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I really don't think this is true. In fact, you don't even remember the year correctly. It did have some news coverage but not much and basically nobody cared. The story started to pick up steam with the weird-online-right years later with pizzagate, it became a mainstream right wing talking point during biden but mainstream media continued to mostly avoid it until last year.
Even on google trends you can see that few were interested before he died. Bill Gates for reference.
It's very possible that for those people Epstein was just this guy with access to money that knew everyone. He had served a sentence but he was fully discharged and it was for getting a massage from a girl he might or might not have known to be underage, so whatever.
Ethics its one of the most bullshit branches of philosophy. All ethics needs to conform to your gut feeling of what is right and wrong and since that's not based on any a priori simple rule system they all need to be malleable enough to be made to conform. Outside of completely irrelevant thought experiments they also all end up being homomorph. How about we pretend they were christian? It says in the book of virtues that rape is bad but you also have to forgive, he paid penance, he shows contrition, Mary Magdalene and shit. There you go.
At the end of the day many evangelicals vote for an adulterer who grabs em by the pussy, why? Because there are other considerations, more important things. Ethics needs to be flexible, to bend which ever way. This is a good thing actually. The worst people in the world were the ones that took ethics seriously enough to suppress their gut instinct.
This seems most plausible. However...
I CARED.
I was in high school circa 2007, and I only really had an awareness of it because it happened right near my hometown so it was more featured in local newspapers, which I read voraciously at that age. And I mean the actual, physical paper.
And even then the coverage was rudimentary in terms of explaining what was happening. Dude was allegedly soliciting, possibly banging 16 year olds. In that neck of the woods, occasionally a socialite goes down for that.
So the story about some relatively mysterious, wealthy guy doing pervy old guy stuff wasn't the talk of the town. But me, reading virtually ALL the news about it... noticed the strange circumstances surrounding the situation, including the extremely light-handed sentencing and the odd level of privileges the guy was getting. By 2010, the guy was holding secret meetings at Harvard WHILE ON PROBATION.
And then weird dots that nobody ever actually put together but there was enough out there to put my spidey sense tingling in 2006-2008:
https://archive.is/CATIy
https://web.archive.org/web/20110616194257/http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2006/08/14/m1a_EPSTEIN_0814.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20120514032017/http://www.page2live.com/2007/09/12/lewinsky-prosecutor-joins-defense-of-clinton-crony/
https://web.archive.org/web/20080209131505/http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2008/02/06/0206EPSTEIN.html
Note how almost all of those are under the "local news" category.
The "Original" Epstein list was A journal with the names of the girls he predated that turned up after sentencing.
From a 2006 article:
All of this was open and known in 2006. It wasn't like he died in 2019 and suddenly all his connections to celebs came out. At literally NO POINT during any of this did the man himself ever make any public appearance or plea or otherwise attempt to preserve his reputation IT WAS LIKE HE DID NOT CARE if people thought he was a sexual predator. And as you can see from OP's post, apparently a many prominent person did NOT care... assuming they knew. Google was a thing and fairly popular at the time.
Compare that to the New York Times Article when he got sentenced, and how it skimps on details that were more prominent in the local stories.
Look, I read a lot of mystery books in my youth, lot of Sherlock Holmes, Hardy Boys... Scooby Doo. I could sense there was a lot to this story and also that someone(s) were very interested in keeping it tamped down. On the superficial level this fits a "rich guy escapes legal consequences" narrative alright, but there's a lot of missing pieces or pieces that do not fit. Then 10 years later he dies, Covid happens, Pizzagate, many events occur in rapid succession, oh and Ghislaine Maxwell is found hiding out in New Hampshire with armed, private security and yet still, nobody was able to effectively put together the full picture of exactly WHAT this guy's deal was, and who kept the lid on it. Not even me. Its a question I plan to ask God about should I arrive at the Pearly Gates, even if I'm denied entry I REALLY WANT TO KNOW.
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Law and Order made an Epstein episode of trafficking underage girls in 2011. Knowledge or a belief that he was doing more has been out there a lot longer. They just didn’t care.
Law and Order isn’t red tribe or even blue tribe. And obviously they eventually turned establishment woke. The idea he was doing more has been out there a long time. And they also got him out of trouble thru high level military/intelligence connections.
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They don't even mind adultery as long as she's not 17.
The issue at hand is the same people that don't mind adultery think that over a year in jail and life on the sex offender registry is not enough negative utils to compensate for the negative utils done to the underage girl who participated in the massage. This is despite the fact she said she did it willingly. To me, her utils couldn't have been that negative; she could have simply stopped coming. Surely something like 10 days in confinement would make up for her discomfort, so I think Epstein got a super disincentivizing sentence. And indeed, all the evidence I can find suggests he quit his activities after getting out of jail. So, the problem was solved, insofar as there was one. But for some reason, many people think he should have received somewhere near life in prison, and, lacking that, he ought to have been persona non grata while out of prison, and anybody who does or feels otherwise is guilty.
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