Epstein
Doublethink
Admin, 8th Day Host
Amongst all the mountains of crap - what the fuck were our intelligence services and dps police doing !
Doublethink
Admin, 8th Day Host
Comments
(I have emailed my mp to ask him to ask what police and security services knew - there were active terrorist attacks on the UK mainland during this time, you would expect they were vetting people and places the royal family went for safety and security reasons.)
It seems like they were either incompetent or complicit.
The irony of this whole situation is that crazy people have been saying for decades that there are a bunch of princes, oligarchs and powerful people who meet together to do disgusting things. Turns out they weren't wrong.
Given the presence of the dps, it beggars belief that Andrew's actions were not widely known and regarded as acceptable within his circle.
It is definitely beyond time that the protocols for PPOs are reviewed and updated because it is obvious that they have been present when principals have crossed the line from dubious to criminal behaviour.
I remember years ago when Princess Anne was in court, I think for speeding. She got a fine which was ten-pence-ha'penny, far below what ordinary people got in the same situation.
The law hasn't touched the royals and their cohort for a very long time.
Per Steaknife, I think they probably knew Epstein for who he was - and they should have done something about it, regardless as to whether their principal was engaging in unlawful behaviour or simply immoral behaviour. Child protection should trump that.
I think a large part of billionaires going right is a reaction to #MeToo, but I don't think that's the full extent of what was going around Epstein's influence network
This, alas, seems to be all too true. No doubt there are yet more 'shocking revelations' to emerge from the toxic swamp. which will prove the crazy people right. Again.
In those sorts of circles, "house parties" that existed to facilitate affairs and casual sexual liaisons were normal enough. Various guests would go and stay in someone's home, and nobody would talk about who visited whose bedroom during the night.
There are, and were, any number of parties and gatherings whose purpose is to put attractive young women in the presence of wealthy powerful men. This describes the operation of quite a few nightclubs, as well as private gatherings. In itself, that is not illegal. It only becomes legally problematic when the consent of the young women is impaired.
"Randy Andy" earned his sobriquet. His attitude towards women was well known, and everyone surrounding him would naturally be discreet about a parade of consenting young women marching through his bedroom.
Would those surrounding him have been aware that many of the girls associated with Epstein were children? Would they have been aware that even for those that were adults, informed consent wasn't really Epstein's priority? I don't know, but I think it's worth asking some questions.
If I had apply Occam's razor to the location - a cellar beneath a suburban Pizza Hut, or someone's private island - I would have ended up in the broom cupboard too. The Q-anons must be a bit sad that Hillary isn't (so afar as I know) in the files, while someone else...
Generally people know not to ask questions that their bosses won't like the answers to.
I think that's the troubling part. It's entirely possible that (as with creeps like Weinstein) a lot of people knew or suspected something was going on, and it wasn't necessarily that they liked it or were threatened to keep it quiet, but just found the perpetrators (or their associates) too useful to their other goals or decided it wasn't worth the personal cost to be the one to put their head above the parapet. It reads like Starmer and the rest of establishment Labour were well aware that Mandelson was at least corrupt and possibly implicated in CSA but decided he was too useful to be without. A lot of people behaving quite rationally in their individual circumstances can do as much and more harm than a full-blown conspiracy.
The photo of Giuffre dates to 2001 and sexual offending by UK citizens abroad came within jurisdiction of the UK courts only in 2003, The Modern Slavery Act, which is in part designed to combat sex trafficking came in in 2015 (one of Therese May’s better ideas). I am not sure the law would have recognised the coercive control involved prior to that - defence would have argued she could have sought assistance from the authorities the moment she stepped off the plane.
I suspect the only thing they have a decent chance of making stick in court in the uk, would relate to his conduct as a trade envoy - ? misconduct in public office ?
Whereas he might face more legal jeopardy in the USA because the statutes were different at the time.
I think it's magnified in the UK because the media and politics are interlinked, small and incestuous - concentrated in one place and the product of a very small number of educational institutions.
Political news stories go from something no one will admit to something everyone knows but no one will mention, and in this case it was evident that it was actions in the US that were the precipitating factor in what has taken place since (most people on social media would have seen the two photos of Mandelson and Epstein which have been in circulation for years - one of which was very probably taken by Jean Luc Brunel).
Take this from Lewis Goodall's substack:
"more journalistically valuable" leaps out doesn't it ? (And Goodall is one of the better journalists -- still and all, he shares a podcast with Maitlis and his wife works for the TBI).
Your comment about the speeding fines is untrue.
Anne has been fined for speeding on three occasions since 1970.
In 1977 she was fined £40, which was the standard penalty at the time.
In 1990 she was fined £150, when the average was £85.
In 2001 she was fined £400, when the standard was £60.
It's almost like you read history books about the crazy things rich people do and...they just keep doing it.
I've been reading this book about 19th century Europe and...yikes!
And I don't think that's a uniquely European thing.
I think this is it. If somebody with police protection were regularly attending parties full of sexually available young women, and took full advantage of this, we might reasonably call them immoral and sleazy, but they wouldn't be a criminal.
One of the problems with consent is that there aren't always bright lines between someone who gives free and informed consent and someone who doesn't. There's a continuum of behavior, with free and enthusiastic consent between equal-status peers at one end, and coercive control and rape at the other end. The grey middle is full of more or less reluctant consent, persuasion, false promises, quid pro quo, and a bunch of similar things that might be sleazy, but might not be illegal.
At one time in the Republic Of Korea, it was a criminal offense to make knowingly false marriage proposals in the pursuit of sex. I don't recall that I ever followed any trials employing this law, but I do remember it being removed from the books. IIRC, the abolition of the law was fairly non-controversial.
Marriage "subsequente copulae" ceased to be legal in 1940.
It was used quite a lot in the First World War to legitimise babies born after their fathers had died in the trenches. The WWI cases were often easier as there were generally letters from the trenches indicating an intention to marry.
Our legal system used to be (maybe it still is?) innocent until proven guilty.
No longer. You can "allege" whatever the hell you want and are guilty by association. You have to resign whether you're guilty or not.
Which elides over the purpose he collected people, essentially an operation of buying influence, which has been seen from some of the correspondence.
So not everyone who associated with him with guilty, but there's a reason why many of them continued to keep in close and frequent contact with him after his original conviction.
And has anyone else noticed that whenever a new release of Epstein files comes along the White House jumps all over a completely different new story? I wonder, could the two things be related?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yg8yrypejo
"Innocent until proven guilty" applies to state actions to punish crimes. People get sacked for things that aren't crimes or on a burden of proof lower than that for criminal offences all the fucking time. I've seen careers wrecked in teaching over far more minor allegations than enabling child sexual abuse, insider trading, and/or misconduct in public office on far less evidence. Sacking is not a judicial punishment and cannot be subject to the same level of proof. It's a fact of politics that reputation matters.
Cancel culture does not exist in a world where Trump is still in office.
It is very very dangerous to suggest that the Epstein files validate conspiracy theorists, when in fact (surprise surprise!) it's overwhelmingly conservative cishet white men abusing marginalised people. The Epstein files literally talk about using Brexit and transphobia for their own financial and sexual goals!
Resigning from a governmental post is not the same as being convicted of a crime. If you think the minimum standard for being in government is "hasn't actually been convicted of a serious crime yet", then I find your opinions disgusting.
I don't think it's possible for a person to have been buddies with Epstein for any length of time without understanding that he was a disgusting person, regardless of whether they understood that he was raping children. It should also be noted that the people who have resigned or been fired (like Mandelson) are people who kept on being friendly with Epstein after he pled guilty to sexual offenses involving a child. We're not just talking about people who knew Epstein because they attended the same glitzy New York parties.
Mea culpa I should hhave remembered this (and the Princess) and said non-Americans.
Thanks. But just so I'm clear...
MAN: I'll marry you if you have sex with me.
WOMAN: Okay.
If they then have sex, that is enough to get a court to declare them married, regardless of whether the man gives any further consent to the proceedings?
Scottish law was very easy going as regards getting married (hence Gretna Green) and was the basis for the plots of a moderate number of Victorian novels. Note that if either the man or the woman was already married that would be a bar
Theoretically yes, although in reality it was
MAN: Have sex with me.
WOMAN: No! I am a virtuous woman and I don't want to risk pregnancy when we're not married.
MAN: It won't matter if you do get pregnant, because I'm going to marry you!
WOMAN: OK.
It was most often used when the man had died, and was unable, rather than unwilling, to marry his pregnant girlfriend. If the man was alive and well, but not keen on marriage, then suing for Breach of Promise / Declarator of Paternity etc made more sense.
Originally posted by Net Spinster:
Scottish law was very easy going as regards getting married (hence Gretna Green)
Gretna Green was a thing because the age of marriage in Scotland was 16, regardless of parental consent, whereas in England parental consent was required to marry under the age of 18. Although I've come across one case in which it seems the couple, both in their mid-20s, had crossed the border because they intended to fudge the date of their marriage by a couple of months - i.e. imply that they had married 9, rather than 7 months prior to the birth of their first child.
(It is still legal to marry at 16 in Scotland, though practically unheard of, outwith the Travelling community. There are plans to raise the age to 18.)
Second, in a related way, it is interesting how many rich and powerful people wanted to be in his cohort like moths to a flame. Why were none of those worried about the association?
The speculation and unsubstantiated stuff is really grim but even the things that we know for certain are pretty bad.
I find this interesting because we've been told for a long time about the evil Dark Web, yet it appears that here's a celebrity child trafficker acting in the open.
I've been wondering about that. In the most unambitious instance of virtue-signalling imaginable, nothing Epstein did attracts me (imagine!). So I imagine myself on the fringes of that setup - 'come to such-and-such a party, so-and-so and so-and-so will be there, you wanted to speak to them about project xyz and didn't your daughter want an internship at pqr?' (you can see how familiar I am with how the rich and powerful roll). And then I get there, and it seems OK and there's loads of daaahling this that and the other - and then I notice something feels off (lets say I do notice, because if I don't then I'm still up to my neck and sinking in it) ... and I start to wonder how to back off without blowing up all my business relationships (because I've probably got too much to lose to be going to immediately call the police on all those guys - I told you this virtue signal was unambitious).
And then I remember that dang, I totally forgot the host had a conviction for child sex offenses!
Perfectly nice middle-class families with two cars under five years old, two kids and a Labrador get my overactive spidey-senses going, due to (I think) a lengthy and unfortunate exposure to the rich as a youngster. So I can't really project myself into this situation effectively. It doesn't seem reasonable to use wealth as the driver behind a 'it's people like them that do things like that' move. Even though that comes naturally to me. So the whole thing is quite hard to understand.
I'm turning another Hell thread into something else, so, errr, 'Epstein, grrrrrrr'.
One famous person, who I'm not going to name here (because who it is doesn't matter really in one sense) is portrayed in the emails as a person with a transactional relationship with Epstein.
They had regular financial problems, they contacted Epstein and he wired them the money that they asked for.
I think it is understandable to read between the lines in this kind of thing. In normal life people I know only ask for money from financial institutions. So what does it say that a person is contacting a guy with a Google Mail account and an island instead?
Secondly I think most people would assume that the person giving the money was likely expecting something in return. The mind boggles to imagine what that could be with Epstein.
It almost feels like the retractions make this even worse. We know, just because we are not stupid, that money doesn't normally change hands like this. The lurid unsubstantiated stuff might be fantasy, but something bad was happening here.
Where today is a John the Baptist calling everyone (us included) to repentence?
I think you might have an exaggerated idea of how uniformly institutional investment and borrowing is. I've known of some real fly-by-night characters involved in that line, guys operating basically out of their own little offices.
And if that TV drama about Andrew's interview is to be believed, Epstein gave Andrew £ 125, 000 as a gift, and then suggested that he hang around NYC for a few days because "I've got some people who really want to meet you." So he seems to have been trading financial favours in exchange for networking opportunities, as well.
My own impression is that Epstein was someone like Stephen Ward of Profumo fame, but more on an international scale, and with way more money to throw around.
Praise the Lord!
What utter nonsense. Stephen Ward was not a sexual abuser of young women. He was thrown under a bus by the Brotisj Establishment because he was not one of them. He was wrongly convicted of living off the immoral earnings of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies when he clearly did not do do and he committed suicide before he could be sentenced.
I am only happy that the whole sorry affair contributed to the downfall of the Conservative Party and the election of Labour with Harold Wilson as PM.