A resurfaced clip shows sex offender Jeffrey Epstein pleading the Fifth when he was asked during a deposition if he ever socialized with underage girls around Donald Trump.

The video clip, unearthed by left-leaning outlet MeidasTouch, shows Epstein responding to questions during a March 2010 deposition. The disgraced financier was questioned by an attorney of an alleged victim, Vice News previously reported.

    • breecher@sh.itjust.works
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      There is no limit. They will never turn on him because of clues, they will only turn on him if they think they can win over him. As long as his pedophile voterbase uncritically supports him, he has the upper hand.

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            Yep. This is a little bit of a tangent, but I like to bring this up whenever Trump being a rapist comes up in a thread.

            Trump’s mouthpieces always claim that he was not found to have raped E. Jean Carroll by the jury. But this is only because the legal definition of rape in New York requires PIV penetration. However the judge has clarified this saying:,

            Judge Kaplan provided an unsparing analysis of the legal issues that informed the New York verdict. He wrote: “The only issue on which the jury did not find in Ms Carroll’s favour was whether she proved that Mr Trump ‘raped’ her within the narrow, technical meaning of that term in the New York penal law.

            “The jury … was instructed that it could find that Mr Trump ‘raped’ Ms Carroll only if it found that he forcibly penetrated Ms Carroll’s vagina with his penis.

            “It could not find that he ‘raped’ her if it determined that Mr Trump forcibly penetrated Ms Carroll’s private sexual parts with his fingers – which commonly is considered ‘rape’ in other contexts – because the New York penal law definition of rape is limited to penile penetration.”

            “As the court explained in its recent decision denying Mr Trump’s motion for a new trial on damages and other relief [in the New York case] … based on all of the evidence at trial and the jury’s verdict as a whole, the jury’s finding that Mr Trump ‘sexually abused’ Ms Carroll implicitly determined that he forcibly penetrated her digitally – in other words, that Mr Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”

            By any reasonable definition, as determined in a court of law by a jury of his peers, Trump is a rapist.

            Edit for formatting.

        • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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          Which surely enrages him, and is probably part of his Sociopathic profile. So he takes it out on the liberal scientists who won’t make his wang work.

          Just like Musk. None of those Sociopathic Oligarchs can wave the flag.

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        I don’t know about present tense. He’s got a lot of blood thinner bruises on his hands these days. He’s probably require enough viagra to blind an elephant. He’s old as shit.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      I believe that he possibly also helped facilitate and/or finance Epstein’s child rape and blackmail operation.

      I don’t have any evidence, but I feel it in my bones.

    • PastafARRian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      My T R and K buttons are totally worn to a nub. We should vote for a new Unicode emoji, “TRK” so we can type this more easily.

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      We already know that Epstein is incontrovertibly guilty though. Nobody doubts this. Trump is the one in the crosshairs today.

      • Cocopanda@lemmy.world
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        Because he had to plead the 5th to protect Donald. We know that Donald is guilty of diddling children.

        • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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          I don’t think it was to protect Trump. I think it was still the normal sort of selfish legal maximization. The story is that he couldn’t answer about his times being with both Trump and young girls without incriminating himself, which implies that when they were both together with young girls, something illegal happened.

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          Well yeah, we know that. But if it were as incontrovertibly known about Trump as it is about Epstein, we wouldn’t be asking for the release of the Epstein list to prove Trump is guilty.

          • saimen@feddit.org
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            The point is he plead the 5th when asked if he raped children with Trump. So by Trump own words that means he plead the 5th because they did that.

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              Trump said (well, heavily implied) that the party who pleads the 5th is guilty, not that other parties not present are also guilty.

              There’s a practically infinite amount of bullshit coming out of Trump’s mouth we can criticize so easily; I don’t see why anyone would feel the need to transparently mince his words to invent more.

    • Laser@feddit.org
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      He does exactly that half a minute earlier though. Was basically asked “did you socialize with Donald Trump” which he confirms after clarification. He just plead the fifth after the question was amended with “with females under the age of 18” or whatever the wording was.

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      How about the MSM? They’re fucking bulldogs when they want to be, a bad debate sends them into weeks of non-stop reporting and questioning mental faculties, but somehow they just never give two shits about the dozens of scandals and so much worse from this POSOTUS. All of this could have, and should have, been dug up years ago, they just didn’t bother to for some reason until now, assuming it is because ruling class wants him gone before he completely fucks the economy beyond recognition.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
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      None of it would have mattered back then. It took the entire Administration to form a phalanx against any demands for release of the files, in a complete reversal of their explicit campaign promises. Many MAGAs based their allegiance on those promises.

      Now it turns out that he was bluffing all along, and they are calling his hand, and everyone knows he doesn’t have the cards.

    • NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world
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      There is no “left” in American politics, this is just the people who put him into power handling their liabilities. Trump is just an externality to them.

    • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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      Totally agree, but I don’t really give a fuck as long as we can shine some light on all these career pedophiles who paid for kiddiediddler island trips.

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    I think it’s clear by now that this is too well organized for the democrats to be behind it. The call is coming from inside the house…

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        Trump did his part. Thanks to Trump they managed to cut medicare and give massive tax cuts to the rich. That was the main goal for this term but now people will start to realize what happened and Republicans may lose the midterms. So what do you do? You get rid of Trump and blame everything on him. You replace him with someone more stable and easier to control.

        Basically now that they got what they wanted they want to put JD in charge to stabilize the economy and increase their chances of winning midterms. That’s how I see it.

        • ctrl_alt_esc@lemmy.ml
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          they wanted to want to put JD in charge to stabilize the economy and increase their chances of winning midterms

          😂😂😂😂 good one

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            You don’t think JD will calm it down with the tariffs or at least will stop changing his mind about it every week? That’s all coming from Trump. It helps people in is circle to make some money but the rich definitely don’t like it.

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              No, I don’t think he would. For sure he’d accelerate the US’s transition into a dictatorship, tariffs would be a minor concern.

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                That’s a completely different thing. I’m talking about global trade. The elites want global trade to continue and Trump and his terrible policies are fucking it all up. The elites would like to see some stabilization but then can’t control Trump. JD would help them with that.

                What would happen internally in US is a different story. I didn’t make any claims about it. Of course JD would be terrible for average American but we’re talking about elites and why they would prefer him from Trump. Not what you would prefer.

    • Alaik@lemmy.zip
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      I mean… I think the way you put that is both truthful and the only way Republicans would accept it.

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      I’m really confused why this is all of the sudden a big deal. Everyone is rehashing things that we already know/knew.

      • 7U5K3N@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        Theory is that this is maga realizing they’ve been played. Trump ran on Epstein files and when they decided the files weren’t real, maga realized he’s been lying to them.

        But who knows.

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          But t lied about a lot of things… It’s really interesting that this is the hill where maga becomes woke.

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            They’ve built conspiracies about child predators up to the point where it’s a foundational principle of the movement for many. They make movies about pedophile hunters and spread conspiracies that inspire people break into pizza stores with rifles. Maybe this is a coordinated threat to Trump to get him to bend on tariffs and deportations, maybe they just didn’t realize the themes they were using to rile them up actually stuck and wasn’t something they were going to reverse course on when it became politically inconvenient.

            • aceshigh@lemmy.world
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              Is the media pushing this story to maga, or is maga pushing this story? It seems like he’s trying to distance himself from it, but it keeps coming back. Who’s pushing it? Maybe it’s a chicken and egg question.

    • Null User Object@lemmy.world
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      My current conspiracy theory is that Trump’s owners have decided that he’s become more of a liability than an asset, and are throwing him under the bus to replace him with someone more under their control.

      My “evidence” is that this steady daily trickle of new evidence tying Trump to Epstein didn’t just miraculously spawn into existence this week. It’s been in people’s filing cabinets and video/photo archives for years

      I just find it really hard to believe none of this was “found” earlier. Instead it’s being “found” now, but not all at once. It’s being “found” at a rate that keeps the story at the top of the news cycle.

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        I think that’s very possible. They’re using him as a fall guy too. They want to transition power to someone who’s not so fickle and more loyal while avoiding elections. They have to constantly course correct him because he’s actually wildly incompetent and he goes off script. He’s easy to manipulate but that means he’s easy to manipulate by everyone.

        Also, look at all the tech stuff he’s passing right now. It’s super concerning and is going to have long term impact on our ability to do anything beyond tech monopoly control. Everything is “EPSTEIN” meanwhile he’s signing crypto laws, ai deregulation and all kinds of scary dystopian tech bills.

        If you don’t know who Curtis Yarvin and what the Dark Enlightenment is and who his acolytes are— it’d be a good place to start to understand what’s possibly happening here. Hint: JD Vance is a loyalist.

      • phx@lemmy.ca
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        Or he turned on them and this is basically the leash they held in reserve…

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    I don’t doubt that Trump did things like what he is accused of but taking the 5th is not an admission of guilt and we can’t assume this is a smoking gun .

    Taking the 5th is like playing an Uno reverse card. It’s saying prove it I won’t help even if I didn’t do it.

  • Randomgal@lemmy.ca
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    It still blows my mind that 'rapist is rapist’s is somehow this important. What do you expect will happen? Suddenly the king realizes it’s bad to do this and becomes a good person?

    Stop fucking falling for the billionaires’ distractions

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      You think this is a distraction? The most damaging scandal for the billionaires’ president is actually a secret plot so we should just ignore it and focus on an unspecified not-damaging story?

      These memes about media manipulation by mastermind powers puppetting everything often just seem like an excuse for perpetual inaction. It’s the lefty version of the liberal “keeping our powder dry”, where no current conflict is ever worth engaging in because somehow action is always playing into the opponents’ hands and the savvy move is either inaction or refocusing on something else without traction.

      • forrgott@lemmy.sdf.org
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        Have you not been paying any fucking attention?! They outright lied about the house going on recess to distract from yet another vote stripping away workers rights.

        And the fact that all the big media have been absorbed into their camp isn’t a meme. It’s Propaganda 101. They didn’t buy out all their competition as act of compassion, for fuck sake. But sure, buddy, the fact that this absolutely does give them the power to control the narrative is just some coincidence. And I’ve got some prime lakefront property on the moon you would probably be interested in, too.

        Cheering at the existence of headlines that do no more than hint at consequences that’ll never materialize isn’t “taking action” buddy. Jumping on the propaganda train is the very definition of perpetual inaction. So please explain to me again exactly how that’s going to do a single goddamn thing to help.

        • Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
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          It’s derailed their propaganda machine. No one thinks Trump’s going to be arrested in the White House, but this is the first issue that’s put a wedge between Trump and Congress (and where it hasn’t between Congress and their base). As long as this runs, Trump isn’t the golden leader of the unified conservative team and individual reps have to fear whether loyalty means they’ll lose their job. Which then empowers local campaigns to block bills.

          If you think a House committee passing a bill out to the shut down House (not even an actual full House vote) was going to trigger something if only people weren’t distracted by scandals, you’re delusional. The media aren’t riding Epstein to stealth a fucking Education and Workforce committee vote.

          • forrgott@lemmy.sdf.org
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            Umm, the same headline everywhere, with slightly different variations, is the expected outcome from their propaganda machine. But, sure, essentially identical messaging is totally a sign it’s been derailed, why didn’t I see that before?;

            What are you smoking, guy? Pass that shit already.

            I mean, shit, we’ve heard all about “their base is finally cracking” a just stupid number of times already. But, sure, this crack is for real. Yup. Uh, huh.

            Oh, and his supporters in Congress shutting everything down to protect him means they decided to withdraw support. Makes total sense!! And getting the ball rolling on an unpopular issue while everyone isn’t paying attention totally means they want you to know it’s in progress. Duh

            But seriously, you fucking lost me entirely with this one…

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              If they (the whole Republican caucus) supported him, they could have stayed open and voted it down. Nothing that’s happened has advanced their position. The committee vote wasn’t improved by Trump and Johnson becoming weaker. You’re too deep in the grand conspiracy theory to actually capitalize on changes in the political landscape. In your eyes, every development at every point in time is just another example of the enemy winning, so whatever happens must be what they want and it must be moving you further from your goals. But there’s no winning with that mindset. You’ll never see when there is an opportunity to rally workers to contact representatives in a newly chaotic political environment where they’re off balance because the previous status quo of blind loyalty to leadership is in doubt.

              They’re not your friends and the game isn’t won, none of this is a development that means we can all just sit back and wait for success, but being at maximum doom all the time means you’re not prepared to take advantage of their weakness.

              • forrgott@lemmy.sdf.org
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                Yeah, sure buddy. I’m now incorrect because all the assumptions you’ve made about me.

                Get a life

  • merc@sh.itjust.works
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    Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendment rights

    I’ve never before heard of anybody claiming any rights other than the 5th when answering a question.

    The sixth amendment is:

    In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

    The “assistance of counsel” part seems to make sense when being questioned, if he didn’t already have a lawyer present. But, the rest of that seems unrelated to answering a question.

    Cop: “Were you with Trump at the child-raping party?”

    Epstein: “I assert the right to a speedy trial!”

    As for the 14th, that’s the one currently in the news because Trump wants to strip citizenship:

    All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

    That’s also a very weird one to plead. Talking about your citizenship in an interview like that seems irrelevant.

    Cop: “Was it just Trump who was raping kids, or were you doing it too?”

    Epstein: “I assert the right to due process!”

    Cop: “Yes… this questioning is your due process. That’s what’s happening here.”

    I wonder why he didn’t claim others. 4th seems more relevant than 14th, for example. 8th is also useful if they want to put you in jail. At least he didn’t invoke the 27th

  • snailboy@leminal.space
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    Is this the one where they asked him if it was true that he had an ‘egg-shaped penis’, and he walked out of the room?

  • TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip
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    Something doesn’t sit right with me, Epstein has been under investigation for 20 years, dead for 6, out of those 20, 11 were ruled by the Democrats but all the blame goes to Trump for not investigating himself?

    Has anyone checked if Biden is still breathing or the rock in which Obama hides under?

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      “Doesn’t sit right with me?” Just say what you mean. Do you need it spelled out instead of posting some vague conspiratorial insinuation? We all know that Epstein’s clientele list was pushed to the back burner when dems were trying to hold on to their seats in a tight election. They know they have members on the list too. There absolutely were calls to dig into the Epstein connections because it would have put trump under even more pressure while out of office, but they were ignored because Dems chose self-protection instead of pursuing the list to bury trump in an effort to maintain their grip on seats they were desperate to not lose. Combined with a shamelessly spineless judiciary, and lackluster candidates, it cost them everything.

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        At the very least, I’m sure a significant number of the billionaires bankrolling both parties make the cut. And in the craven society I’m unfortunately living in, money comes first. Fucking always. (I’m also fucking disgusted that a single goddamn penny of my taxes goes towards finding more efficient ways to slaughter children whose skin doesn’t match mine, but that’s a whole other cursed mess of utter bullshit.)

        That said, I wish I could say otherwise, but I kinda figure the Democrats are just a little more careful hiding the heinous crap they do in their own spare time. I mean, obviously Clinton makes the cut, and only a complete jackass would think he’s the only D on the list. So…yeah, I live in a fucking shithole of a society, and I’m tired of pretending otherwise.

        (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

        I kinda just want the house of cards to just collapse already, and yet I’m not willing to buy into that accelerationism crap, either. But since fucking fascism has become our chief expert, I do hope the rest of you prove to better at finding an antidote than we were.

        And anybody who’s gonna try tell me to go buy guns and start preparing to kill people, you can fuck right off. What we need are community-based solutions that are based on local networking. It’s our only fucking chance. (Assuming we still have any chances left, of course…)

        If you’re focusing on preparing to kill your neighbor instead of offering them aid, fuck you - just cause your Nazi bullshit is painted blue instead of red doesn’t change the fact that you’ve taken the side of the enemy.

        • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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          There’s a difference between the ideological nihilism based on the desire to destroy those they disagree with in some selfish rush to be in some sky-fairy’s afterlife vs wanting a corrupt and greedy system to collapse so that it can hopefully be rebuilt with the best of intentions. They are not the same thing.

          Absolutely the wealthy pocketbooks backing campaign money have a huge influence on candidates, and it would be no stretch at all to suspect they engaged in quid pro quo of funding suppression of investigation into the list.

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            Ummm…no shit, Sherlock.

            Unless you’re implying that’s justification for doing shit to increase the fractures and divisions in our society, in which case you may as well take your arguments to someone else. Cuz I know exactly what that smells like and I ain’t buying a stinking pile of shit.

      • TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip
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        Do you need it spelled out instead of posting some vague conspiratorial insinuation

        It’s not a conspiratorial insinuation, It’s pretty clear there are people from both sides on the list, the “Doesn’t sit right with me” is about public pressure not being applied to all culprits.

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      The point is that you have pedophile narcissist elitist racists running your country.

      And from what I see the democrats might be also capitalism junkies, but at least they seem more human and caring when compared to the bullshit Americans voted in.

      Of course it is odd that those files were never released. Most likely reason: too many very rich and powerful are on it. Perhaps even from other countries which would likely open a huge diplomatic shitshow.

      Though with Trump fucking up the US and the world with his racist and sociopathicly drenched dementia I say fuck the consequences if it means that dude gets what he deserves: the rest of his wrinkly life in prison.

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        The answer really should have been “fuck the consequences” from the start. It wasn’t justified before because there could be diplomatic and economic fallout, but we’re now in a political environment where the previous protectors of the status quo are willing to push toward that result and the lie at the core of a lot of MAGA is bucking their leadership to push in the same direction, so even if they haven’t both become better people en masse, they might get there anyway.