It's the Same Source Code

Epstein, the EPA, and the dude in my DMs

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend about a project of mine that is behind schedule. I hired a company to take care of something tech-related for me - an update for my website. They gave me a price and an end-date, I paid the contracted amount - and they have not completed the project on time. This is not the first time I’ve been in this scenario.

Last time I told myself that next time I’d pay half up front, and the other half upon completion, but I know these guys - I’ve hired them before and they’ve delivered. It’s a relatively straightforward job. I thought it would be cool. It has not been as cool as I had hoped.

Twice burned, but not by the same tech bros. Title of my next book.

My friend said if it were him he’d be calling or emailing every day. After all, I paid, they have not met their obligation. I said if I called or emailed every day or got too aggressive about it, things would not go well for me because I’m a woman. He scoffed.

“It’s not a gender thing,” he assured me, “it’s a person thing. Obviously what you’re doing isn’t working.”

I didn’t bother arguing the point. I have a finite amount of energy, and you have to pick your battles, especially now. If I email every day, I’m not going to get what I need or want. I need them to finish the project, and I want to have a professional relationship with them moving forward. In order to get what I need and want, I have to dance backwards in heels whilst displaying the correct amount of persistence and assertiveness. I can get away with an occasional line that makes it clear I’m not happy and not a pushover if I do it carefully.

If you think this would be different with another firm, I have news for you - comparatively speaking, this firm is pretty good.

I was not shocked by my friend’s comments, though, because he’s said things like this to me before. He’s lived in a man’s body his whole life, and he has feelings and ideas about what it’s like to live in a woman’s body, and that’s nice for him. Whatever.

The last time I hired a tech company to do a project for me, it was a big undertaking and it was expensive. Two-years-of-college expensive. That’s how you measure things when you have teenagers. I vetted a bunch of firms. The one I chose came highly recommended by someone I know. They bid on the job, and came up with the timeframe and the payment structure. They sent me a contract, which I signed. I made every payment on time, and they went so far past the end-date they were absolutely in breach.

I was patient and understanding for a very long time. It was a bigger job than they’d realized. More complicated. I sent emails at the end of each week asking for status reports. I asked to please not have to ask, that I would appreciate it if the project manager made a habit of sending me an email letting me know what had been accomplished and what was on the agenda for the following week.

The project manager was never able to send me those emails. I guess that was too big an ask. I was always having to “check in” and “circle back" which was frustrating and enraging given how much money I’d spent, and how insanely behind schedule they were. When we were over two years into a website update that was supposed to take six months, I finally lost it.

By “lost it” I mean that one day when I asked what was going on and why we were not making more progress, the PM told me it was because their “lead dev” was in Thailand and it was monsoon season and so he’d had to leave his house to find somewhere else to work, whilst another coder on the team went to a wedding. I might have held the phone away from my face and looked at it while I took a very deep breath. He followed that up by saying he was going to have to start charging me again because they’d used up all my money and the project wasn’t done. No shit.

The lead dev. Photo by Taneli Lahtinen on Unsplash

I said, “This is weird, but all of these sound like you problems. I didn’t know you were going to outsource anything, that isn’t something we discussed, and that has nothing to do with me. I hope your lead dev is okay, and I hope the other team-member has fun at the wedding, but I need the job done. That’s where we are, you are 21 months late, I already paid in full, and you are not going to start charging me again for a job you haven’t finished, that’s insane.”

He hung up on me and didn’t speak to me for two weeks. No movement happened on the project, I had no idea if I was going to have to go to court to try to recoup my money, hire a whole new team, and start again - it was an absolute mess. Aside from that, he had access to my current website, which meant he could have gotten vindictive if he was that kind of person. It is not easy to sleep knowing you have made yourself financially and therefore emotionally vulnerable to someone who has decided to stop communicating with you. There is nothing professional or okay about that.

When I finally did get him on the phone after weeks of the silent treatment, he spoke to me in monosyllables like a petulant teenager. I asked him where things were, and whether we were moving forward. He told me they were continuing work on the project, and he hadn’t called me back because last time I had “slammed him up against the wall.” Slammed him up against the wall by speaking the truth? By refusing to pay more money for a job I’d already paid for? By finally realizing that every time I’d been patient and compassionate, what they’d understood was they could drag out the job as long as they liked, take on new clients, and squeeze my project in wherever they could between monsoons and weddings?

I got screwed, and a job that should have taken 6 months took 3 years - but getting assertive didn’t work any better than being patient. It is not easy being a woman dealing with tech nerds, tech bros, coders, guys who don’t normally speak to women, guys who think they’re smarter than women, or guys who expect women to smile and take it when they get treated differently than they would if their name was Chad and they had a fucking beard.

It is not easy being a woman dealing with men, generally, in case you hadn’t noticed. You are constantly doing math in your head until you know what you’re dealing with. Can this guy handle the truth, or does he have a fragile ego? Am I physically safe? Is he one of the good ones, or does he just think he is? Is he going to slip something in my drink if I go to the bathroom? Is he going to send me an annoying DM telling me the story I shared is unimportant because it’s about our predatory president and not the defunding of schools - and he’s too dumb to understand those two things are connected - but still feels entitled to tell me what I should be posting on my own page?

So please man-friend of mine on the phone, tell me again how it’s me who is the problem. Tell me how I’m not handling things correctly, and should email every day until I get what I want. I’m sure that would go really well for me. Maybe you can drop some other pearls of wisdom on my lame, female brain that clearly doesn’t know how to handle things, but has somehow managed to run a business for years and raise two pretty awesome human beings and also write two books while doing the single mom thing. I’m sure I could learn a lot about how to proceed as a woman from you. Maybe you could also suggest a cute platform sandal because I can’t or won’t do heels anymore.

Anyway, I’m not even upset with my friend, or the tech bros, this is not even a blip in the scheme of things - it’s just an annoying situation that will resolve, and an irritating conversation that happened while I was driving somewhere - that I’m sharing with you precisely because it’s a nothing. I want you to understand, things like this happen all the time and if you let them send your blood pressure through the roof, you’ll probably drop dead a lot sooner than you should.

What I am upset about - and “upset” is far too mild a word and really cannot carry the necessary load here, incensed is closer to what we’re looking for - is the likelihood that Ghislaine Maxwell will get a pardon from the most despicable president in history. Or that the now-compromised Supreme Court could decide to review her case and overturn her conviction. I used to hold the Supreme Court in such high esteem, it is actually painful to no longer feel that way.

Are people not paying attention? Is that it, because I really need for there to be a reason we are having a moment in which reporters are asking the president if he is going to give her a pardon, and this creature who could not find a moral compass if it struck him on his pre-combover bald head, who seriously does not get enough blood flow to his veins or his brain because he has no heart - says he hasn’t considered that, but he is allowed to pardon her.

Do you realize what her grounds are for a writ of certiorari? She is asking the Supreme Court to overturn her conviction because she is saying as a co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein’s, she should not have been prosecuted in the first place. This, thanks to the sweetheart deal Epstein got in Florida in 2008 at the hands of the cretinous Alex Acosta, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida.

Let’s go back for just a moment in case you’ve forgotten, because about ninety gajillion things have happened since last week, let alone 2008. Epstein, who had been grooming, trafficking and raping minors for years, agreed to plead guilty to two state charges (soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution), to accept a prison term that enabled him to go free by day, but be in prison at night (I’m sorry, what??), to register as a sex offender, and to pay his victims monetary damages. He served less than 13 months.

In addition - and for reasons that are impossible to fathom unless you’re ready to look at the larger story about capitalism, patriarchy and power - his deal included a non-prosecution agreement in which the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida (please remember that part) granted immunity to Epstein, four co-conspirators, and “any potential co-conspirators.” So….would “co-conspirators” include other men who raped minors with Epstein’s help? Because it sure seems that way.

Why would you negotiate a deal like that if you’re Alex Acosta, top prosecutor in the state of Florida at the time? Why would you be interested in protecting a ring of sex-trafficking pedophiles more than you’d be concerned about protecting the minors these people prey upon? Please read that question twenty times if you need to, because it’s the crux of so many problems we’re facing right now. The system is set up to protect wealthy white men at all costs. Young girls from families struggling to make ends meet? They are expendable. Families on the fringes of society? Expendable.

All marginalized groups are expendable, as are poor people, people who can’t afford groceries, people who think breathing clean air is important, people who don’t want to see children suffering, starving, being raped, shot dead at school, neglected, or forced to carry their rapists’ babies, anywhere.

It’s all the same source code causing these issues, it’s not a bug.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Would co-conspirators include Ghislaine Maxwell who made at least $23 million finding, grooming, trafficking and abusing young girls alongside Epstein? Well, she denied being involved when she perjured herself during her trial. To this day she has never given her victims even a shred of the respect they deserve with any kind of acknowledgement, apology, or accountability for her actions. So which is it? She denies conspiring, but also says she should have been protected under the non-prosecution agreement that included co-conspirators?

Here’s a better question: why is Todd Blanche talking to Ghislaine Maxwell for nine hours without any members of the FBI present - which is what would usually happen in a case like this - and how is that not witness tampering? (Not that the presence of Kash Patel would have put my mind at ease.) Why is the attorney who was just last year the president’s personal attorney and is now running the DOJ (hey, I’m sure that’s fine, no conflict of interest, nothing to see here) talking to a person who has already shown she’s willing to perjure herself?

A person who procured and abused minors and does not want to spend the rest of her insult of a life in jail - is not a person whose words I am interested in, nor do I want to see someone like Maxwell normalized, do you? Especially when there’s no need to talk to her at all. If millions and millions and millions of people suspected you might have raped minor girls and there was a document you could release that would prove you hadn’t - and you were one of the most self-serving people on the planet, what would you do? This is the easiest math there is.

In 2008 Donnie was heading toward his sixth bankruptcy. He and Epstein weren’t so chummy by then, because, apparently, Jeff had “stolen” people away from Mar-a-Lago. That’s the president’s word choice from earlier this week - Jeff stole people, as if people are property you can own. He also said he never had the “privilege” of going to Jeff’s island, so I guess in his mind it’s a privilege to go to an island where you can rape minors. He did fly on Jeff’s private jet the “Lolita Express” multiple times, and it’s not like Jeff and Ghislaine didn’t rape young girls in New York and Florida, too, so I’m not really interested in whether he went to the island - nor do I, personally, need a list. I know who this man is, and I believe women.

It’s not like I have to take their word for it, I’ve lived it. I know exactly what it’s like to be assaulted, to not be safe in the world, to know that if you come forward, you probably won’t be believed. It’s made abundantly clear to all of us.

The president’s once-bff Jeff trafficked young girls. Those are the correct words, and clearly the president knew. But if we use his word, and the thing he said just this week - “stole” them to do what? What did he imagine Jeff was stealing them to do? File his taxes?

He knows full well who Jeff is, they spent a lot of time together over fifteen years. There are photos, there are videos, Jeff was at his second wedding and apparently introduced him to his third and current wife. Trump knows who Ghislaine is, and exactly what she did - we all do. Imagine being so without ethics or decency you’d be willing to set a monster like that free to save yourself. Then imagine that person running a whole country.

Do you know about Mason Lee Gipson? He’s a 23-year-old in Arkansas. He raped a minor, she was fourteen at the time and ended up pregnant - and the judge, a certain Scott Ellington whom I refuse to call honorable - has given him a year of probation because he took a plea deal. He said he was real drunk the night of the rape, he knew it was wrong, you know how these things can happen.

The judge has ordered him to pay his victim $690 broken into $75 monthly installments for her pain and suffering. He’ll have paternal and visitation rights when she has the baby. She is, of course, forced to carry the baby to term whether she wants to or not, because Arkansas has draconian anti-abortion laws with no exception for rape or incest, even of a minor. Lovely.

Here is the judge’s (work) address if you care to drop him a line. I did.

That’s the message again and again - the lives of straight, white men are more valuable than all others. They are at the top of the food chain, with wealthy white men being the most powerful, and billionaires playing by whatever rules they like. Worrying about what most Americans need, like affordable healthcare and housing, access to a good education, food security, clean air to breathe and water to drink? Those are not priorities, as evidenced by the Big Ugly Bill. Two out of three EPA requirements for cars have been lifted, and the third one that has to do with tailpipe emissions is sure to be next because it’s too hard, everyone.

It’s too hard, and these men in power won’t be here to watch the planet burn or the sea levels rise or the floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and wildfires get worse - so they do not care. They just want to make more money. Get rid of the regulations so they can manufacture, drill, emit, pollute, and sell, sell, sell. Wars? Children starving until they’re nothing but hollowed out eyes?

It does not matter to them if it happens in Gaza or the Sudan or Haiti, or the Congo. If there are resources to be had and there’s money to be made, children can starve. 0.2% of our entire national budget going to feed malnourished children around the world? Nope, not gonna do that anymore, those kids can die. AI taking over so no one knows what’s real or fake? My god do they love that. That’s the best news ever. Because then they can continue to do whatever depraved things they want to do, keep lying to our faces, and watch as the people who support them will remain loyal until there’s nothing left here but a planet full of despair - when there could have been something so much better.

I keep hoping people are going to realize. I keep hoping enough small, kind actions will tip the scales in a direction that is sane and compassionate so we can start again and rethink everything. Some days I believe it will be enough, other days I feel bereft.

I guess I’ll end with this last thing for whatever it’s worth. I think the biggest difference between people who are still supporting this man and this administration and all the truly awful things they’re doing…and people who never would, is this: if Bill Clinton is in the files I hope he goes down hard for it. Raping a child is never okay and I don’t care who does it.

If you can’t say the same thing about your guy, what’s going on? Does this man who would step on you without thinking twice, really mean more to you than the whole, wide, beautiful world? In that case I would ask, have you forgotten the actual source code?

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