The equipment
Katha Pollitt asks
Why Did So Many People in Epstein’s Circle Look the Other Way?
Here is what I’ve learned from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal so far: If you are rich, practiced in the art of flattery, generous with favors and connections and donations, give star-studded dinner parties, and offer flights on your private plane, nobody cares if you hired a 14-year-old girl for sex.
Or, nobody except those boring cranky argumentative people who think women and girls matter.
Even if you went to jail for it—though Alan Dershowitz and future labor secretary Alexander Acosta finagled a deal whereby you didn’t serve your whole sentence and were allowed out during the day and on weekends. Nobody’s going to ask a lot of follow-up questions about your activities in the years since your encounter with the law. It was just the one time! Mistake of judgment!
As Jeffrey Epstein’s very good friend Noam Chomsky (yes, that Noam Chomsky) put it in 2023 when The Wall Street Journal asked him about his extensive contacts with Epstein over many years, “What was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to US laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”
What???
Like hell it does.
It yields a you have served your sentence. Having served a sentence is not the same thing as a clean slate. It means you can’t be sentenced again for the same crime; it does not mean you are now a decent human being. You may be a reformed human being, but then again you may not. Having served a sentence doesn’t tell us which you are.
Epstein had no problem attracting famous, brilliant, immensely powerful people into his circle, almost all men.
Because women are for poking; women are not for brilliant. Nobody cares what’s in a woman’s brain.
Everyone who hung out with Epstein had more than enough information to ask hard questions about their dear friend Jeffrey and chose not to ask them. Or maybe even to think them. As the Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, who himself left Arizona State University over sexual harassment accusations, told an interviewer in 2011, “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”
Oh come on. That’s azza scientist I judge based on empirical evidence? I’ve seen all these very young women around him but I haven’t watched him fuck them so I would believe him and no one else? That’s not judging on empirical evidence, that’s seeing what you want to see and nothing else. Or as Katha puts it, “Empirical evidence apparently doesn’t include a conviction for soliciting a minor and lifelong placement on the sex-crimes registry.”
These are men accustomed to looking beneath the surface and pursuing what is hidden wherever it leads—about science, language, world affairs. But about these women those men evinced a profound incuriosity. They were just the scenery, the help, or as Dominique Strauss-Kahn memorably put it, the “equipment.” In degree but not in kind, they are like the men in Southern France who were invited to rape a drugged Gisele Pelicot, and justified this bizarre situation on the basis that her husband had given permission.
But they’re important dudes so whatever.
Lawrence Krauss can’t recognize confirmation bias when he sees it/does it? Why am I not surprised? How does he know the ages of the anonymous female scenery around Jeffrey Epstein? Did you even see all of them? How would you know?
And Alan Dershowitz? Used to be a respected lawyer. Not now. Not since a long time. He practices from the bottom of the sewer now.
Looks like Noam Chomsky could do with a bit of reality recognition training; maybe also a brain transplant while they’re at it.
That does not yield a ‘clean slate.’ It yields an ex-crim, former jailbird, and a bloke with a record. And totally suss until accepted as otherwise.
Of course serving your sentence only yields a clean slate if you belong to the rich, important, male genius class. Try serving a sentence as a peasant, and see how easliy you can get a job and be accepted into polite society afterwards.
When my father was alive he was missing one of his fingers. He used to poach abalone as a kid, and one of them got him, he’d stuck a finger under the shell and the Abalone sucked down onto the rock it was attached to.
He was with a friend at the time who managed to save his life, at the expense of the finger.
The two remained friends for decades, my father would go down to Cape Town and stay with the guy who saved his life. Until near the end of this he started getting funny looks, and catching other friends whispering.
Turned out the guy who had saved my father’s life was a paedophile. Eventually got convicted of molesting another friend’s son.
My father had stayed with this guy repeatedly over the years and he had no idea, because it just isn’t something you think of happening. He was shocked and disgusted when he found out, and actually contacted his other friends to ask why they didn’t freaking tell him.
I tend to think of this when it comes to Epstein. It is easy to not know this sort of thing.
A lot of the people around Epstein weren’t there for Epstein, they were there for the contacts. Stephen Pinker for example said he attended a couple of Epstein parties basically looking for funding for his research.
Before Epstein was convicted, I could see some plausible deniability. Afterwards though? Yeah Noam Chomsky is a creep.