The Problem With Megyn Kelly’s Epstein Spin

 Megyn Kelly recently offered her own “clarification” on Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes — and it wasn’t clarification at all.

It was minimization dressed up as nuance. 
Let’s break it down the same way you'd eat an elephant; one bite at a time.

“Epstein was not a pedophile… he liked 15-year-old girls.”

In psychology, attraction to teens gets labeled as hebephilia (11–14) or ephebophilia (15–19). In law, you don’t need any of that: 15-year-olds are minors everywhere in the United States. Sexual contact with them is statutory abuse, period.

Trying to soften this by avoiding the word “pedophile” is rhetorical misdirection:

  • It doesn’t change the criminality.
  • It doesn’t change the exploitation.
  • It doesn’t change the power imbalance.
That’s not nuance. That’s the same crime in sheep's clothing.

And yes — as Kelly herself admits — it’s a distinction without a difference. Stick a pin in that. We’ll come back to it.

“We haven’t seen anyone under 14 come forward.”

That’s simply false.

  • Epstein’s 2008 plea deal includes victims as young as 14.
  • The 2019 federal indictment describes victims “including as young as 14.”
  • Multiple civil suits detail abuse beginning at 14.

So if 14 is your line in the sand, you’ll need to explain why — because 14-year-olds are still:

  • minors
  • unable to consent
  • vulnerable to coercion
  • emotionally and economically exploitable

They’re not the “upper bound of innocence.” They’re children.

“Not quite the youngest victims”
is not a defense. It’s an indictment of your priorities.

“He wasn’t into 8-year-olds.”

Ah, the relative privation fallacy — “it could’ve been worse!” 

 (I recognize this from my Philosophy 170: Elementary Logic and Semantics class. I took it twice.)

This trick drags in an extreme scenario no one alleged, just to make the real accusation look less horrific. It also conveniently redirects attention away from the actual charge.

Reframing Exploitation as “Preference”

Kelly’s phrasing — Epstein being “into the barely legal type” — treats real human victims like items on "bizzaro-world somehow sanctioned chattel" menu,rather than preying on girls who were:

  • recruited through manipulation,
  • paid for sex,
  • trafficked among adults,
  • threatened and controlled.

These aren’t categories at the top of a PornHub page, they’re people who are survivors of exploitation.

When you talk about victims like a search filter, you’re not doing journalism. You’re doing damage control.

Back to That Pin

Megyn Kelly threw out that "distinction without a difference" line to sound sort of foxy/folksy, but in truth, she knows exactly what that means, because she has a Law Degree.

A random podcaster rambling about differences between abusing 8-year-olds and 14-year-olds is sloppy and socially unacceptable.

But a licensed attorney doing it? That’s something else entirely.

Megyn Kelly knows:

  • minors cannot legally consent,
  • “they looked older” has never been a defense,
  • this is not nuance — it’s minimization,
  • the difference between explanation and justification.

She knows better.
She chose not to do better.

The Bottom Line

Megyn Kelly’s commentary:

  • contradicted documented facts,
  • minimized statutory rape and trafficking,
  • injected irrelevant comparisons,
  • reframed abuse as “preference,”
  • presented hearsay as fact,
  • implied a moral difference between exploiting a 14-year-old and a 5-year-old,
  • treated “not a pedophile” as if it matters.

Epstein wasn’t “into barely legal girls.”

He was a serial abuser of children.
And dressing that up as nuance isn’t journalism — it’s erasure.

I'm just saying.


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