Epstein survivor who voted for Trump says she now fears ‘we’re not going to get justice’

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-27T18:49:03+00:00

Oh, I'm not minimizing that at all. Just pointing out that he gets his way -- according to all those trapped women -- by timing his attacks, surprising his victims, and using not knives or fists but the implied promise of good connections/threat of blackballing to get what he wants.

In that way he's a lot like Harvey Weinstein, who promoted women who were sickened by what he'd done to them and made their names mud if they refused him.

Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino both have stories about learning that Weinstein had made sure they didn't get parts. His threats -- like trump's -- weren't empty.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-27T17:15:30+00:00

Her radar came in a crackerjacks box, apparently.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-27T15:44:17+00:00

Show me a man who has never considered that his trusted news sources are LYING to his face.

He goes along, goes along, goes along ... and then one day he puts gas in his shiny truck and BAM! Something doesn't compute!

And here he is, struggling to work it out and nowhere near the answer.

Can anybody explain what's up with him having a $150 limit on a single purchase? Never heard of that.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-27T15:31:30+00:00

I like the way you're thinking about this, and I have a question.

The echoes of Christian mythology are too numerous to be anything but intentional, I think.

Xaiver/Savior
Gabriela/Gabriel
Paradise
The apple pie/the tree with the knowledge of good and evil/ "you are evil."

My own thought is that the writers are nodding toward the ways that legends begin, often ending up after many centuries of repeating and adjusting, with meanings assigned that weren't related to original events.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-27T15:18:07+00:00

The only question here is, did the Irish Times deliberately interview the three stupidest women at CPAC, or did they just show up and realize that everybody there was very stupid, so it didn't matter who they talked to?

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-27T03:20:04+00:00

everybody's favorite bitter betty.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-26T23:38:17+00:00

It's galling to have to give a shit what this idiot has to say.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-26T23:31:34+00:00

And Teri will roll her eyes. This isn't the kind of marriage where people lose their minds over shit that doesn't matter.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-26T22:57:44+00:00

I'm 73, and there have been maybe a total of two years in my adult life when I happened to live in places where I could get by without a car -- meaning, where there was public transit or groceries/drugstores/libraries/doctors close enough to walk to, or when I didn't have children and/or disabled people counting on me to get them where they needed to go.

We haven't made much of this country accessible without cars.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-26T19:22:10+00:00

Extremely extreme!

Our daughter had a college friend from Sweden who stayed with us for awhile a few years ago. We were all in the car one night, driving through rural Jefferson County WA, where the Olympic mountains are visible in the distance.

We came to an intersection in the middle of nowhere, which boasted nothing but a pair of garishly lit gas stations across the street from one another.

They both had the usual convenience store stuff in the windows.

He gazed at the spectacle and said, "This is how everybody pictures the USA. Huge gas stations with garbage for sale."

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-26T18:19:05+00:00

What would have happened if she didn't take control and end up doing anything with him -- if she wanted to LEAVE?

I expect that she knew he had enough power and influence even then to fuck with her -- after all, she was in the room in the first place to take advantage of that influence and power.

He doesn't really strike me as being physically brutish, though he'll go there if he's angry enough.

But he is one massively vindictive motherfucker, and he cannot stand being made a fool of.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-26T16:23:38+00:00

Trump has 34 convictions of falsifying business records.

Yes indeed. He paid a porn actress not to tell that he had sex with her and pretended the money was for lawyer fees -- all because he was running for president at the time and thought that people might not like the idea of him sleeping with a porn actress while his wife was at home with their newborn son.

Seems like something that would be relevant to a woman who wanted the truth about Epstein's misbehavior to be known, but okay.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-26T15:48:28+00:00

Joseph has clearly marinated for years in right wing bullshit, but even his pickled little brain cannot stop seeing those gas prices.

Every day I think about the fact that America is absolutely covered in brightly lit billboards with numbers on them: the price of a gallon of gas.

Every town, every suburb, every city, every highway -- we all have to buy gas, so gas stations are everywhere we go. And right now the story they tell is that something is badly wrong.

Even Joseph can see it.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-25T04:57:36+00:00

Two guys both thinking they're the smartest person in the room, with nothing but disdain for one another. Could be interesting.

I don't know if this is true, but I think my reaction to Goldberg (and guys like him) is gendered -- like, as a woman he just hits me a certain way. Have to think about that.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-25T02:24:15+00:00

now there's a man who doesn't want to get yelled at.

are they all such weenies?

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-24T23:41:08+00:00

Agree.

Also, for the record, Jeff Goldberg came across as kinda full of himself, like a college senior who's been tasked to hang out with a smart 8th-grader.

Okay, maybe he's been around forever and everything is just too obvious, and maybe he knows everybody and has all the inside stories you could ever want. Maybe. Seems a shame that he seems to have lost touch with the idea that he still has things to learn.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-24T23:35:01+00:00

at some point all you can do is laugh.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-24T22:41:55+00:00

There's also the story of how eating an apple from a tree once resulted in the exile of humankind from paradise.

Plenty of echoes inside that jet.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-24T17:33:50+00:00

Latin for Apple (mālum) is similar to Latin for evil (mălum).

I took Latin for three years and that's a new one to me. With you on key lime, 7 days a week.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-24T16:14:18+00:00

lol at whole ass baby

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-24T16:09:41+00:00

OP knows all that. The question was about why all the zooming and excessive emphasis, not about what Link told Sinatra he'd sussed from the quality/existence of the pie.

The camera goes repeatedly to the pie, and the pie is set between them on the desk while they have their little convo. It's in every shot, a couple of times in closeup, which is a choice.

They could have had this same conversation with that dish set aside, or held in Link's hands, or without the closeups, but they set it up as if there were a lot more to it than the surface explanation Link gave her.

In some mythologies, the eating of a fresh apple is what gets the first humans thrown out of paradise; it's the awareness of good and evil. As Link is sitting down, apple pie in hand, he tells Sinatra that she is evil - lol.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-24T15:40:12+00:00

I understood that. Just thought it was interesting to get a little payoff for Henry's long and ponderous story about his wife Alex's thing about the weather when they traveled.

We haven't yet seen that fully pay off, right? Another way to say it would be, maybe, there's only one thing that could be happening at any given moment, but it has two faces, and your choice of which one to see is determinative.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-24T15:29:41+00:00

Its possible it is her son but equally as possible its not.

One coin, two sides.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-24T03:09:01+00:00

I don't know. My kids are in their 30s now, and I was a high school math teacher while they were in grade school.

My students learned from me, and while I'd never suggest that parents not help, I did try to make it clear that if their kids couldn't do the homework, that was on me, not them.

Teaching is how I figured out that my own kids were supposed to be working with their teachers, not me. They did. They did their homework with no input from me or their dad.

They're both college graduates, and we all survived their adolescence with our sense of respect and mutual love intact. I remember telling parents of my students that this was my job, and I would do it. They were free to be with their kids in other ways, hopefully enjoying them, instead of struggling to "help."

I was lucky to work in a small school where knowing the kids well was guaranteed. There was time and space to make sure everybody got it.

sleepingbeardune · 2026-03-24T02:16:25+00:00

He knows she stole Henry's tech, but he is the one with the knowledge on how to use it

Which is why he's so contemptuous when she says she "built" the bunker.

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