[JohnBooty]

Right. I have full faith that his belief was that Minsky had made an honest mistake with a girl that would be considered legal anyway in large swaths of the world. I give RMS (what I would consider to be) the full benefit of the doubt here and I believe his message was less "Minsky is blameless" or "sex with kids is okay" and more "let's not confuse Minky's poor judgement with far, far more heinous crimes." And I wouldn't even really disagree with RMS there on a factual level.

Even given this generous interpretation, RMS' poorly chosen words are still rather egregious.

Specifically he misses the forest for the trees. A fundamental duty of adults is to make sure that our sex partners are (a) of legal age (b) truly freely consenting without coercion.

One can think of various circumstances in which one might reasonably make such a mistake in good faith. However, somebody's private... child sex island is not one of those places.

Even more importantly, RMS neglects even some sort of token recognition of the actual victims of Epstein's trafficking. Hint: Minsky is not one of them!