In some ways, having it all come out in court would be halfway justice. These are powerful people, and one would hope that those sorts of revelations would undermine that power. If the best case scenario is admitting “yes, I had sex with a lot of borderline legal girls in drug fuelled parties, but you can’t prove that the ones I slept with in particular were under 18”, well, I don’t think they’d consider that an absolute win.
And I think there is a really good chance that there is a lot more evidence than you’d think. I don’t think they were taking extraordinary steps to conceal their tracks because they didn’t think this was THAT bad. These girls were 15, 16, not 8. They were sorta trashy. They didn’t matter. So I think there will be more pictures and emails than what you would have gotten for something like securities fraud.
The conspiratorial part was the implication that rich people would get off because they’re rich, and that other mysterious rich people would pull invisible strings to make that happen, while a few unfortunates would take the fall for it, or that plea deals would be made that were somehow shady (again due to this conspiracy) and they’d avoid jail time.
I was pointing out that getting convictions may end up difficult, based on what the prosecution will need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and that failing to jail these people in light of that hardly indicates anything fundamentally wrong with the system, just that circumstances were such that the prosecution didn’t have what they needed.
I’m frustrated by the reporting in this case. I want to know where Epstein got his money. I want to know what the scam was - pure blackmail or something more? I want to know exactly how it worked.
The salacious stuff is interesting and, well, salacious…but I love a good financial/ business crime. And no one seems particularly interested in that part.
I agree. That’s the really interesting thing to me here; how did someone become a literal billionaire and yet nobody has any real inkling of how that came to pass? It seems almost unbelievable. Certainly less believable than him having a sex-fiend lifestyle where he liked his girls young.
There’s another issue that I don’t understand, but it makes me wonder who is hiding something:
Why did Ghislaine Maxwell return to the US and live within easy reach of the FBI?
She has French citizenship, and could have chosen to live in France…where extradition to the US is a very complicated,(almost impossible?), process.
Instead, she chose to make it easy to arrest her.It almost seems to me that (warning–conspiracy theory ahead:) she wanted to get arrested.
Maybe she wants to spill the beans on somebody?
It makes no sense for her to remain in the US.
Well that bit is not only not a conspiracy theory, its not even a theory. It absolutely 100% undeniably happened in 2008. The plea deal Esptein got (from Trump’s one-time labor secretary Alex Acosta) was unbelievably shady, and lenient.
Now look, people shoot themselves in the back all the time in prisons across the globe. The is no proof that this was anything other than what it appears to be.
Now that Randy-Andy (that used to be his name, right?) has reached an agreement with Virginia Giuffre the Guardian asks similar questions as this thread and the OP:
I am curious too. On the one hand, the mibillionaires have money, connections and power. On the other hand, a billionaire may have a score or two to settle with another billionaire. And when people die in jail others start to think and weigh options. Justice is slow, but sometimes, just sometimes, it gets done.