Hacker News Reader

Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

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-...

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com