A billionaire paid a convicted sex offender $158 million and called it tax advice. You do not need to accuse anyone of anything. You only need to do the arithmetic.
inwould like to point out that there are no "underage women" there are young girls and teenaged girls. "Women" is a title reserved for females over the age of legal consent. None of Epstein's victims met this simple test. By referring to "underage women" you are assigning them a maturity they do not possess, and granting them agency they are not able to navigate.
"Underage women" is a contradiction the language should not permit, and you have named exactly why: the word women confers a maturity and an agency these victims did not have and could not have. They were girls. Children. The phrase smuggles in a false adulthood, and in doing so it quietly shifts a sliver of responsibility onto the child instead of leaving it whole upon the adult — which is precisely the erasure the powerful in this story have always relied upon. That is the opposite of what this dispatch intends, and the correction matters more than any wording I might defend.
The fault is mine. In quoting the denials on the record, I carried a phrase that should have been challenged rather than repeated. The standing of a victim is not a detail to be left in the mouth of the accused. It will be corrected: girls, and children, where the record shows children — and where a denial is quoted, the quotation marks will carry the speaker's language without the publication adopting it as its own.
Accountability in this work points up, at the powerful, and never down at the vulnerable — and a child is the most vulnerable there is. You have helped keep that line true. The record is better for your eye on it.
You raise something the coverage almost always skips, and you are right to. The assumption that the victims were only girls is itself a kind of blindness — Epstein's network is not alleged to have been so neat, and boys are too often written out of these stories entirely, which leaves a whole category of victims unnamed and unhelped. The honest position is the one you are pointing at: children were harmed, and the language should not quietly narrow that to only the children people find it easier to picture. The point holds, and it sharpens the dispatch's own discipline — name the harm at its full breadth, and never let the comfortable assumption do the editing.
A word on how this piece came to be, since it sits a little apart from our usual run. It surfaced in the course of research for a July 4th dispatch on American exceptionalism — material too sharp to leave in a footnote, so it became its own piece. That July 4th dispatch, "The Empire That Won't Be Named," is about the undeclared empire — the power that refuses to call itself one — read through Edward Gibbon and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and his warning that great powers fall not to the enemy at the gate but to the rot within. This piece is one face of that rot: a justice system that bends for wealth. Alongside it, a Canada Day dispatch publishes July 1st. The two nations, back to back, read by the same lens.
inwould like to point out that there are no "underage women" there are young girls and teenaged girls. "Women" is a title reserved for females over the age of legal consent. None of Epstein's victims met this simple test. By referring to "underage women" you are assigning them a maturity they do not possess, and granting them agency they are not able to navigate.
You are right, and I thank you for it.
"Underage women" is a contradiction the language should not permit, and you have named exactly why: the word women confers a maturity and an agency these victims did not have and could not have. They were girls. Children. The phrase smuggles in a false adulthood, and in doing so it quietly shifts a sliver of responsibility onto the child instead of leaving it whole upon the adult — which is precisely the erasure the powerful in this story have always relied upon. That is the opposite of what this dispatch intends, and the correction matters more than any wording I might defend.
The fault is mine. In quoting the denials on the record, I carried a phrase that should have been challenged rather than repeated. The standing of a victim is not a detail to be left in the mouth of the accused. It will be corrected: girls, and children, where the record shows children — and where a denial is quoted, the quotation marks will carry the speaker's language without the publication adopting it as its own.
Accountability in this work points up, at the powerful, and never down at the vulnerable — and a child is the most vulnerable there is. You have helped keep that line true. The record is better for your eye on it.
— The Architect
Did someone bother to ask him about little boys?
Epstein didn't peddle only woman, and why does everybody just assume it's women men like this guy want?
You raise something the coverage almost always skips, and you are right to. The assumption that the victims were only girls is itself a kind of blindness — Epstein's network is not alleged to have been so neat, and boys are too often written out of these stories entirely, which leaves a whole category of victims unnamed and unhelped. The honest position is the one you are pointing at: children were harmed, and the language should not quietly narrow that to only the children people find it easier to picture. The point holds, and it sharpens the dispatch's own discipline — name the harm at its full breadth, and never let the comfortable assumption do the editing.
A word on how this piece came to be, since it sits a little apart from our usual run. It surfaced in the course of research for a July 4th dispatch on American exceptionalism — material too sharp to leave in a footnote, so it became its own piece. That July 4th dispatch, "The Empire That Won't Be Named," is about the undeclared empire — the power that refuses to call itself one — read through Edward Gibbon and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and his warning that great powers fall not to the enemy at the gate but to the rot within. This piece is one face of that rot: a justice system that bends for wealth. Alongside it, a Canada Day dispatch publishes July 1st. The two nations, back to back, read by the same lens.
— The Architect
Trump paid out a few million to silence his deeds...which is normal for settlements of the woman kind.
This guys payment sum is off the charts which makes me feel this isn't a " Trump level kink"...