FACT CHECK ME: WE DON’T NEED A SMOKING GUN
When the news focuses on the Epstein files, people keep saying the same thing:
“There’s no smoking gun.”
“The images are disturbing, but they don’t show explicit wrongdoing.”
“Nothing illegal is visible.”
That may be true in a courtroom.
But it’s irrelevant in real life.
Many of us have worked with kids for decades.
And none of us have photos or videos that look like that.
Neither do teachers, coaches, instructors, or mentors who actually do this work.
You don’t accidentally collect material that blurs boundaries unless boundaries were already irrelevant to you.
And when powerful men and women say they were “just trying to help” by giving vulnerable kids jobs or opportunities, that excuse collapses under one simple test:
What would we have done?
If a fourteen-year-old runaway showed up at our door, we wouldn’t be offering them work.
We wouldn’t be placing them in adult environments.
We wouldn’t be keeping them close.
We’d be calling professionals.
We’d be getting them to a doctor.
We’d make sure they had food, clean clothes, and a safe place to sleep.
We’d get them back into school.
We’d make sure adults trained to protect children — not benefit from them — were involved.
That’s not virtue.
That’s baseline humanity.
And if kids kept “turning up”?
We wouldn’t normalize it.
We wouldn’t quietly handle it.
We wouldn’t solve it alone.
We’d ask why.
We’d rally our friends with money and influence.
We’d knock on government doors.
We’d say, “We have a serious problem here.”
Because when something keeps happening, decent people escalate it.
They create systems.
They bring sunlight.
They don’t keep it private.
We know this because we’ve seen what happens when kids get lost.
In communities without money, access, or influence, people still step up.
Couches get shared.
Fridges get stretched.
An aunt appears.
A friend’s parents decide a kid isn’t going back out into the cold.
It’s imperfect.
Sometimes it barely holds.
But the goal is simple: keep the child safe.
And the unlucky ones?
They end up on the street.
Easy prey for a system designed to exploit vulnerability — funneling children upward to people with power, then discarding them.
That’s not accidental.
That’s a structure.
So when we scrutinize the excuses and the abundance of evidence, we don’t need a smoking gun.
We don’t need explicit footage.
We don’t need perfect certainty.
We just need to ask one question:
What would we have done?
Because anyone who’s actually cared for a child already knows the answer.
And if an explanation requires ignoring that instinct, it isn’t an explanation.
It’s a distraction.