Tag Archives: Sexual abuse

The Damage That Was Done

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Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Ghislaine Maxwell is spending her time in a luxury prison in Florida. But let’s not forget the damage they did to the young girls they trafficked.

On October 17, 2023, there was a news story in USA Today that didn’t get a lot of coverage by the mainstream media.

The article reported:

One of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims who testified against Ghislaine Maxwell in her trial for sex-trafficking minors has died of an accidental overdose, authorities said.

Carolyn Andriano, 36, was found dead in a hotel room in West Palm Beach, Florida, on May 23, according to West Palm Beach Police Department spokesperson Mike Jachles. Her death wasn’t made public until this week.

Andriano died an overdose of methadone, fentanyl and alprazolam, Jachles said. She testified in 2021 that she had been addicted to “pain pills and cocaine” and that she had taken them “to block out” Epstein’s sexual abuse. For four years, Epstein had abused her at his Palm Beach mansion, starting in 2001 when she was 14, she said.

Andriano lived in Wellington at the time of her death and leaves behind her husband, John Pitts Jr., five children and her mother, Dorothy Groenert. She is the second Epstein survivor known to suffer a fatal overdose in Palm Beach County.

Leigh Skye Patrick, 29, was also found dead in a West Palm Beach hotel room in 2017. Patrick’s twin sister blamed her struggles with drugs on Epstein.

She “suffered tremendously and it started with Epstein,” Selby Patrick told the Daily Mail in 2019. “She struggled with addiction since the time she met that guy.”

Epstein’s case had drawn worldwide attention. The 66-year-old investment banker was known for his powerful connections, including Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom and former presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

That last sentence is extremely misleading–Epstein was barred from Mar-a-Lago as soon as President Trump figured out what he was about. The inclusion of President Trump is an effort to tie him to the crimes of Epstein.

The damage that was done by Epstein and Maxwell is incalculable. I am not against the death penalty for anyone involved in child trafficking. Child trafficking does include those under the age of 18.

A Sad Day In Texas

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Yesterday CBN News reported that a jury  has ruled against a Texas father as his ex-wife tries to turn their 7-year-old son into a girl.

The article reports:

Jeff Younger has been locked in a dispute with his ex-wife Dr. Anne Georgulas who has accused him of child abuse for not treating their son James like a girl. He says she’s the one abusing their son by trying to change his biological gender.

Now LifeSite News reports a jury and judge have collectively ruled against Younger, which appears to give Georgulas the go-ahead to turn James into “Luna”.

The article continues:

The SaveJames site contends, “This suggests that the diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria should be reviewed by an independent psychologist. James has never had an independent second opinion. Medical and social intervention should be suspended until James’ father can get a good second opinion.”

Younger told the Luke Macias podcast, “I believe this is not just emotional abuse but is the very most fundamental form of sexual abuse, tampering with the sexual identity of a vulnerable boy.”

Macias says this is about the LGBT activist agenda reaching the next level in America.

“The most radical in our society have not found themselves content with expanding their own horizons and throwing off truth in regards to their own lives. They are actively experimenting on the children of Texas,” he says.

Hopefully in the process of making the wrong decision, nothing will be done that is irreversible. The child is too young to be making this decision. I can’t help but wonder how the child will feel as a twenty-year-old. Hopefully if he changes his mind, he will be physically be able to reverse what is done.

Quietly Fighting The War On Child Pornography

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NBC News is reporting today that federal agents have shut down the world’s “largest dark web child porn marketplace.”

The article reports:

The now-shuttered English-language site, called “Welcome to Video,” contained more than 200,000 unique videos or almost 8 terabytes of data showing sex acts involving children, toddlers and infants, according to the 18-page criminal indictment unsealed here Wednesday, and processed 7,300 Bitcoin transactions worth more than $730,000.

According to prosecutors, the vast online store was run by Jong Woo Son, a South Korean citizen currently serving an 18-month prison sentence in his home country after his conviction on charges related to child pornography. The site operated from June 2015 until it was seized and shut down by U.S. authorities in March 2018.

At a press conference Wednesday morning, U.S. officials said 337 suspected users of the site had been arrested worldwide to date.

…In addition to Son, more than 300 other suspects have been arrested in South Korea as of Wednesday, while still more suspects were identified in other countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, including a Washington, D.C., man who was caught with the equivalent of 50 years worth of video footage he had downloaded.

The website ran solely on the dark web, a section of the internet that can only be accessed via a Tor browser, which is designed to protect users’ tracks online and obscure digital footprints. Users could purchase videos using cryptocurrency and an annual membership was priced at 0.03 bitcoins (at current exchange rates, around $300).

The article concludes:

When they announced the arrest of “Mr. A” in 2018, the South Korean police also said they had arrested a total of 156 South Koreans for either uploading or downloading child porn materials, which was unusual given that the site operated entirely in English.

“Most of the users were in their 20s, unmarried and white-collar office workers and first-time offenders, although some were ex-convicts of sexual crimes, including juvenile sex offenders. One possessed as many as 48,634 child porn [files],” the KNPA said.

Paul Henkins, head of the Americas region for the U.K.’s National Crime Agency, said at the Wednesday press conference that 18 investigations of alleged site users had yielded seven convictions, with one defendant sentenced to 22 years.

The case, Henkins said, demonstrates the “increase in the scale, severity and complexity of child sexual abuse offending.”

Hopefully the people arrested will spend the rest of their lives in prison.

Will The Victims Receive Justice?

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The death of Jeffrey Epstein was not the end of the story. Today Ed Morrissey posted an article at Hot Air about one of Epstein’s victims filing a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, described as one of Epstein’s enablers.

The article reports::

A new front in the Jeffrey Epstein case opened Wednesday morning, as Epstein accuser Jennifer Araoz filed a lawsuit against his estate, his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell and three unnamed female household staff.

Araoz alleges she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Epstein at his New York City townhouse when she was 14 and 15 years old, including a forcible rape in 2002. She first disclosed her alleged abuse publicly in an exclusive TODAY Show interview with Savannah Guthrie of NBC News on July 10, the same day she filed papers in New York state court saying she intended to sue Epstein.

The complaint Araoz filed Wednesday alleges Maxwell and the other staffers “conspired with each other to make possible and otherwise facilitate the sexual abuse and rape of Plaintiff.”

Meanwhile, The U.K. Daily Mail reported today:

Ghislaine Maxwell, long-time consort of Jeffrey Epstein and the alleged procurer of victims in his underage sex trafficking ring, has been laying low in a New England beach town, DailyMail.com has learned exclusively.

Maxwell, 57, is in a relationship with Scott Borgerson, 43, and has been living with him at his secluded oceanfront property at the end of a long private road in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts.

The British socialite has been loath to leave the $3 million mansion, a source told DailyMail.com amid heightened focus on Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators following the convicted pedophile’s apparent suicide on Saturday.

‘She’s become a real homebody, rarely ventures out. She’s the antithesis of the woman who traveled extensively and partied constantly with Epstein,’ said a source familiar with Maxwell’s new life.

Hot Air concludes:

Araoz explains her decision in today’s New York Times to press forward with her civil claims, not just against Epstein’s estate but also against his “adult enablers.” Without them, Epstein could never have succeeded in the scope of his predation, Araoz convincingly argues:

The power structure was stacked against me. His money, influence and connections to important people made me want to hide and stay silent. Those same powerful forces let him hide and evade justice.

That changes, starting now. I want my story to hold Epstein to account and also his recruiters, the workers on his payroll who knew what he was doing and the prominent people around him who helped conceal and perpetuate his sex-trafficking scheme. Their hideous actions victimized me and so many young girls like me. …

Standing up to the entrenched network of power and wealth that surrounded Epstein is scary, but I am no longer afraid. Reliving these experiences is tough, but I’ve learned to be tougher.

I used to feel alone, walking into his mansion with the cameras pointing at me, but now I have the power of the law on my side. I will be seen. I will be heard. I will demand justice.

So will others, especially now that Epstein’s dead and his “power structure” is on the run. Or at least the part of it that we know about at the moment. When other victims start adding some high-profile male names to this “power structure” in court documents, we’ll see how well the justice system works.

We are about to find out if there really is equal justice under the law

When The Accusations Crumble

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On Thursday, The Daily Caller posted an article about Mark Coleman, a former MMA fighter who wrestled at Ohio State when Representative Jim Jordan coached there. It seems that Mr. Coleman has changed his mind about whether or not Representative Jordan know about the sexual abuse allegations against a university physician.

The article reports:

“At no time did I ever say or have any direct knowledge that Jim Jordan knew of Dr. Richard Strauss’s inappropriate behavior,” Mark Coleman, a former MMA fighter who wrestled at Ohio State when Jordan coached there, said in a statement.

“I have nothing but respect for Jim Jordan as I have known him for more than 30 years and know him to be of impeccable character.”

Coleman is the first former OSU wrestler to recant his claims that Jordan knew about sexual abuse at the hands of Dr. Richard Strauss, an OSU physician accused of molesting dozens of student-athletes.

I previously wrote about this scandal here. The two noteworthy things about the scandal are the fact that it happened twenty years ago and did not surface until there was talk of Jim Jordan as Speaker of the House and the fact that Perkins, Coie is involved. Perkins, Coie was the law firm that was used to channel funds to Christopher Steele for the dirty dossier.

I wonder how much of the mainstream media will report the fact that this man has changed his story. I also wonder if now that the damage to Jim Jordan’s reputation is done, will the story go away.

When Political Correctness Interferes With Justice, Everyone Suffers

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Front Page Magazine posted an article today about the exploitation of girls in Birmingham, England, dating back to the 1990’s.

The article reports:

Britain’s Birmingham Mail reported last week that Birmingham’s City Council buried a report about Muslim cab drivers exploiting non-Muslim girls back in 1990.

A researcher, Dr. Jill Jesson, drafted a report on this issue. But, she explained, “the report was shelved, buried, it was never made public. I was shocked to be told that copies of the report were to be destroyed and that nothing further was to be said. Clearly, there was something in this report that someone in the department was worried about.”

The article reminds us that the report was buried because the British authorities believed that prosecuting these cases would have appeared to be racist. Meanwhile, young girls were being sexually abused by these cab drivers. Political correctness prevented these girls from getting the legal protection they were entitled to.

The article reports:

“The sad part of this story,” Jesson concluded, “is not the suppression of evidence but that the relevant organisations have failed to address this problem.”

Indeed so – and that is because of its racial and religious aspects. British authorities persist in seeing this as a racial issue, when in fact these cabbies only preyed upon these girls because they were non-Muslims, and thus eligible to become “captives of the right hand” (cf. Qur’an 4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50) and used as sex slaves.

At what point are the authorities required to intervene when a religion sanctions the sexual abuse of young girls? Does freedom of religion extend to the abuse of other people? At some point I think we need to examine whether Islam is simply a religion or a political system.

The Dangers Of Political Correctness

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The story that recently came out of Rotherham England is extremely upsetting. The U.K. Telegraph posted a story on Sunday about the sexual abuse of at least 1,400 children over 16 years. The fact that this continued over a sixteen-year period is horrendous. These children can never buy back their innocence. They will probably never fully recover from the damage that was done when the abuse continued for sixteen years without being addressed. The really scary fact here is that the authorities were hesitant to pursue reports of the abuse because they did not want to be called racists. That is truly sad. People in charge were afraid to stand up for justice because it might not be politically correct.

The article reports:

The Rotherham scandal and a series of cases in towns including Rochdale highlighted how evidence of Pakistani men targeting white girls for abuse was repeatedly played down for fear of accusations of racism.

Mr Danczuk (Simon Danczuk, who helped expose a pattern of grooming of white teenage girls by men from a Pakistani background in Rochdale, where he is the Labour MP) said the elements of Pakistani political culture itself were partly to blame for the cover-up.

“There are cultural issues around the way politics are done in the Asian community which have to change,” he said.

He said he had personally come under pressure from Asian councillors and members of the community for speaking out as well as being warned by prominent figures in his party.

He pointed to the way in which two Muslim councillors in Rochdale had provided character references for one of the perpetrators of the Rochdale abuse.

“Politics are done differently in Pakistan, it is a cultural difference we have imported some of that into some of these northern towns and cities and I think we have to face up to the fact that we can’t carry on doing politics like that.

“It is not healthy and the direct consequence is that we end up having to tackle issues like has been faced in Rotherham.”

He described it as “a looking after your own” within the Asian community which other politicians had accepted.

This is the danger in allowing an immigrant population to settle in a country and not assimilate. We have the same problem in America. I am not opposed to legal immigration, but when you bring in a population and do not teach them how America (or Britain) works, you may find that population doing things that are considered illegal here.

The role of women in Britain and America is very different from the role of women in Muslim countries. We need to make sure that young girls and women who live in America and Britain are treated with the respect the law grants them. In Muslim countries, under Sharia Law, women have no legal standing. Rape is not rape unless a woman has male witnesses to confirm that it was a rape. A women can be jailed or killed for being raped in a Muslim country. We do not need those laws or that attitude here. Immigrants should be welcomed, but they should also be required to understand that all citizens have rights in America and Britain–not just male citizens.

 

A Strong Statement From The Editor Of The Patriot-News

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I know this is a long post, but please read it–it is important. Yesterday the Patriot-News posted the following statement by David Newhouse:

From the very beginning of reporting on the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse story, Patriot-News reporter Sara Ganim knew the identity and many details about the young man known in the grand jury presentment as Victim One.

It is the policy of The Patriot-News and PennLive not to identify alleged victims of sexual abuse, whether children or adults. In all of our reporting, we have been extremely careful not to reveal any of those details about Victim One which would help someone make that identification. Instead, through her stories and interviews, Sara Ganim put the focus where it should be – on the alleged crimes, the pain that this young man says he has suffered, and the alarming frustrations he and his mother describe in trying to report it.But the Sandusky child sex abuse story has showed the difference between truly protecting the identity of a victim and the fiction of protecting the identity of a victim.

In Wednesday’s story in The New York Times, for example, a profile entitled “For a Reported Penn State Victim, a Search for Trust,” reporters Nate Schweber and Jo Becker write a profile so detailed that, even though they do not name him, googling certain information in the profile results in the young man’s name within seconds. The Patriot-News has learned that other news organizations, which did not have the young man’s name, have already done so.

 
Although the Times story has been all over the web, and of course the Times web site draws a huge amount of traffic on its own, we decline to link to it here.
The story quotes his next-door neighbor and names his neighborhood. It describes the detailed circumstances of a car accident which was reported in local papers at the time. It says he liked to wear tie-dyed socks. None of these details have the slightest to do with why or how the boy was allegedly befriended and then assaulted over several years by Sandusky. They do not serve the story of Jerry Sandusky. They only serve to make an alleged victim of sexual assault easily identifiable.You could call the anonymity maintained in the story a polite fiction, but there is nothing polite about it.

To be clear, the Times story is not alone. It is just the latest and most prominent example so far of such reporting. 

 
The pledge of most news organizations to withhold the names of sexual assault victims – men and women, children and adults – is not some journalistic game of who can say the most while following some arbitrary rule. Most media have adopted it because, tragically, reporting sexual assaults still carries a stigma. It is no accident that Victim One was only the second boy to come forward to authorities in what is alleged to have been more than 15 years of assaults by Sandusky. Stories like these, if anything, could discourage future victims from speaking up. 
 
Victim One told the grand jury that he had been victimized by Jerry Sandusky. Now one could argue that he is being victimized again – this time, by frenzied news media who essentially name the victim in the pursuit of salacious details, all done in the name of anonymity.
 

David Newhouse is the editor of the Patriot-News.

 

 


 

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I Don’t Follow College Football–But This Is Disturbing

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Number 12, Penn State quarterback Michael Robi...

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John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting writes a column for Sports Illustrated. His latest column was about the scandal in the Penn State football program involving Jerry Sandusky.  The article features a link to the Grand Jury report on Jerry Sandusky.

After reading the Grand Jury report, I would like to see the football program at Penn State suspended for at least ten years–that is how long the sexual abuse of young men was allowed to continue.

It is inappropriate to allow those who covered up the activities of Coach Sandusky continue in their current positions. There needs to be a total housecleaning of those who have overseen the football program for the past ten years and a suspension of the program for the next ten years.

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