Er - Typically a sugardaddy is just someone who is expected to pay for nice thins, and gets sex and companionship in return. It doesn’t mean the woman involved is under aged.
But to the point, he should have known better/verified her age. If prostitution was legal and at least lightly regulated, we wouldn’t have these problems. Indeed there used to be a site for Johns and Prostitutes in I want to say San Francisco that, until it was taken down, resulted in better working conditions for the women, as well as an increase in pay.
Let’s not be so quick to condemn him. That’s a site where men go to pay for sex with women half their age. He went after a 16 year old when he was 30, so this Randian giant added on a whole year, doubtless to demonstrate his sense of “personal responsibility”. /s
Seriously, though, a guy who could make a good case that he thought she was older is not a guy who’d immediately flee the country the moment he heard about a police investigation.
I’ve now added the /s tag. Whether it’s a court of law or the court of public opinion, it’a not a big leap to assume that a 30 year old man on that site is looking to pay someone underage for sex.
If one person wasn’t an adult, then consent isn’t legal.
It’s the adult’s responsibility to verify age, not the minor’s responsibility to tell the truth.
This is all basic stuff, well known before the modern consent and #metoo movements.
Wait a minute…you’re telling me that a crypto-anarchist gun loon with ties to the alt right was into something like this? Who could have ever seen something like this coming?
I think “3D printer fans” and “libertarian 3D-printed guns fans who flaunt court orders” do not form a circular Venn diagram. The latter is the group that unsurprisingly has creep-wads like this guy in it.
False. If one person is under the age of consent, then it was illegal. In most states, the age of consent is 16 BUT it can vary from 14 (yes, really, and even younger under certain conditions) to 18.
Yes, the site involved is squicky as hell but it is not automatically illegal to have sex with a 16-17-year-old as an adult, depending on the locale.
For reference, the locale in question was Austin, TX, where the Champion of “The Gubmint Can’t Tell Me What to Do!” lives:
The Texas Age of Consent is 17 years old . In the United States, the age of consent is the minimum age at which an individual is considered legally old enough to consent to participation in sexual activity. Individuals aged 16 or younger in Texas are not legally able to consent to sexual activity, and such activity may result in prosecution for statutory rape .
Texas statutory rape law is violated when a person has consensual sexual intercourse with an individual under age 17. While there is no close in age exemption, defenses exist when the offender was no more than 3 years older then the victim and of the opposite sex. sexual intercourse between an employee of a school and a student is also prohibited, unless they are married, and no age of consent is specified in this law.
Ugh to all the whataboutism and devil’s advocacy in this fucking thread.
The age of consent is 17 years old in TX; Wilson was fucking a 16 year old girl he met through a skeevy-ass website, so he broke the law… regardless whether ‘she wanted it’ or not, regardless whether she was paid for sex, and regardless if she lied about her age or not. He broke the law; and he got caught. Fullstop.
Texas, itself, was not mentioned in the post I responded to. I also explicitly noted the laws involved vary by locale. Stating the simple truth is neither “Whataboutism” nor devil’s advocacy, any insistence otherwise aside, no matter how fervent.
And @vonbobo was replying to someone who was stretching to discuss possible mitigating factors in this particular case, which occured in Texas, where indeed one person wasn’t considered an adult for purposes of sexual consent.
And laws are different for sex work, porn, and anything involving transport or trafficking.
Last I checked it was specifically more illegal in all of the US to purchase sex from some one under the age of majority, regardless if they are over the age of consent for the locality. It carries different charges and more extreme penalties that normal prostituion statutes. Just as pornography or the production there of is illegal if it features people under 18, regardless of age of consent where it was produced or posessed. Or even the legality of child porn where it was made. Transporting a minor (or inducing a minor to transport themselves) across state lines for purposes of sex is illegal regardless of ages of consent in any involved locations.
And those sub 18 ages of consent often come with exceptions/limits of the “within five years age difference” type.
The point of those lower ages of consent is not “it’s a ok to fuck a 16 year old!”. It’s to avoid criminalizing normal sexual behavior between minors and their peers. Nested inside a host of statutes designed to prevent and punish the sexual exploitation of minors by adults.
A 30 year old paying a 16 or 17 year old for sex is an adult sexually exploiting a minor. And it’s rather neatly covered by the host of statutes designed to criminalize this exact situation, without recourse to age of consent. No matter how much “but child brides are legal in Missouri” people want to throw at it.
The age of consent law is pretty clear cut in Texas. Whether or not the girl in this case was engaging in sex work, whether or not there was a reasonable close-in-age exemption in Texas (which there is not*), Wilson still broke the specific state laws that the prosecutors are citing against him:
four counts of sexual assault of a child, two charges of indecency with a child by contact, and two charges of indecency with a child by exposure.
The point being, they don’t need to charge him with anything else.
I’m sure he’s hoping that there’s a gold-fringed flag in that courtroom, because he’s not going to be able to make a plausible defense against the actual charges.
[* at least not formally – problematic, but beside the point here]
