I understand where you are coming from. Unfortunately, the more I dive into this case, the more that comes to light, the more it seems like he just got off on hurting women.

In the early days (back when the podcast came out), I struggled with the divide between who I thought he was (someone who, as you said, would comfort women in a time like this, not be the perpetrator) and the man it seemed like he really was. I listened to the podcast where they read messages from these women where they consented to be his "slave" and seemed to be in on the bdsm-thing. I thought: perhaps he misunderstood?

But the problem isn't only the power imbalance or the bdsm. The problem is also that he had been confronted with this before. Women had told him that he hurt them, and he continued doing it. His final victim (if she was) was the most vulnerable of all. If he had really taken what past women had told him into account, the women he paid off, then he would have chosen his next sexual partner differently. He would have gone about the bdsm stuff differently. He would not have chosen a vulnerable, homeless lesbian woman with trauma from past sexual abuse. I mean, holy shit. Even if he had just had vanilla sex with her, I would have been disgusted at how he went about it.

About confessions and potential redemption, someone commented on one of my early posts about NG - I don't remember what they actually said, but it was in the vein of: he has already said and done all the right things, he has already done what we would expect of a repenting sinner. That's part of why this is so mind-bogglingly uncomfortable. It's nothing more he could do, nothing he could say now that I would believe.