruction. I anticipate that you’ll hear testimony from the next witness about physical contact that she says she had with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell in New Mexico. I instruct you that the alleged physical contact she says occurred with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell in New Mexico was not, quote, illegal sexual activity, end quote, as the government has charged in the indictment. I’ll give you more instructions on the legal term, quote, illegal sexual activity, end quote, at the end of the case. However, to the extent you conclude that her testimony is relevant to the issues before you, you may consider it, but you may not consider this testimony as any kind of reflection on Mr. Epstein’s nor Ms. Maxwell’s character or propensity to commit any of the crimes charged in the document.

She (Annie Farmer) acknowledged that when she applied to receive millions of dollars from the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program — drawn from the Epstein estate — she wrote on the application that she experienced “sexual abuse” in the form of “hand-holding.” For this, she ended up receiving $1.5 million, not counting whatever she might have received from the subsequent settlement funds, such as JP Morgan.

https://x.com/mattforney/status/2021297917424734429#m

I don't like to quote Forney, but this is another "survivor" there's reason to be skeptical about.

The “other victim” Brown references is Sarah Ransome. Who is Sarah Ransome? She’s a person who says she came to New York City from London, by way of South Africa, when she was 22 years old. So already, right off the bat, nothing Ransome says — even if we were to take it all at face value — would corroborate anything remotely related to any pedophilic sex-trafficking enterprise. Nonetheless, here are some noteworthy facts about Ransome. She said that when she first arrived in NYC, in 2006, she generated income by working with an “agency,” through which she would be “paid to spend dinner with a gentleman.” For such dinners, she said, she would receive $1,500. On certain occasions, she engaged in sexual relations with these “gentlemen” on her “own accord” — because, she said, sometimes they “happened to be really good looking.” So that’s what this adult, Sarah Ransome, was doing at the time she later claimed she was brutally enslaved in a heinous sex-trafficking ring.

When she became acquainted with Epstein, Ransome said, he began to pay for all her living expenses, including accommodations (an elegant apartment on the Upper East Side), transportation, food, and medical visits. She started traveling with Epstein on his private jet to his private island, with the understanding that she was to be available to provide him with massages upon request. During one of these massage sessions, she said, Epstein asked her to undress and lie down on the massage table, which she did. Epstein then started to perform a massage on Ransome, she said, and it turned sexual. Ransome was asked if she told Epstein to stop. “No, I didn’t,” she said. She confirmed that she had an orgasm during the encounter.

I grant that “Convicted sex offender did not, in fact, abuse this specific accuser” isn't a headline that's likely to win any awards for tact, but I'm still vexed that we are expected to grant “survivor testimony” near unqeustioned social immunity even when the factual record (sometimes to a legal standard) has already established that no such abuse occurred in the instance alleged.

Interestingly, the latest files revealed that Epstein had recommended his own lawyer to Robert Kraft to beat charges (against Kraft) of trafficking women from China. Instead, all charges against Kraft and 24 other men were dropped, and it was four of those women (aged 41 to 60) whom he allegedly trafficked who were arrested, charged and convicted.

Irregardless of any new developments in this case, the public and all political camps have latched on to this "pedo cabal" narrative to let it unravel. Epstein appears to have been a sexual predator who, in at least one period of his life, did engage in conduct meeting trafficking definitions involving minors (to himself). But there's nothing to substantiate a baroque, centrally managed blackmail syndicate spanning half the planet. Wealthy and powerful people likely did participate in morally compromising environments, but there is little evidence that a structured, coordinated conspiracy of the sort popular imagination has constructed ever existed.

EDIT: I'm heading to work, will read the replies later, but I gotta drop this piece by Michael Tracey, as it's pretty damning regarding Virginia Roberts Giuffre's credibility. Here are the article highlights:

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York found the marquee Epstein “survivor,” Virginia Roberts Giuffre, also known as VRG, to be so lacking in credibility that they were impelled to compose a lengthy December 19, 2019 memo detailing the many preposterous flaws with her many fantastical tales.

— They said they were “unable to corroborate” the central claim of VRG’s purported victimization, which had also given rise to the very essence of Epstein mythology as we now know it: that she was “lent out” for sexual services to prominent men, such as Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz.

— They noted that VRG’s accounts of her own sexual abuse were “internally inconsistent,” and not just over long periods of time, but within a single interview they conducted with her on September 9, 2019.

— They noted that VRG admitted to repeatedly lying about basic facts, destroying evidence, and telling falsehoods to the media.

— They noted that VRG schemed with a tabloid trash journalist, Sharon Churcher of the Daily Mail, to generate “big headlines” by accusing lots of prominent people of heinous child-sex crimes, in hopes that this would entice prospective publishers to buy their forthcoming “memoir” for big bucks.

— They noted that VRG claimed the FBI told her they were aware of “40 other Epstein victims,” but the FBI never told her any such thing.

— They noted that VRG had falsely claimed the FBI told her “Epstein had cameras watching her at all times,” and repeated this tantalizing claim to the media, but the FBI never told her any such thing. And indeed, they were “not aware of any such cameras.”

— They noted that VRG became “particularly combative” when asked for specific details of her claims, at one point cursing at the Assistant US Attorneys when they requested more information about the specific instances in which Ghislaine Maxwell had purportedly “directed her to have sex with another person.” An infuriated VRG eventually proclaimed: “She’s the one who brought me to be trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein in the fucking first place!” Which, conspicuously, did not answer the prosecutors’ question. Oh what I wouldn’t give for the video footage of VRG frothing at a stone-faced Maurene Comey.

— They noted that VRG “began using drugs so heavily that Epstein said he did not want her around anymore.” VRG has long acknowledged consuming large quantities of memory-impairing drugs during her tenure as a supposed sex slave, but I’m not aware of the drug-taking habit ever being cited as the proximate cause of her departure from Epstein. (But I could be misremembering; I’ve consumed such a lunatic amount of this material, I might as well be on some mind-melting substance.) Either way, VRG’s excess drug consumption is not supposed to be mentioned in polite company, because we’re not to “shame” her, even though VRG’s self-told memories of sexual misfortune many years after the fact are what unfortunately form the basis of the currently-existing Epstein mythology.

— They noted that VRG made a “continuous stream” of “sensationalized” claims in her public media appearances.

— They noted that VRG falsely claimed the FBI had told her there was a “credible” death threat against her, and repeated this in public several times, including in front of the Manhattan federal courthouse after the infamous August 27, 2019 struggle-session hearing I’ve previously written about. The memo says the FBI actually told her the exact opposite: that there were no credible threats against her! WTF!

Tracey has been kind enough to attach a copy of the memo, for those interested.

But there's nothing to substantiate a baroque, centrally managed blackmail syndicate spanning half the planet. Wealthy and powerful people likely did participate in morally compromising environments, but there is little evidence that a structured, coordinated conspiracy of the sort popular imagination has constructed ever existed.

This argument is rather weak when there are still significant amounts of the epstein files left completely unreleased, and what has been released is rife with plenty of illegal and unmerited redactions. The Trump admin has already had to unredact some of the files already because of how many there are. And that's despite the incredibly short time limit and restrictions they're allowing the senators to see the unredacted files for.

If there's nothing substantial to be gleaned, why is there still so much being actively hidden? Does the Trump admin just engage in coverups for the fun of it? This strategy of drawing it out for seemingly no reason has been nothing but egg on their face over and over, why do they insist on slow walking it and hiding so much of the files? This is the equivalent of walking into a kid's room after you told them to clean and they have that stereotypical cartoon bulge in the rug and saying "ah well must be clean then"

But ok sure, let's assume it really is just a nothingburger. Well that's what they get for spending years apparently lying to the public and courting the "conspiracy theorists" with bold claims. You can't just keep talking about the elite pedo rings you're gonna drain the swamp of, get into power and then say "nothing here". The only reason this even blew up is because they made releasing the files a whole spectacle, claiming they had the client list and other important details right there on Pam Bondi's desk and they would hand out information to journalists only to completely 180 and decide to hide everything.

Edit: And also, it seems pretty clear he was acting as a high class pimp even if all the women he pimped out were adults. That's still bad that he would have been running a fancy prostitute esque service for the elites, even if it's at least not a pedo ring.

This argument is rather weak when there are still significant amounts of the epstein files left completely unreleased, and what has been released is rife with plenty of illegal and unmerited redactions. If there's nothing substantial to be gleaned, why is there still so much being actively hidden? Does the Trump admin just engage in coverups for the fun of it?

Okay I should probably clarify first that my intention is not to defend Trump or Clinton or anyone else specifically, that is why I refrained name dropping any R or D in my OP. All of those are perfectly valid questions, and indeed the optics of staggered releases, redactions, and rhetorical overpromising warrant distrust (and maybe even disgrace) after years of grandiose “client list” language. What I'm getting at is epistemic proportionality. When key accusers have recanted major allegations, contradicted earlier statements, or demonstrated patterns of embellishment, well, not saying you should automatically invalidate all claims. But it does materially weaken the scaffolding required to sustain the theory of a coordinated, global pedo enterprise. If the most explosive extensions of the story (global ring, systematic third party trafficking, blackmail architecture) rest disproportionately on accounts that later wobble under scrutiny, isn't it fair to expect a greater evidentiary threshold?

Firstly, just as a general rule, we should expect crazy people are going to come out of the woodwork and make insane accusations (probably in many cases easily-disprovable) about pretty much any public figure. Some people are crazy and will grab the spotlight any chance they get. The fact that spurious accusations have been made of Epstein does not mean that there's no fire here, necessarily. (It does mean, imho, that we should take the numbers ("1200 victims" or whatever) with a grain of salt.)

Secondly, it should surprise no one if savvy operators arrange for such a scenario to be made, although I've seen no specific evidence of that here. But if there was actually worldwide conspiracy to do illegal stuff, would you not come up with trivially easy ways to undermine any case that could be made against you? Basic misdirection techniques are, well, basic, and I don't think pointing to what could be a pretty trivial misdirect that any competent conspiracy could put together and use it as slam-dunk evidence against a competent conspiracy is actually very persuasive.

The real thrust of my comment here is less about Epstein specifically and more the drum I keep banging on in here, which is how to evaluate how conspiracies (can) work. And while it's not clear to me that Epstein, who seems to have been pretty cavalier in his emails, bothered to take such defensive measures I think anyone who is contemplating the possibility of a competent conspiracy ought to at least consider that such things might exist.

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