MEGYN KELLY IS RIGHT ABOUT EPSTEIN

Bill Donohue

Megyn Kelly is being bashed for saying that Jeffrey Epstein was “not a pedophile.”

Her critics are plainly ignorant, and their gripe is not with her—it’s with the American Academy of Pediatrics. It defines puberty as beginning at age ten for whites and Hispanics and nine for African Americans. A pedophile is a person who has sex with a prepubescent male or female, meaning someone ten or younger.

In reference to Epstein, Kelly rightly noted that “we have yet to see anybody come forward and say I was under 10, I was under 14.” She was also correct to say, “There’s a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old.”

She was not justifying predators of any age, and indeed it is malicious to suggest she was. The context of her remarks was whether Epstein’s predatory behavior qualifies as pedophilia. Clearly it does not.

Why does this matter to the Catholic League?

For too long, the media and the chattering class have said that the Catholic Church clergy abuse scandal was due to “pedophile priests.” Wrong. The data clearly show that the vast majority of priestly victims were male (81 percent) and that 78 percent were postpubescent. Why is this important? Because it means the molesters were homosexuals. When males have sex with males who are postpubsecent, that’s called homosexuality, not pedophilia.

But the media ignored the data, thus avoiding the role that homosexual priests played. This allowed them to tag the offenders as “pedophiles.” The fact is only 3.8 percent of clergy sexual abuse victims were boys ten or younger.

[See my book, The Truth about Clergy Sexual Abuse: Clarifying the Facts and the Causes, for the citations.]

Epstein was a sexual monster. But the discussion is marred when false comments are made about his behavior. It is even worse when people like Megyn Kelly are falsely blamed for justifying it.