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Comment by shihab | Hacker News Reader

The article strictly talks about people who were pals with him _after_ his Pedophilia conviction. And please don't do this strawman "evil person eating babies", nobody sane is claiming that.

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Just take a look at the photos of his residences, it's filled with big black redaction squares of the "artwork" and photos on his walls and the little bits that can be seen lend a huge credence to his prior conviction.

Absolutely bonkers to say he's a "somewhat flawed person" when there's gigs of PDFs of some of the most heinous things imaginable.

His pedophilia charges are 1000x worse than Roman Polanski who actually (the literal sense of the word) raped a 13 year old.

Whereas Epstein was convicted solicited sex from 16 year old. There's a mountain of a difference between them.

Here are the people who signed petition against Roman's conviction

* Woody Allen

* Wes Anderson

* Jean-Jacques Annaud

* Asia Argento (later expressed regret)

* Darren Aronofsky

* Paul Auster

* Monica Bellucci

* Gael García Bernal

* Adrien Brody

* Penélope Cruz

* Alfonso Cuarón

* Guillermo del Toro

* Jonathan Demme

* Alexandre Desplat

* Xavier Dolan (later expressed regret)

* Stephen Frears

* Harrison Ford

* Terry Gilliam

* Taylor Hackford

* Buck Henry

* Alejandro G. Iñárritu

* Jeremy Irons

* Neil Jordan

* Harmony Korine

* John Landis

* David Lynch (his daughter claimed posthumous regret in 2025)

* Michael Mann

* Sam Mendes

* Mike Nichols

* Alexander Payne

* Natalie Portman (later expressed regret)

* Brett Ratner

* Walter Salles

* Jerry Schatzberg

* Julian Schnabel

* Martin Scorsese

* Steven Soderbergh

* Tilda Swinton

* Kristin Scott Thomas

* Tom Tykwer

* Emma Thompson (later expressed regret)

* Pedro Almodóvar

* Wong Kar-wai

* Salman Rushdie

* Milan Kundera

* Diane von Furstenberg

* Neil Gaiman (signed a related petition)

* Meryl Streep (publicly supported without signing)

* Whoopi Goldberg (publicly supported without signing)

* Debra Winger (publicly supported without signing)

* Harvey Weinstein (publicly defended him)

Why don't we hold these people to the same standards?

Im not a fan of Roman Polanski to put it mildly, but are you trying to claim that supporting a pedophile is as bad as being a pedophile?

Also all those people can fuck themselves. There’s more than enough blame to go around.

do you agree that you have to hold all these people to the same standard?

Yea, so the guy who actually committed pedophilia is being judged harder than someone defending him who hasn’t committed pedophilia.

You for instance seem to be in the same boat as the people in this list, so I won’t judge you as harshly as Epstein.

do you judge the people Epstein was in touch with the same way you judge the people i listed above?

If the were post knowing his crimes then yea, like that UK minister who got sacked.

Why are you carrying so much weight for Epstein and associates?

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