When a person has difficulty “putting themselves in others’ shoes” it’s commonly called a lack of empathy. I think Derec can’t get past “if it was me I’d do ‘x’”.
Not at all. It's not about what whether somebody would do x or y. People are different and they do different things. But when you wait that long, there is very low chance of any real evidence still being extant. So how can we possibly know whether it's true or not?
I honestly do not know what I would do in a similar circumstance. But I also do not think it matters. There are two possibilites.
- She really was sexually assaulted and didn't want to say anything for whatever psychological reason.
- She made it up and 35 year gulf is convenient because while there is no likely evidence extant to corroborate her story, there likely isn't any evidence to disprove it either.
The problem is not what I would do in her shoes. The problem is that without evidence we cannot choose between these two possibilities.
There's also option#3, similar to option#1, not reporting it because of socio-cultural / institutional reasons.
I think it is apparent that Derec is discounting the impact of repeated abuse on the human psyche. This is something I learned while living through my ex-wife's emergence after years of physical, mental, verbal, and sexual abuse at the hands of a violent psychopath. I'm reminded of the "well why doesn't she just leave her abuser?" refrain from people who have no context.
Also, consider the victims of abuse at the hands of the Catholic church. "Well why didn't you come forward about this stuff 30 years ago?" can be answered with "because a centuries old institution with nearly limitless wealth and power isn't something a scared little kid who's been diddled can be expected to stand up against."
Admitting to abuse is incredibly difficult for any number of reasons, including shame, fear of retribution from unspeakably powerful entities, and also the desire to "just put it all past you" as society seems to think is healthy. As I may have mentioned before, my ex was so traumatized by her abuser that she more or less created an alternate personality to survive. On some level, i thought it was great when we started dating and she was like "whatever it takes to satisfy my man is good with me" but it turned out that the relatively meek, submissive person I met was a defense mechanism against a guy who held a gun to her head while he raped her.
How long would it take a well-adjusted person to overcome that sort of thing? How about a person who'd grown up in an abusive household with an alcoholic drug addicted father where violence and insanity was simply part of life? Not only can it take years or even decades to extricate yourself from such a situation, but it can become generational. We wound up taking my step-daughter to therapy when she was 8 years old and found out that her concept of what was "normal" was almost hopelessly skewed. Not because she'd been physically abused herself, but because she saw it for the first 6 years of her life and even at that age had developed coping strategies in order to protect herself.
And bringing it back around to the Epstein files, imagine if you'd gone through all of that trauma, figured out a way to get through all of it, and when it looked like maybe you'd be able to get some closure (even though your abuser was dead) the ENTIRE EXECUTIVE BRANCH OF THE US GOVERNMENT decided that your experience was all a lie and you just had "Trump Derangement Syndrome."
But what do I know?
