“Two women who claim they were paid for sex by former Rep. Matt Gaetz provided House ethics investigators with “numerous” photos related to time they spent with the Florida Republican, a lawyer for the women said Tuesday, including from an alleged 2019 trip to New York.
The women said they were paid by the former congressman for sex on that trip, during which they also joined Gaetz at a Fox News studio while he filmed a TV appearance, their attorney Joel Leppard told CNN’s Erin Burnett on “OutFront.” Gaetz allegedly covered the women’s travel costs as well, Leppard said.
The women additionally provided the House Ethics Committee with selfies Gaetz is said to have sent them, according to their lawyer. They also testified that they sent nude photos to Gaetz, sometimes at his request, Leppard said.”
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“Leppard noted the House panel heard testimony from several other witnesses.
“The evidence that the House has, I would presume, is overwhelming, because my clients were just two of the other witnesses, and there are very important witnesses who have yet to come out and give a preview of what the House Ethics Committee results might show,” he said.
House investigators, according to the lawyer, asked the two women about records they had obtained showing payments, largely transmitted electronically, allegedly made to them by Gaetz. Leppard said the records showed one of his clients was paid more than $6,000 by the congressman and the other more than $4,000.
“What I’m telling you is just a fraction of the evidence that’s available, of the thousands of documents” the House obtained, Leppard said.”
“We don’t need a formal study to tell us that taking away sex workers’ ability to communicate online makes their lives worse—sex workers have been saying that for a decade now, since the federal government started taking down websites where they advertised (RIP MyRedBook, Rentboy, The Review Board, Backpage, and so on). But here’s a(nother) study saying exactly this.
For the study, published in the journal Social Sciences, researcher Melissa Ditmore and her team conducted a national survey of 440 sex workers, asking about how they used online platforms, how the use of these platforms affected their working conditions, and how laws like the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)—which led to platforms removing and restricting sex worker accounts—affected their work lives. Survey respondents included folks who had engaged in webcam work, phone sex work, strip club work, pornography, independent escorting, street-based sex work, working at a brothel, working at a massage parlor, BDSM/fetish work, working for an escort agency, and other types of sex work.
Ditmore’s team found—unsurprisingly—that “platform policies and practices often remove and/or limit sex workers’ access to them, which, in turn, restricts their ability to earn income and compromises their capacity to live and work safely.””
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Ten percent said deplatforming led to more interactions with law enforcement, and 11.5 percent said it led to more social service interactions.
Around 9 percent said deplatforming led to more interactions with madams/agencies/managers/pimps.
Around 8 percent said they experienced “exploitative work conditions” after deplatforming” and 6.7 percent said they experienced “abusive work conditions.””
https://reason.com/2024/09/04/deplatforming-doesnt-make-sex-work-safer/
“Like Carlson, Vance had once opposed Donald Trump, and like Carlson, he had transformed into a prominent Trump supporter and a rabid participant in the culture wars. “We are effectively run in the country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,” he told Carlson, “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He went on to name Kamala Harris (and Pete Buttigieg, and AOC) as his prime examples of the childless leaders who should be excluded from positions of power.”
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“Vance appears to be a decent family man — someone who supports traditional conservative values, and is even willing to buck conventional GOP norms by supporting strong pro-family policies. But a quick perusal of his thoughts on women and gender reveal some unusual opinions that lie outside the American mainstream, beyond a stray comment about cat ladies.
Vance is staunchly opposed to abortion, and has suggested that it is wrong even in cases of rape and incest. He has compared the evil of abortion to that of slavery, and opposed the Ohio ballot measure ensuring the right to abortion in 2023. He also was one of only 28 members of Congress who opposed a new HIPAA rule that would limit law enforcement’s access to women’s medical records. He has promoted Viktor Orban’s pro-natalist policies in Hungary, which offer paybacks to married couples that scale up along with the number of children (a new Hungarian Constitution that banned gay marriage went into effect in 2012, so these benefits only serve “traditional” couples). Vance opposes same-sex marriage. During his 2022 Senate campaign, he suggested the sexual revolution had made divorce too easy (people nowadays “shift spouses like they change their underwear”), arguing that people in unhappy marriages, and maybe even those in violent ones, should stay together for their children. His campaign said such an insinuation was “preposterous,” but you can watch the video yourself and be the judge.”
“A harrowing new report by The New York Times detailed horrific accounts of sexual violence carried out by Hamas during its October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel.
Allegations of rape were made almost immediately after the attacks, which Israel said left some 1,200 people dead.
But many of the accounts were not from direct witnesses, sparking debates about whether they could be relied upon.
The Times said it carried out exhaustive work on its investigation, citing more than 150 interviews, video footage, photos, and GPS data.
It concluded that in at least seven locations women and girls appeared to have been the victims of sexual assaults or mutilations.
One witness interviewed by the outlet was Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant who only gave her first name.
She said she saw gunmen rape and kill at least five women while she was hiding near Route 232, around four miles southwest of the Nova music festival, which was targeted by Hamas on October 7.
She told the outlet that she saw “about 100 men” as they dished out weapons and passed wounded women between them.
In a particularly disturbing and graphic account, Sapir said that she saw the attackers cut the breast off of one woman as she was being raped and pass it between them before throwing it on the ground. “They play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road.”
“That day, I became an animal,” Sapir said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”
Another witness, Raz Cohen, said he survived the attacks by hiding in the dried-up bed of a stream along Route 232. He told the Times that he saw five men dragging a young, naked woman across the ground.
“I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words,” Cohen said.
“Then one of them raises a knife,” he added, “and they just slaughtered her.””
“intersex is actually an umbrella that covers four parts of human biology: chromosomes, those X’s and Y’s that carry genetic information; gonads, the organs that produce eggs or sperm; the mixture of hormones coursing through a person’s veins; and what their genitalia looks like. An intersex person might have differences in one of these areas, or all of them.”
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“Not only is gender a spectrum, but actual physical, biological sex is a spectrum … And so it’s impossible to fit these bodies into a single box.”
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“Wong says it’s hard to know for sure what the rate of intersex traits are because there are so many differences that could be counted and because some differences go unnoticed without genetic testing — which most Americans never do. But she and Fraser worry that these laws could mandate that kind of test, say for participation in sports.”