Epstein files reveal links to gender surgeon-Jess Ting who visited the island

Society is so strange about what teens are mature enough to do.

The push to give the vote to 16 year olds coincides with the push to ban social media for under 16s. I suppose in 2029 we'll be asking kids born in 2013 what they think of the government's performance, without them having been exposed to alternative news sources.

That’s an interesting opinion, given the push to give the vote to 16 year olds

That's the most creative misreading of someone's post that I've seen in a long time, and I've been on a thread with an MRA this last week.

The "casting couch" is an open secret. It's vile, it shouldn't exist, but it's real. Until the whole US movie industry changes, there will be more like Weinstein, and there will still be young women who feel that they have to audition horizontally to get the role they know they can do.

LOL, nice try 😂

😆

I read posts like this and I wonder if this board should change its name. A twisted defence of Weinstein on … FWR? Is that where we’re at simply because we can’t be seen to be on the left in any way at all? You blame the girls and their parents more than any perpetrators.

Of course, she's not sending mailers out herself, is she

Well duh. There's some fucking unhinged twats on X who are whipping themselves into a frenzy crowing otherwise though.

I dont think Epstein needed to keep a list, he seems to have done a good job of keeping receipts in the form of emails and all these compromising photos.

Is there nothing that certain types of people won't tell lies about to try to make the wonderful principled j k Rowling look bad - disgraceful, and frankly doesn't work on normal intelligent folk.

Lying to promote hatred of JKR doesn’t work here.

As in 'Keep a diary, and someday it'll keep you.'
[Mae West in Every Day's a Holiday]

There are people on Twitter openly insinuating that JKR's very tenuous connection with Epstein makes her a child abuser. The stupidity of defaming one of the richest people on the planet never ceases to amaze me. She has successfully sued for libel before, forcing people to apologise, and yet they continue.

Yeah, having friends who've been in the glamour modelling business, Page 3 and so forth, they often say "I don't in principle regret what I did, but my parents shouldn't have let me do it at 16." At that age there's too much scope for making bad decisions and too much naivety about dodgy men.

The movie business is on the surface a step up from that, but anyone who follows it knows that sex is a currency in that world. I firmly believe that Harvey Weinstein was guilty and also that he was a scapegoat for a much broader problem that industry insiders will never speak honestly about.

Yes, this too.

And here is the thing, there can be a very thin line between being prostituted and being willing to exchange sex for success in a very competitive career. A lot of people in the entertainment industry have low boundaries anyway, which is why they are willing to get naked on camera and all the other things we expect in our films.

Yes, I think people should be very wary of assuming that some link with Epstein means going off to weird sex parties.

He clearly was looking for any connection at all to rich and influential people. Invites to a dinner, getting them tickets to events, golf, drugs, whatever people wanted. I have no doubt that if he felt one of these people didn't approve of certain things he would keep those things out of sight.

Yes, it very much looks like the great & the good, the rich & the famous have all crossed paths with Epstein at one time or another. The question is who had the deeper connections that survived the conviction.

It confirms that once you're moving in those circles, either from being born into it or getting there yourself, then everyone knows everyone else or knows someone who does. It's not a stretch to believe that "they're all covering for each other" or at least enough of them are and the rest aren't bothered enough to rock the boat of power and privilege.

I think that was the point, photos were being taken all the time some discreetly and some posed. Mainly for blackmail purposes.

😂😂

I think it was Steve Martin who said that a man has enough blood in his body to run a brain and a penis, but not both at the same time.

But your friend Jeff, he has these high society parties with lots of businesspeople and artists and politicians present, and there are always lots of attractive young women who are thrilled to meet you. And (you believe) Jeff is a discreet kind of guy.

Good point, though I have been wondering why, if Jeff was so discreet, there are so many photographs of these people. Didn't Peter Mandelson ever wonder why someone was taking a pic of him in his underpants?

I think they must have.

Plus, possibly forgot that it was Jack Thorne who wrote it, not JKR.

Regarding Ting. Lots of us have had uneasy feelings regarding blocking puberty in children due to the technically over the age of consent, but look much younger (and are mentally younger due to the important role that puberty plays in brain development) aspect.

The way it will have worked is: let's say you're [captain of industry], you're not going to go to a sketchy part of town and hire a prostitute. That's terribly low class, it runs the risk of exposure and it runs against these guys' self-image (they like to think of themselves as charismatic seducers, not as seedy johns)

But your friend Jeff, he has these high society parties with lots of businesspeople and artists and politicians present, and there are always lots of attractive young women who are thrilled to meet you. And (you believe) Jeff is a discreet kind of guy.

I think this side of Epstein's business was his ability to be a very prolific sex trafficker while putting on enough of a veneer of class that the men in his circle could rationalise it to themselves as not really being sex trafficking - or, maybe more likely, they just didn't think about it as long as they were getting their rocks off.

It's like how lots of what happens in Hollywood is just thinly disguised prostitution. Most women in the business, and a large chunk of the men, will have been effectively prostituted when they were trying to establish their careers, many of them underage at the time. But nobody really wants to talk about that, and it would interfere with the glamour of the entertainment business to acknowledge it.

It is no surprise that paedophiles are interested in giving kids puberty blockers.
Reading some of the emails, Epstein was giving thousands and thousands for research and for 'advancing the cause', as well as publishing puff pieces in the media on trans in the animal kingdom and being 'natural'.
Truly, truly astonishing.

What, doesn't everybody get their tickets for Cursed Child directly off JKR?! Is there another way??

Part of it is: people believe there is an "Epstein client list", but that's never been found, and it's doubtful whether there would be a single document.

Likewise, the emails show who he was in contact with. There's no easy way of disaggregating those who were involved in his criminal activities from those who weren't. Very few people are dumb enough to put anything directly incriminating in an email.

The people who have been tripped up are the likes of Andrew and Fergie, who were dumb enough to say "I cut off contact with him in year x" and then it appears they were still in contact with him years later, and then they get caught in a lie.

Even if you take his long term friendship with Woody Allen, you might draw conclusions based on Woody's sketchy private life, but the thousands of emails between them are really just the two of them exchanging jokes and saying "thanks for dinner last night".

I think it's very likely that Epstein (NYC, Jewish, grew up in the 1970s) was genuinely a huge Woody Allen fan, had seen Annie Hall dozens of times, and was thrilled to strike up a friendship with his idol. And it's quite plausible that the elderly Woody, who has been completely cancelled, was unwilling to cut off contact with his shady friend who was one of the few people who didn't turn against him.

That's not to say it's impossible that there was more to their relationship, but I'm not seeing it in the emails.

It's massively more of a stretch to deduce anything from emails to/from a publicist about attending a Harry Potter premiere.