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Comment by cybersnowflake | Hacker News Reader

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I went on vacation to St Maarten around 2010 and when we were getting off of the plane Epstein's private jet landed. We were wondering who it was so we asked a group of people who were working at the airport and they told us that it's Epstein, a pedophile billionaire who keeps flying in to have sex with underage girls on his private island. Given their nonchalant response it seemed like it was common knowledge on the islands.

We asked our taxi driver about it on the way to the hotel and he knew about it too.

This is about continuing to maintain ties with Epstein long after how problematic he was was known, to the point that the university had banned having any involvement with him because of his pedophilia conviction and Joichi Ito still associated with him and took his money, while lying to the greater university and covering up that he was still involving himself with him.

No, this definitely could not have happened to 90% of us.

People, happily do things like honor a holiday made by a man who sticks women's toes into vices, Think OJ is an innocent victim of systematic racism, and freely do business with some of the most repressive regimes. Just a few months back some of the same talking heads acting all high and mighty now were whining how Drumpf was hurting business with China. The same china which massacred a bunch of people in fairly recent events as tiananman square and memoryholed it to the point where even most americans aren't aware of it.

If people regularly overlook stuff like this without any shame, maybe possibly getting a massage seems pretty easy to overlook as well especially if you're getting a fat stack of cash.

I'm not going to argue what others would do with respect to the moral quandary of taking Epstein's money (indeed, Nicholas Negroponte argued 2 days ago he would still have counseled to take the money).

However, saying "hindsight and all" is a misrepresentation of the facts. Epstein was convicted of 2 felony prostitution charges (one involving a minor) in 2008 and was a registered sex offender. To try to portray this as just some "he said-she said" between a "rich playboy" and accusers is complete bullshit.

Also, Prince Andrew was widely criticized in 2011 for his tied to Epstein, and all of this stuff was after that. The "hindsight" was already well known by the time Ito accepted this money.

These folks knew what they were doing and made the calculation that the money was worth it.

It's hard to read your position here. I agree that many people would let greed overcome them, but you seem to actually be saying that's not a problem, and even going as far as saying that allegations of rape are being manufactured for drama. Not good

Unfortunate that this comment is not trendy.

People are out here acting like accepting a donation means you are complicit in unrelated crimes by the donor.

If someone offers me large sums of money, I do go on Google for at least 30 seconds to look them up.

Which is basically what you needed to do to figure out that Epstein was a pedophile pimp.

Which, incidentally, we know that Ito already knew.

So take that bullshit all the way straight out of here.

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