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You can debate what "presented as willing" means, and other things, but then you get to the point that many of these girls were 13-16 years old, and generally "

You can debate what "presented as willing" means, and other things, but then you get to the point that many of these girls were 13-16 years old, and generally "looked young" - that was Epstein's modus operandi - he didn't want "plausibly adult" girls (either as a result of his own proclivities, or to further his (alleged/hypothesized) attempts at blackmail, or both). As Donald Trump famously said, "many of them on the younger side". Ghislaine Maxwell was introduced to Trump at 14 - and said she was 14 at the time. So then you run into this awkward thing of how many plausible deniability criteria are we going to work with? "Presented as willing"? "Never asked age"? What else?

ewzimm 3y ago
These are all valid points, but Stallman never said anything to defend either Epstein or his associates. I’m not advocating for Stallman’s position either by questioning if it was effective or by laying it out here, but this is the subject that got him in trouble Stallman basically believes in freedom, love, and the precise use of language. He doesn’t even like people using “they” pronouns, preferring other gender-neutral pronouns like “pers,” because it’s singular. That’s the kind of argument he usually gets into. Here, he was objecting to the use of the term “sexual assault” for people who had only been accused but not found guilty of anything because it carries so much force. He attempted to show that most plausible situations didn’t involve force or coercion on the part of the accused in this case. He doesn’t care about the consensus popular or legal definition of “sexual assault,” only the most precise one.