Don't know about you but my mum didn't ply me with drugs and booze to get me to do the chores.

What an odd comparison.

Stepped down to spend more time with his children.

at least, I think I heard 'his'

Absolutely, if Reb77Br actually knew the background of many young victims, he would understand that there most likely wasn't a mother/strong, caring parent at home who would ask their daughter to clean their room or teach them to love themselves and protect their bodies.

TBH I'd ignore her posts.

She appears to spend far too much time on Internet Conspiracy sites or American daytime T.V.

Is it a woman?

Does that matter?

At least one person in Epstein's inner circle was a woman.

True, true ... he actually had several women working with him in the operation.

Well, lets just get some facts together:
- people love to throw the word Pedo at anyone, but this case is not pedophilia as we are not talking about children, but mid to late teens. I know there is a term for it but I wont google it now...
- any 16 or 17 year old American girl knows what sex is at that age. If some very rich but old and creepy looking guy asks you if you want to fly in his private jet to his private carribbean island and stay for a while... you need to be extremly naive to not know whats going on. And while I did not follow the story completely: My understanding was that he told the girls and offered them relatively large amounts of money for their services...

So: Yes, they were underage. Yes, prostitution is generally illegal in most parts of the US and so yes: Eppstein is a criminal and so are all of his friends taking part in it. But for me is this not the same level of child abuse which we have seen in many other cases. And girls who willingly went into prostitution and now make a lot of money for talking about it are not exactly the Kampusch or Fritzl sort of victims.

I think you are missing a considerable part of the picture regarding Epstein. While the main girl in the Andrew side of the story was 17, the charges against Epstein including recruiting 13-14 year old girls. I also seem to remember that the 17 yo was recruited for “massages” at 15. Regardless of that, the missing piece is that while you are correct regarding a 17 year old girl being physically mature and with raging hormones, she is not necessarily mentally mature and worldly wise to understand what she is getting herself into. The likes of Epstein, seemingly aided by Maxwell have taken advantage of what you call naivety to groom these girls to be abused by these powerful older men. It’s no different to kebab shop owners plying vulnerable girls of a similar age with alcohol, drugs and attention (google Rotherham child abuse for more details) and then passing them round their friends. I also have no doubt that this has been going on since the beginning of time, but it doesn’t make it right.

In this interview, Andrew's accuser makes no mention of a gradual or Rotherham-style grooming process. Instead, she says her sex "training", and she's quite explicit, started "immediately" and took place "every day". If this is true, she would have known right from the start that she'd be expected to provide sexual services. She uses the word "groom" in relation to Ghislaine Maxwell (who has denied her allegations, as has Alan Dershowitz), but doesn't explain in the interview (has she elsewhere?) what she means by this, what strategy was used to turn her into a "sex slave" and how she was "forced" to sleep with other men. Why does she miss out these key parts of the story?

In the interview, she says she met Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein when she was 16, the voiceover says when she was working in the spa at Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. What was she doing in the spa? Handing out towels? Massages? Was she really prostituted against her will, or did she do it willingly, or did she "just" give massages and/or serve as an attractive decorative item to a sad but rich old bloke and possibly his friends? If she was only doing privately for Epstein and Co what she did in the spa, there's not really much of a story there.

For anyone thinking it's beyond the pale to question Virginia Roberts because it "blames the victim", I'd ask you to consider the possibility that some opportunists, even women, might find it a lot easier than benefit or insurance fraud to come up with a compelling but impossible to prove story, so easy to research online and/or copy whoever has gone public before, in exchange for media payouts and/or other financial rewards such as payment for a memoir or compensation, while holding a metaphorical gun to the heads of genuine victims of such crime in the style of "believe me or they get it".

Shall we start with this quote:
https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/loc...220097825.html
“Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right,’’ said Courtney Wild, who was 14 when she met Epstein

Sounds pretty Rotherham to me.

I certainly would question the word of one person, but when there are 80 telling the same story, I begin to be more inclined to believe it.

The recently unsealed court documents have shown that Epstein bought multiple books on sex slavery purchased from Amazon, inlcuding this:

''Slavecraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude''




Amazon describes the book as:


''Principles, Skills and Tools. The author of Ties That Bind joins forces with a grateful slave to produce this gripping and personal account on the subject of consensual slavery.''




cheers
SC

Even in the age of the internet when it's so easy to research a story, e.g. Rotherham? As I see it, if the first person to make such allegations about a particular person is telling the truth, anyone saying "me too" could be telling the truth or not, but if the first person is not telling the truth, it's only logical that the rest can't be either. 10 or 50 or 100 times 0 is still 0.

Could a surge of false insurance claims be possible, but a surge of false sexual abuse claims impossible?


Britons’ fake claims of holiday illness fall as hotels fight back

"An epidemic of false food-poisoning claims that has cost hoteliers hundreds of millions of pounds and threatened an end to the all-inclusive package holiday has triggered a ferocious legal fightback from the travel industry.

Between 2013 and 2016, a 500% increase in gastric sickness claims by British holidaymakers prompted some hoteliers to warn they would withdraw the holiday deals from the UK market."

Christ. And this is why so many victims of assault, rape and abuse never come forward. They think no-one will believe them, think it is their fault, that they did something wrong. That the connected, powerful, wealthy folk who hurt them are untouchable.

Sure, plenty of children - for that is legally what they are - are aware of, talking about, having sex from early teens and up. That is a very different kettle of fish from grooming, coercing, forcing.

Prince Andrew did that bloody interview, IMO, out of sheer bloody arrogance. He clearly believes he did nothing wrong. His lifelong experience of power and entitlement gives him a very different world view: there are people that are like him, and then everybody else who doesn't really matter.

Ignoring the you ignoring the more pertinent part of my post... The abuse started in 2001 and was being discussed by Epstein’s lawyer in 2007. I hardly think that time period was the age of the internet for those vulnerable girls. Just so we are clear, you believe that these 80 women are all after a payout from his estate and have been since at least 2007?

Forgive me if I am wrong, but like me, I believe that you are a vocal opponent of the business practices of DeVere. Is that all people jumping on the bandwagon for a payday?

This is very much like the old project manager joke. Plenty of conspiracy theorists believe that these ~80 women will have been rounded up, paid and coached to parrot the same story.

If you've ever had to run even a small team of people at work, all of whom are well paid professionals and in theory should be on the same page and you source opinions from them, you'll get as many varied opinions as there are people on the team.

Corralling 80 fundamentally similar stories from 80 people is nigh on impossible, even if they are being paid and coached.

Maybe you have no idea how corrupting minors into prostitution works. There is a lot of manipulating and intimidation, and fooling them to agree with acts they have no idea where they may lead. Lied to, promised material advantages etc. Yes, some of them are sexually active and may agree with having intercourse with older males, but from here to these sordid affairs is a long way that it is also paved with threats, blackmail, physical abuse etc.
What kind of a person would even think that an underaged person is able/mature enough to make these kind of decisions? Why would anyone try to corrupt vulnerable minors/women into activities they are not fully aware of what they really mean, and you intentionally mistake sex with prostitution/sexual slavery. Mind bogles.

I have no idea how many are telling the truth, and am not suggesting they are all lying, just that it is theoretically not impossible, IMO. I haven't been paying close attention to the Epstein saga, so wasn't aware that women coming forward now had reported crimes to police in 2001 or 2007, or indeed at all. But from what I have seen of her allegations, I have my doubts about Virgina Roberts.

People who have lost money are likely to be able to prove through a papertrail that they have done so. Here it's verbal claims only which can generate money.

But ignorance of the facts did not get in the way of your opinion right....

can't tell if joking.


The 'no sweat' defense, you couldn't make this stuff up. Well, maybe if you're a pedo perv trying to cover your ass and knowing full well that nothing will really happen to you anyway, you'll never see the inside of a jail cell, because you've been born with magic blood and the lowly commoners adore you for it. I guess then you could make it up.


Now we need interviews with Trump, Clinton, Bill Gates, etc etc