I got kicked off UB for posting about them, but the old UB would have devoured that story. I always came to UB to make sense of that other side of NYC life, the finance types and socialites. Can someone help me to understand what was it about NYC in the 90s that made this comment from the Guardian true? 'The heady mix of Epstein and Maxwell’s world of power and wealth in the 90s “is a fascinating portrait of a moment in New York society”, said one acquaintance. “There was a sick undercurrent of wealthy, powerful, dominating men. Things happened, things went down that were unacceptable in terms of girls being meat. It was just accepted – and carnal – there’d be some gorgeous girl from a gallery or a publishing house and these older powerful men, married or unmarried, it didn’t really matter.”
Where did you get that quote from? I cannot image the environment that allowed this type of behavior to exist and perpetuate. I guess that is pretty naive of me to say but it's true. I hope those men, and others that enable them, are exposed and go to jail for a long time.
Anonymous quote from one of Ghislaine's friends in this Guardian piece:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/04/high-society-to-hideaway-arrest-ghislaine-maxwells-dramatic-fall
I keep hearing the 90s were a tricky time for feminism. I was living on the west coast and life looked like a Portlandia episode back then, so I didn't see what was happening in NYC. To me it's more like the aughts when you had a lot of sexual exploitation. The Victoria's Secret ads, the old Vice magazine, American Apparel and Terry Richardson's exploitative photographs for them. Lots of sexist/sexually exploitive advertising and media culture.
I think this type of conspiracy theory nonsense doesn't belong on this website.
OT: let's not start to überpolice the discussion. You're free to disagree loudly, and OP is free to believe in various theories, mainstream or not, credible or not etc...
uh were you on old UB? this is exactly the type of discussion that would happen.
Hardly a theory, this is a conspiracy. Page Six called out a lot of names for dining with Epstein as I recall, Woody Allen, Katie Couric, the Stephanopouloses, etc. This is a good summary featuring a clip of Prince Andrew self-immolating:
having trouble understanding what's the conspiracy theory
Ditto
Why is this a conspiracy theory? It’s a description of the upper Echelons of society and how they took advantage of women and bystanders looked the other way. 2020 with their me too movement is not so far off, better concealed is all.
I bet there were women on UB who knew them, maybe even women who worried their DHs were caught up....weird to think how their behaviour was considered ok until very recently.....
I don't think the 90's were any worse than the previous decades re:young girls/women as meat
I like this kind of discussion; many of us have daughters, let's learn how this kind of insidious behavior is allowed to continue... and as for whether or not this discussion is appropriate, Epstein worked at Dalton and donated $30k to the Hewitt School for heaven's sake! It would be a shame to shut down discourse on Day One...
It sounds like the victims didn’t have particularly engaged parents or stable home lives. I think that’s a big part of how it continued. What parent in their right mind would send their daughters off to other states and countries with adults they didn’t know? Really bad ones, that’s who.
Maybe the parents were poor and thought this was an opportunity for their daughters to get into modeling. Isn’t that how actual modeling works? Sending young girls off to Europe or exotic locations by themselve?
There have always been depraved people doing depraved things. The wealth of these people simply facilitated the depravity in this era, and everyone surrounding them either covered it up or ignored it because no one wanted to challenge the unspoken rules of the group. This is how I make sense of it.
Perhaps we can challenge then?
How? The super wealthy will always have ways of working outside the system everyone else has to abide by.
It was this way and I doubt it changed. I had a MP post about it on UB that all the young women who were hired at the niche firm I was at were attractive. Not sure if I would have gotten the job otherwise and I was on the lowest end of that attractiveness scale in comparison.
Just a speculation, but could it be also that in the 90s there was an influx of pretty girls from Eastern Europe, who wanted to make it by any means in the West after the fall of the Iron Curtain? I had friends who "modeled" at that time there and that's exactly how that world operated. I would imagine they were ready to do a lot more to make it in the USA.