It's like the people who are against hunting, but who are happy to eat store bought meat.
Charitable contributions can make a sleazeball look like a boy scout, when in fact deep down he's profiting on human misery.
The thread is: bb88 proposes that Epstein's charitable giving to MIT was a way to reputation launder ("turn a sleazeball into a boyscout").
davrosthedalek disputed that claim, as the donations were anonymous.
The reason for anonymity doesn't matter; the net effect is there is no plausible reputation laundering effect from anonymous donations.
The Jeffrey Epstein Pediatric Fund for Incurable Childhood Illnesses
The Jeffrey Epstein Research Lab at MIT
The Jeffrey Epstein Fund for Worldwide Peace
(Note: some of these I'm sure I made up...)
Why are you caping so hard for this guy?
Donating money doesn't make you a philanthropist. I'm not caping(? not sure what this means) at all for Epstein. I simply think it beyond ridiculous to fault an institution for taking donations from any individual as if that act implies the institution agrees with all actions that individual has taken.
Had that not have happened, most people to this day would still think he's probably an "A OK dude."
But to disprove your point. If I go back one year with the wayback machine and look at his wikipedia the first sentence on his page mentions he is a registered sex offender[1].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20180807122025/https://en.wikipe...
It was only after the Miami Herald story came out did we learn about the child trafficking that took place -- and then this year it became a huge national story.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/business/01epstein.html
Upthread you said:
> Most likely, you didn't know about the evils of Jeffrey Epstein until a Miami Herald reporter started to dig into the story, and then got picked up by national papers. Had that not have happened, most people to this day would still think he's probably an "A OK dude."
But I would heartily disagree with that.
Allegations of sexual assault of minors had been public from 2008 on, and Epstein settled literally dozens of civil suits from victims prior to the 2018 Herald piece. Allegations of trafficking were made in 2015 by Virginia Roberts.
(Also, honestly, isn't a single instance of knowing solicitation of a minor enough? Dude was known to be a creep since at least the 2008 conviction, despite the extremely favorable plea deal.)
Technically, it puts some of the blame on the underage girl, because she then becomes a "prostitute". Hence, she was at least half to blame. Hell, he could even have said: "I didn't know she was underage..." And a lot of guys would believe him.
The fact that she was trafficked instead completely changes the issue. She was never a "prostitute", and he was a bigger sleazeball than we realized.
If it was child abuse, they would have charged him with abuse. They basically called her a "prostitute" from the charges suggesting that she was at least partly to blame.
But it's still unclear why the US attorney's office refused to investigate the other cases and offered him a sweetheart deal. In any case, the 2008 charges made it sound like he was just looking for sex, not running a child trafficking ring.
Well, that's not the sleazeball's or the charity's problem. If you and other people don't think he's a "boy scout" then he won't be seen as one. If you do, he will.
I don't understood the argument for non-politician organizations returning donations from problematic people. By keeping the money, you're enriching your organization, at expense to the bad person. Win-win for society.
For politicians and political organizations, there is an implicit association with bribery, so in that case I can understand demands to refusing contributions from bad donors. (But even there, better to redirect it to a good charity than to return it to the "bad donor.")
I think that just confuses the issue.
> For politicians and political organizations, there is an implicit association with bribery.
1. Alice accepts money from Bob
2. Alice discovers Bob is running a underage sex trafficking ring on the side.
3. Alice continues to accept money from Bob.
So let's ask the following questions:
1. Is Alice implicitly condoning underage sex trafficking by taking Bob's money?
2. Does Alice look like she's implicitly condoning underage sex trafficking by taking Bob's money?
3. How does the public know what the true motives of Alice are? Does she support underage sex trafficking or not?
4. How do we know if Alice is telling the truth as long as she accepts money from Bob?
5. How does this affect Alice's reputation? Would you go to Alice to seek help with trying to stop underage sex trafficking? Or has Alice been "tainted" with Bob's money?