It’s disingenuous for ABC to say the story did not meet their journalistic standards. The Epstein story dates back to 2005. “He came under investigation in 2005 and, according to NBC, Palm Beach investigators spoke with five alleged victims and 17 different witnesses.” There was an FBI indictment in 2007. Flight logs are public record so Clinton’s and other high profile liberals such as Bill Richardson’s association with Epstein is completely verifiable. Epstein settled lawsuits related to sex trafficking. He served jail time.
This was hardly a bombshell story. In fact, this story circulated widely in conservative media. If not for the #METoo movement, it would have been buried along with the Weinstein story which Ronan Farrow claims NBC buried. The #MeToo movement has been one of the best things to ever happen for conservatives.
They hid the story, most likely, because they’re a wealthy and powerful institution, and as such they default to protecting abusers, especially wealthy and influential ones. Not because of politics.
This society treats women and girls like shit. It’s not about politics, it’s the whole society. Trump and the GOP are only the most visible and prominent examples of rape culture. It started long ago and politics isn’t going to fix it.
This is the reason so many wealthy people are Democrats. They get their money through unethical ways and understand that if they get caught, a Deep State of media, politicians, judges, and ideologues will cover up their wrongdoings. Trump should have remained a Democrat and his crimes would be still unknown except to the victims. But you’ve clearly established Trump is not smart.
If this is you rejecting and apologizing for your past support of admitted sexual abuser Trump, then good for you. We as a society have a long way to go.
The rest appears to be right wing radio fantasy straw man stuff, and I’ll leave it alone.
Corporate media has to watch the bottom line and needs more support when confronting guys that can afford a team of lawyers. Epstein is IMHO a very good example of how a lot that can not be confirmed properly thanks to the complicity of media that is too close to their targets. Where LAZombie and others fail to realize is that at the same time non corporate media was “widely” reporting on this, right wing tabloid media was also actively tampering with the witnesses.
The topic of this thread is ABC not Trump. Why are posters endlessly allowed to change the subject? Aren’t the hundreds of other Trump hating threads enough?
Funny, I did not mention Trump there, the last links were to the point about Epstein and the National Enquirer tampering with the victims and witnesses, leading to the plausible explanation of why corporate media like ABC did not dig deeper, while very left leaning sources reported on that also.
That Trump was one of the guys being protected by Epstein and the National Enquirer is only one item to keep in mind. But it is clear that the intention is to ignore that right wing media also helped in the cover up by not telling their viewers or readers about a lot of what Epstein’s and the National Inquirer did when they tampered with witnesses.
They weren’t a secret for people who knew about him. He’d been prison for sex with a minor and had several local and FBI investigations on him for those issues.
I never expected so many people running defense for ABC’s killing the story.
Did they verify what Debbie Ramirez told them? Blasie-Ford? How about the Covington Kids? How much work did they do to make sure they got that story right?
How often have they run stories about Trump based on single-source anonymous leaks?
The problem wig the media’s ‘standards’ is that they are unevenly applied depending on whose ox is being gored.
I have no idea. I have no love for Yale fratboys, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a guy like Kavanaugh did some pretty dumb and/or shitty stuff while in college.
However, Blasie-Ford cited three witnesses who she claims were there. All three denied it, including her best friend. Ford can’t remember which year this happened, in which house, how she got there, or how she got home, and the three people she said were witnesses denied it, but she is certain that Brett Kavanaugh was the guy, and she’s certain she only had two beers. I have a hard time passing the smell test on this.
That’s not to say she was lying. She could be conflating events, or even remembering false memories triggered by Kavanaugh’s appearance in the media. So I’m not going to call her a liar, and I’m not going to say Kavanaugh didn’t do it. What I will say is that the charge itself has no corroboration and is unfalsifiable with the little derails she provided, so it should have never even come up in an official hearing, not having met the minimal test for evidence.
I’ve never bought this argument, Blasie-Ford is a feminist professor at a very liberal college. You don’t think she would have been a hero if she brought down Kavanaugh? You don’t think she could have landed multi-million dollar book deals? She had an awful lot to gain by doing this.
This refutes the argument that she must be telling the truth because she has nothing to gain by lying. Also, since we know that Ramirez DID lie and had apparently even less to gain than Blasie-Ford, you would have to explain that as well. You know, some people do this stuff just for the attention. Or because they hate the person they are attacking, Or because they were convinced something happened that didn’t.
A probability estimate based on what? My gut? Perhaps reading some tea leaves?
An honest person faced with an accusation that has zero corroborating evidence can only say, "I have no idea. Probability of guilt doesn’t even enter into it, because we have no facts from which we can reasonably establish any sort of numbers. All we can say is, “Sorry, in a free country we require rules of evidence before we destroy someone in the public square. Otherwise, we’re just hunting witches.”
Even if we went down the path of calling forth other character witnesses to establish a pattern of abuse, it turns out that Kavanaugh had a fistful of character references from other women stating that he had always been a perfect gentleman. I’m sure the investigators looked long and hard for anyone since high school who would claim that he mistreated them, and came up empty.
I have no idea. Do you deny that any of this even took place? That there were no rich and powerful men there at all? Forget Clinton - what about the other people that appear to have been taking advantage of Epstein’s services? Were they all too stupid to understand they might get caught?
So if Jane Doe made that accusation against YOU, would you accept the argument that ‘Men like Septimus have been known to threaten women, so it could be true’? Guilt through association is a terrible substitute for due process.
It sounds like the reporter who ‘had the goods’ on Epstein but had her story spiked had actual documentary evidence, sworn testimonies from multiple eyewitnesses, flight logs, etc. This wasn’t enough corroboration for a news outlet that will run any sort of single-sourced glurge about Republicans without any corroborating evidence at all.
It’s possible they weren’t protecting Clinton. If I were Jeffrey Epstein trying to set up a lucrative sex island for the wealthy, I would make sure I got customers from across the political spectrum, and I’d try to snare as many media people as I could. Mutual blackmail destruction, If you have dirt on everyone, no one wants to expose you.
I wouldn’t at all be surprised if names from all the big media outlets turned up on Epstein’s customer list. But I can’t give you a probability.
This is false. No one she said was there “denied it” (aside from Kavanaugh and his pal).
The “denied it” stuff is false, and she also gave other info that could have been used by investigators to corroborate (like that she ran into Kavanaugh’s possible rape-buddy at the grocery store he worked at a few weeks later), though the investigators failed to follow up on this. The Senate committee did not direct investigators to look into this kind of corroborating info, and did not call as witnesses the other potential witnesses, including this possible rape-buddy).
It’s false to say “we know that Ramirez DID lie”. We do not know this. In fact, several of her old friends did say that she told them about the incident at the time, and one of them independently gave the same details to investigators that she did in her account.
Whatever source you’re relying on for the Kavanaugh accusations, it’s giving you bad data.
That sounds like a denial to me. As a reminder, Blasie-Ford says that this woman is her best friend.
What would you think if a friend of yours was accused by a woman of trying to rape her, and she said her best friend was there as a witness, and her best friend spoke up and said, “I have no idea what she’s talking about.”? How would that affect your judgement regarding the truth of the accusation?
“No recollection” is not a denial (especially when the incident in question was from 36 years before). Your assertion that Keyser denied the allegation is entirely false: