I would be interested to hear HN views on Richard Hanania's take on Epstein: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-inverted-reality-of-eps....
I would be interested to hear HN views on Richard Hanania's take on Epstein: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-inverted-reality-of-eps....
Michael Tracey, who influenced Hanania, has been on a wild crusade against all Epstein victims and has tried to discredit them.
He also avoids all intelligence connections. He never asks why Epstein got the job at Bear Stearns after leaving as a teacher at an expensive private school where William Barr's father was the headmaster.
He never publishes material like the officially released birthday book entry from Eliot Wolk, trader at Bear Stearns, who confirmed that Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's father, had an account at Bear Stearns and who teased Epstein about knowing teenage Ghislaine.
So it is now officially confirmed that Epstein knew Robert and Ghislaine much earlier than previously known. And that he knew Robert in the Iran Contra years where Robert was dealing with Adnan Khashoggi.
Tracey and Hanania are doing extremely poor journalistic work here by just focusing on the subset of Epstein victims that were over 18 and took money for the services.
Not reporting at all on the intelligence connections seems suspect as well.
Tracey seems to me to be a dishonest broker that is paid to promote anti-interventionist and related agenda
Anyone who writes a newsletter and hosts a broadcast in defense of Epstein's child sex trafficking ring probably should be under some kind of enhanced scrutiny.
Please keep in mind that the Epstein case was argued in open federal court, where he was found guilty and was sentenced. When he died, there were further criminal proceedings pending in two countries.
Hanania's habit of seeing everything in the binary of "woke" vs "not woke" leads him to some incredibly questionable places, as evidenced here. It's "woke" to believe that a convicted child sex trafficker resumed his crimes when released from prison, so Hanania is ideologically forced to take the opposite view that the kerfuffle is mostly hysterics. I honestly don't know why people read him, the quality of thinking and analysis is simply not there. There are much better conservative writers out there who are not currently apologizing for child rapists.
Epstein was definitely guilty of prostituting, at least for himself, girls between 14 and 17 years old. I personally think young women of that age should know better than to be prostitutes for rich guys, and there's no evidence he ever coerced them to do anything. He lured them purely with money and promises of status. There is plenty of testimony of the girls refusing to touch him and they leave, often with money still in-hand and an offer to come back with more girls. They should know they are themselves "child sex traffickers" if they come back with their underaged friends, and they themselves should have been prosecuted along with Epstein and Maxwell.
I am not a lawyer, but I am fairly confident that this is not how the laws currently work.
Teenage girls cannot currently be charged with illegal sex acts when they sleep with older men, but they can be charged with "child sex trafficking" when they offend against other teenage girls.
"Especially since the MeToo era began, we’re too credulous about these things. So we have globs of money going to Epstein accusers and their lawyers, while nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system."
Feels like someone with an axe to grind over MeToo turning Jeffrey Epstein of all people (???) into a martyr figure for their pet issue. I don't know why someone would feel compelled to defend him when he's not even alive to thank you for it. The idea that vast amounts of evidence and accusations exist yet nothing bad happened whatsoever is so wildly implausible that I can't grasp the mindset that would lead to openly publishing this perspective on Epstein. We found out from the most recent disclosures that people reported Epstein's inappropriate behavior to the FBI as early as 1996 and it wasn't investigated. One need only look at the amount of detail on his Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#First_criminal... ) to get a sense of why accusations against him are at least treated as credible.
I totally get not finding this issue interesting or not caring about what he did to his victims, though I can't really empathize with that position, I understand it. But writing like Hanania's feels beyond the pale and unnecessary.
> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system
One of my #1 things about reading people's writing is that while everybody is allowed to make mistakes, making this kind of easily-verifiable falsehood a central plank of an argument is discrediting. I honestly don't know why people keep reading him. There are better thinkers and writers who will also tell you that women and people of color are subhuman, he's not the only outlet for that point of view if that's what you're looking to read.
>> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system
This flabbergasted me at first. Admittedly I had to refresh my memory that he died in jail awaiting trial, but he was still convicted once before that! The fact it was pre-MeToo should make it more damning, per his logic. I guess he’s saying there were no convictions after he became infamous, but there’s a caveat that he died awaiting trial, and that plus the prior conviction just makes this statement seem disingenuous or sloppy at best.