Absolutely and totally wrong. Claiming your Rights is never, ever “damning”.
The fact that you refused to answer a question using the 5th for example, can not be used as evidence against you.
I’ve spent the last two minutes looking everywhere around me, but I’ll be damned if I can see the walls of the jury box.
I can use any evidence I like for my own opinions.
You dont need a jury box. Taking the 5th cant be used as probable cause, or to get an indictment.
In fact Lawyers recommend that totally innocent people refuse to answer questions without an attorney present, and then only when the lawyer okays it.
That’s not necessarily true.
If, in a deposition taken during a civil case, you invoke the 5th amendment, it is true that your refusal to answer can’t be used against you in a criminal prosecution.
But, for purposes of the civil case, your refusal can be used to create an adverse inference which can be used as evidence against you.
So, Epstein may not be charged on the basis that he refused to answer a question about underage girls, but it is certainly true that you can presume that his answer would have been incriminating.
Who cares? We’re talking about opinions, not courtrooms.
And what’s more, it can’t even be taken into account by an individual thinking about someone! I just tried, and it’s completely impossible. Forget the courtroom–it’s a fundamental feature of the human brain that we’re unable to make personal judgments about someone based on their actions, unless those judgments comport with local, state, and federal judiciary standards.
As I just mentioned upthread, the law is reasonable enough to recognize that a person refusing to answer a question is probably concerned about the answer, and so that refusal is actually usable against you if you are litigating in civil court.
It’s only the principle of not being a witness against yourself in a criminal case that has generated a narrow exception,
Epstein is dead, he doesn’t have rights anymore.
Huh. So I guess the important question is, was @aurora_maire pursuing a criminal indictment as a district attorney, or a civil case as a private lawyer, in her post?
So, are you saying that when aurora_maire didnt bother to say “In my opinion” or even IMHO, that they were expressing an opinion, but I was not expressing an opinion? So, they were right and i was wrong? Think about your apparent outrage here.
“This is damning” is a value judgment. That’s an opinion. “Absolutely and totally wrong” is a statement about truth value. That’s an incorrect belief.
Unless aurora was making their statement as part of a criminal prosecution in a court of law, it’s beyond silly to hold the statement to that standard.
Edit: that said, I’m done with this. I think it’s transparently obvious how silly it is to hold that standard as the applicable one, and pursuing it further risks hijacking the thread into nonsensical pedantry.
Lest we forget the ultimate authority:
“The mob takes the Fifth,” he said at an Iowa campaign rally in September. “If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” - DJ Trump
He is, however, very very good at not answering questions anymore. 
His estate does, notably the principle of abatement of a criminal proceeding. A person who dies pending trial on criminal charges cannot be tried or convicted. That is a financial benefit to the estate, as it is impossible to fine a dead person.
Kenny Lay (of Enron) similarly died before final judgment, so his criminal appeal abated, the conviction was set aside, and he died not guilty of any fraud.
That doesn’t affect civil proceedings, only criminal.
Didn’t that happen to a politician who shot himself on TV? Was that the reason he did it?
That woudl be Budd Dwyer. His appeals were dismissed posthumously. I don’t know why the courts in that case rejected abatement:
Abatement of Kenny Lay’s convictions:
If we have any journalists on the forums, one thing that I note is that there’s at least one potential cache of information that’s outside of US jurisdiction.
The French investigated and arrested Jean-Luc Brunel, model agency owner, for his involvement with Epstein and due to other accusations against him.
Brunel, similarly, died by suicide in jail.
If they did arrest him, that would seem to mean that they had evidence against him - via witness testimony, financial records, chat logs, videos, etc. These are all, presumably, still somewhere in France and - like the Epstein files - potentially free to be released.
I also note, rather curiously, that there are reports that Maxwell committed some of her crimes in the UK. The London Metro Police, however, said that they felt like it made sense to allow the US to lead the investigation and to only do anything if asked to do so. The US made no request to the UK, to search her residences nor look for evidence. This would have been 2020, during the first term of President Trump.
I am willing to bet a million quatloos that IF said files are released, there is no trump smoking gun.
Maybe there was nothing big or maybe it was cut out.
I read the Wikipedia article. Stuff like this messes me up so much. The evidence against him was staggering yet he behaved the way you would expect from an innocent man, and his paranoia about a conspiracy seems authentic to me. I’m beginning to wonder if the guy was a schizophrenic or suffered delusions that made him convinced he was innocent.