• Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    How would this be a surprise to anybody? He’s already been proven to have numerous ties to Epstein. His base simply doesn’t care.

    • KneeTitts@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      His base simply doesn’t care

      Lets face it, we could have a video of trump raping those kids himself and they still would vote for him. Facts are irrelevant to cults, they are immunized against reality

      • Billiam@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        “If Trump is raping kids live on camera, just imagine what the Demonrats are doing they’re too scared to film!”

        • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Anyone who watches the video is a pedophile and can’t be trusted!

          Edit: Not even a joke. The GOP rolls out faultier logic on the daily.

        • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” -Trump

          We all thought he was talking about a gun.

      • ThrowawayOnLemmy@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        It’s because they want to be him. Just like how they all don’t want to punish millionaires because they all think they’re going to wind up as one someday, they don’t want to punish their guys for breaking the law because they want to be able to break the law with impunity someday too.

        • cabbage@piefed.social
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          10 months ago

          It’s all too easy to imagine the mental gymnastics.

          “She was 17/16/whatever, not a real child anyway” “There is no sign in the video that she is not consenting, this is a private matter” “The democrats are sick for obsessing over this”

      • theodewere@kbin.social
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        10 months ago

        he’s their fantasy vaccine, and they’re not giving him up for real ones that actually sting a little

    • numbermess@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      His base will worship him more for it. He’s essentially a black hole (orange hole?) at this point, his people have passed the event horizon and can’t turn back.

    • ares35@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      his ‘base’ is jealous af. all they get is ‘leftovers’ at the family reunion.

    • ripcord@kbin.social
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      10 months ago

      It’s not a “surprise” not did anyone say it was. It justnt clear before WHICH person in the docs Trump was. Now it is.

  • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    There is nothing he could have done, no crime heinous enough, no evidence damning enough, that will cause our country’s legal system to put him in a cell.

    He’s white. He’s rich. He’s connected. He’s as corrupt as a CVS receipt is long. He’s above the law because the law exists to punish minorities for existing and no other reason.

    • Jimmyeatsausage@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I mean, I’m not holding my breath on Trump being held to account for anything ever, but the whole reason we’re talking about this is because a rich, connected, corrupt white man went to jail and died there.

      • MostlyGibberish@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        Right, but he was (allegedly) killed by another rich, connected, corrupt person to stop him from taking anyone else down with him. Which adds another wrinkle to the whole thing. When you try to hold someone like that accountable, they kill you and get away with it.

    • Moira_Mayhem@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      They’re making it so that the only way a normal person can even get a chance at a life is to burn the system down and start over.

    • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      A white, rich president of the u.s will never set foot in jail, people need to accept that. The best we can do is keep him away from politics, bog him in legal issues and wait for a big Mac to kill him

    • WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      There’s also the problems of supreme court bias and that the Dems would see locking him up as the greatest sin of all - being uncivil and disturbing the status quo.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      and no other reason.

      I think you’re summarizing a bit here. I’m gonna need to see something other than anecdotes.

  • zcd@lemmy.ca
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    10 months ago

    John Doe 174 also repeatedly claimed that he was immune from consent requirements and numerous other unrelated matters…

  • dotslashme@infosec.pub
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    10 months ago

    Am I the only one that feels horrified that there were at least 173 more Does disguised in those documents?

    • johannesvanderwhales@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Keep on mind that there were a wide variety of reasons people are on this list. There’s no evidence of wrongdoing for the vast majority of them. Some of the people on the list were even victims.

      • cabbage@piefed.social
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        10 months ago

        Of course the victims are different, but as for the people like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, I am going to judge people by the company they keep. I doubt anyone in his circles were unaware that Epstein was a complete creep, though some of them might have been unaware just how much of a piece of shit he really was.

        Not saying Clinton raped children, just saying that I’d be reluctant to shake his hand.

  • Jaysyn@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    Last time I checked there was no statute of limitation for child sexual assault.

    • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 months ago

      Depends on the jurisdiction and how much the Catholic Church got to the laws. In most states it sadly does have a statute of limitations, with the clock starting either after it happens or after you turn 18.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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        10 months ago

        In most states it sadly does have a statute of limitations

        Which makes sense for a crime where in most cases the only real evidence is likely to be the accusation itself. Short of having a live camera feed and a GPS tracker on you at all times and retaining all the data forever, it gets increasingly hard to build a defense against an accusation like that the farther in the past it was.

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Actually it’s pretty common to have limits. It’s why NY passed a law to let anyone make a claim regardless of when it happened by a certain date. It was a catchup law, pretty much, and now the limit is back in place.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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        10 months ago

        I’m surprised that actually worked. Normally the statute of limitations in place when the crime occurs is the one that applies, and extending it later does not let you retroactively prosecute cases barred by the previous statute of limitations. Stogner v California went that way, for example.

          • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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            10 months ago

            Let me rephrase what I wrote before. Given Stogner, I’m surprised the courts didn’t shoot this down as an ex post facto law. Hope everybody has a permanent recording of a perfect alibi for where they are and what they were up to at all times forever, just in case if ex post facto laws are back on the table whenever a state wants to make a one time exception.

            • stoly@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              It’s not ex post facto. The rape laws already existed. The statute of limitations was extended.

              • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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                10 months ago

                Again, see Stogner. In that case the statute of limitations was extended for a crime, and Stogner was tried for a charge that would have been barred by the previous statute of limitations but not by the new one.

                The decision in the end was that he was not subject to prosecution, essentially that any past conduct you could not be prosecuted for you remain unable to be prosecuted for regardless of any future changes to the law. Basically once outside statute of limitations you can’t be put back inside it or it’s ex post facto.

                So for example if the statute of limitations for a crime moved from 5 years to 20, if you are accused of doing a thing 6 years ago when the extension passes you are safe, but if you did it 4 years ago the extension applies. Except apparently in this case.

                • stoly@lemmy.world
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                  10 months ago

                  Perhaps the NY statue is fully civil in character? I don’t really know either way, but it would be an explanation to your question.

  • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Seeing a lot of comments here about how there’s no way he’ll face consequences, and it fucking sucks.

    People should be held personally responsible for reprehensible crimes. Anytime someone at any level pleads for people to commit to business as usual, it crashes face first into the fact that business as usual fucking sucks, lawless rich assholes fucking suck, and it fucking sucks that government can’t decide where it wants to land in the triangle graph of Corrupt, Inept, and Downright Fucking Evil.

    If some sleazy fuck can dodge taxes, ruin lives, destroy businesses, possibly allegedly rape children, and yet still BECOME PRESIDENT, and continue to defy all consequence, then it’s pretty easy to see why people wind up accelerationists.

    We’ve got to enforce some kind of legal, ethical, moral, logical code on people, including and especially politicians, or else people are going to conclude that our high minded ideas about democracy and mutual respect and dignity are just a bunch of pissing into the wind, and they will be right.

    • pixelscript@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      I appreciate the gusto, but I find rally posts like this to be extremely irritating.

      Do you really think the people who are saying he’ll just get away with it all don’t think all of these things? Do you think people dropped their morals on the issue and now think “this is fine” because it’s the status quo?

      Pray tell – what can I do, today, as a drop in the fucking ocean, to ensure this specific white collar criminal gets summarily apprehended, convicted, and meaningfully punished for his crimes on a reasonable timescale? What reasonable, concrete action am I supposed to take that will do a damn thing about it that I’m not already doing by dutifully casting my ballots and boycotting support for people and causes I don’t believe in at every opportunity?

      I am convinced there is no such action. The dominos that matter in this specific case were already set long ago. All we can do at this point is make logical predictions about how they will fall. And from my point of view, “Donald Trump will not be meaningfully punished” is looking inevitable. I have no faith in the current stacking of the judicial system to declare an outcome I’d be content with. I and others like me are not happy about it. But we aren’t deluding ourselves either. The train for proles like us doing anything about this now is long gone.

      Now, I don’t think it’s hopeless on the grand scale. We can and should work to claw progress on the general form of this issue over time. There’s lots we can still do about that. Activism, protesting, dragging people to polls, etc. But that will likely be a “plant a tree whose shade you will never sit in” kind of thing.

      Regarding this specific man today, I think we are powerless to meaningfully affect the trajectories of these cases. Anything short of rioting in the streets, casting aside legal process, and marching on the courthouse demanding his head on a pike (in other words, stooping to the level of Jan 6th insurrectionists) is too slow and/or only theoretical. And I am very tired of cheerleaders trying to tell me otherwise when they offer no substantive plan of action.

    • ynthrepic@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      The question is what people who conclude the truth will do next. I think we’re stuck between a rock and the hard place that is human nature. I’m growing increasingly cynical about grassroots democracy having any hope of victory in the age of the algorithm controlled internet.

      Sam Harris made a good point during the pandemic that is if everyone had just followed the lockdown instructions to perfection for three solid weeks, the virus really would have been eliminated in the US, and the world if we in the global community all followed suit. Millions of lives and trillions of dollars would have been saved. But we fucking suck at acting in our own best interests, and if Covid had been as deadly as we first feared, we’d already be fucked.

      I think there’s a reason fascist authoritarians are so seductive to so many, and it’s because most of us are suckers for charismatic leaders telling us what to do. Enter stage right a left-wing populist, and the left will get just as horny for them as the right is for Trump.

      This happened in NZ (where I live) over Jacinda Ardern. Turned out she was just in it for her career and the rest of her party was just downright incompetent. Ironically, they did well early pandemic which won them and the left an overwhelming majority in 2020. They honestly just got lucky. Not only did they screw up royally late-pandemic, but in the aftermath, they totally fucking failed to do anything worthwhile with the power they had to move the progressive agenda forward in any enduring way. They just lost the 2023 election in a complete landslide. The only silver lining is the new right-wing three-way coalition is very likely to be even more incompetent, so maybe the left will get another chance in three years.

      Point is, populists always win elections because most people don’t vote for policy, or if they do, vote single issue, and rarely strategically. Then, anything that would improve the situation at the grass roots in the short term (e.g. integrating civics and critical thinking into school curriculums) would lead to accusations of progressive bias since science and progressivism are natural allies. Even so, change of this kind might still be possibly perhaps if it didn’t threaten capitalism as a whole which thrives on the left/right oscillations of so-called “representative” democracy.

      I think we’re fucked in the near term unless one of the following two miracles occurs:

      1. A charismatic left-wing politician more popular than Trump emerges in the US for the 2028 election who is scientifically literate, a competent leader, an excellent sales and business person, and genuinely interested in advancing the UNs “Global Goals” agenda in the most effective ways already known to world leaders in their respective academic and technical fields.

      2. Benevolent aliens announce themselves with a power comparable to God of Abrahamic and they strong arm us into adopting a Solar Punk society.

      I put (2) as being as likely as God actually existing, which is, basically nil. So… Taylor Swift 2028?

  • GodlessCommie@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    In the end it wont matter because none of them will ever face charges. Just like the bankers that crashed our economy in 2008, all that money hidden away in Panama, etc. The laws that apply to the working class do not apply to the wealthy

  • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    I’m actually surprised he isn’t listed as John Barron

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    The documents identify about 170 people whose names have come up in a legal battle between Virginia Giuffre, one of his accusers, and Ghislaine Maxwell, his former girlfriend who in 2021 was convicted of trafficking girls to him for sex.

    “This individual did not raise any objection to unsealing, and thus did not meet his or her burden of identifying interests that outweigh the presumption of access with specificity,” Preska wrote of Doe 36.

    Two of the unsealed documents the judge said named Doe 174 are from a deposition of Johanna Sjoberg, who has accused Epstein of rape and Prince Andrew of groping her (the British royal has denied the claims).

    “Mr. Epstein’s name has been widely linked in the press with prominent individuals such as Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew,” his attorneys wrote in a motion arguing that he should not be forced to testify in front of a jury, later adding: “His personal appearance at the trial of this case would predictably be the focus of massive media attention, of both the mainstream and gutter variety.”

    One unsealed document from a lawyer representing Dershowitz seeks to discredit one of his accusers, Sarah Ransome, by saying she has made unproven claims about possessing video footage of powerful people having sex with girls in Epstein’s homes.

    In her book “Silenced No More: Surviving My Journey to Hell and Back,” she said she told the false story as a sort of insurance policy, though she maintained that “Jeffrey kept a trove of surveillance on every person who had ever visited his properties.”


    The original article contains 1,119 words, the summary contains 262 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.works
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    10 months ago

    Pretty sure publishing the actual names of everyone will have amazing to watch consequences.

    I can’t see a good reason or even a good argument why any person should have their name hidden for any reason at all. Let them all face public scrutiny. Let’s see what kind of stories they come up with as excuses.

    Publish the names, cowards. There is no good reason not to, change my mind.

  • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    What I wanna know is… Why the fuck was Stephen Hawking there? Even if you wanna tell me he was a massive perv the whole time, dude was the poster-child for mind over matter, what the fuck was he gonna use? The joystick on his wheelchair?