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Devastating Report Details How Underage Homeless Girl Allegedly Had Sex With Matt Gaetz For Money to Buy Braces (www.mediaite.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/politics@lemmy.world
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[–] -1 points 9 months ago (1 child)

The 40 year old ID-ing the women he has sex with at a party is icky for sleeping with someone half his age (double so if he is specifically looking for 18 year olds), but that is not illegal. Should that be lumped under rape culture though? Should sex work in general be lumped under rape culture?

If she was not 18, regardless of if she had a fake ID, it is still statutory. There is no mens rea required for statutory. It is however harder in such a case to secure prosecution and conviction.

He may very well have known his friend brought an underage girl to sleep with him, or asked him to find probable underage girls advertising as 18 for plausible deniability. He also may have paid his friend to pay for prostitutes for the party. I won't give Gaetz the benefit of the doubt on anything, but the article doesn't indicate any of those things happened.

At least we got a conviction for the person with the least plausible deniability, because we rarely get that unfortunately.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

    Christ man, you are still lawyering this away.

    Yes, the power dynamic of old dude and young women are part of tape culture. Yes, sex work is part of rape culture (it’s nuanced but in this case YES). I’m not anti sex-work, but I am against a system that makes it illegal, and creates a black market like this.

    You can come up with all the hypotheticals to make it right, it wasn’t. You are defending rape culture.

    Rape culture is a culture that makes excuses for and enables rapists. Look who’s in the government right now. We ALL know gates is creepy as shit yet he still attained a position of extreme power. Look at the president, all his friends falling out of the emails. There is a major problem with this kind of behavior in our culture.

    Edit- look, we’re missing each other because I am arguing a larger cultural issue, you are arguing specific laws (why I say you are lawyering). I do not care how legal this might have been and I am not given to charitable interpretations of obvious evil behavior.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    Edit- look, we’re missing each other because I am arguing a larger cultural issue, you are arguing specific laws

    That was the only thing I was actually asking about. I especially agree with your points about our government/politicians. It appears that the main disagreement we might have is if rape culture is the normalization/glorification of sexual assault specifically or a wider classification of power dynamics in any form.

    I think anyone who commits the crime of rape is a rapist and rightly so, but am just leery about watering down the definition of rape.

    I do not care how legal this might have been

    I want to be clear that it wasn't legal. Gaetz 100% committed statutory rape under current criminal law. It's a strict accountability law, you don't have to knowingly do it to commit the crime.

    The only reason I posted at all was that after reading the article I didn't think the persons comment you replied to was necessarily a great example of rape culture.

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