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Comment by vannevar | Hacker News Reader

Aside from being a pedophile, Jeffery Epstein was an incredibly wealthy man. He met with thousands of people. They weren't all pedophiles. That was part of his scam, to forge relationships with a lot of important people so they'd be less likely to believe the stories about his sexual predation. He banked social proof and used it to deflect scrutiny.

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What about the famous persons who met with him after he was a convicted sex offender?

"Jeffrey Epstein Was a Sex Offender. The Powerful Welcomed Him Anyway." - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/13/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-...

This was before cancel culture, metoo and whatnot. People are a lot more sensitive now. He had served his sentence (even if in retrospect it was ridiculously light). The fact that so many different people associated with him is evidence that obviously it wasn't in any way culturally unacceptable at the time.

"I'm sorry, I cannot comment on the matter until it has been officially hushed up."

I'm pretty sure ostracizing sex criminals was common place before 2016.

Elite* social norms are different, not always in a good way. Consider the many illustrious defenders of Roman Polanski.

*I know this word gets overused but here it is apropos.

Or they (elite social norms) are just more public. It's easy to hate on public figures for their transgressions. If it's friends or family members, there's probably more nuance. But we judge looking in from the outside.

The guy was obviously super questionable in his business dealings, and an active sex offender - but I think that's in hindsight, and a lot of the dealings are more a question of people getting taken in by a professional confidence man than anything else.

I'm not saying everyone he met with was a shining star of virtue. Only that you can't assume they met with him to have sex with underage girls. He was still an incredibly wealthy man after his conviction, that didn't change.

Though if they'd wanted to have sex with underage girls, hanging out with a guy convicted of it who has a private island might be one way to go about it.

But the risk of getting caught would be very high.

Besides that the reputational risk of hanging out with convicted sex offenders is high enough that one should want not to do that.

> But the risk of getting caught would be very high.

Besides that the reputational risk of hanging out with convicted sex offenders is high enough that one should want not to do that.

I'd say the whole Epstein saga (not to mention this very thread) shows neither of these risks were very significant at all.

One important thing is when the meetings took place. Epstein was convicted in 2008. It says a lot that they are willing to overlook it.

It sounds like the emails were 2013 to 2016.

Yes, there's a real "conspiracy theory" vibe to all of this - I think it seems like people want to imply all these people are part of some kind of sex-ring or something, when there's an obvious and benign explanation for all of it. You can plausibly accuse many of the people who took meetings of being greedy, but that's about it. This is just people trying to score cheap political points.

The "Epstein list" is turning into conspiracy theory. It sounds like authorities only have full contact list. Which includes acquaintances, employees, and victims in addition to conspirators. The criminals aren't going to identify themselves, and the FBI is usually quiet until arrests.

Have you ever actually listened to any of the victim testimonies? For example, the ones which make it clear that it was essentially impossible to visit Epstein's island in the Caribbean (as Reid Hoffman did) without it being completely obvious what was going on there? Even the locals who never visited referred to it as "Pedophile Island."

What was the point of the dinner Reid Hoffman organized with already-very-wealthy tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? They already had access to far more money than Epstein could possibly have provided.

This shouldn't be downvoted because it's 100% true. I also wonder why this submission was flagged? At first they just took it off the front page but I guess that was too suspicious so they "flagged" it later. There are plenty of other Reid Hoffman and Epstein stories on here. HN and Hoffman have many investments together so it doesn't surprise me, but it does show where the owners of this site fall.

It's also odd because this earlier article from the WSJ was never flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762731

Indeed, the difference I can see is that the second article mentions Hoffman and the first doesn't reference any HN related people.

And just to confirm Reid Hoffman and YC's affilation: https://twitter.com/ycombinator/status/1656675146588110850

Non-customers were on his free tier and were simply acquaintances. It's likely that many didn't upgrade to his VIP (Very Important Pedo) tier.

Woody Allen seems to be the only sus guy in that list on the surface of it. lol. His name sticks out like a sore thumb.

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