Conflicts in the GNU project now affect Guile
When I was 17, I started dating the woman who I married when I was 20.  She was older than I was, so it&#x27;s fairly horrifying to me to see people publicly equating &quot;pedophilia&quot; with &quot;sex between adults and teenagers&quot;.  It makes my old wounds ache to see respected community leaders like Andy Wingo publicly accusing her of pedophilia and, implicitly, of abusive behavior, promoting the unwarranted social stigma we had to struggle against for the entire duration of our relationship.<p>Although we were only intimate partners for seven years, the relationship was not in any way a matter of her taking advantage of me or abusing me.  The relationship changed my life dramatically for the better, and I still love her, even though it has been some years since we last saw each other.<p>I thank God I lived in New Mexico, where the age of consent was low enough to protect her from legal risks in addition to the social ostracism she did suffer.<p>To state my position clearly, there is nothing wrong with sexual relationships between adults and older teenagers.  It is not a result of pedophilia, nor is that situation inherently abusive.  It does require special attention to issues of inequality of power stemming from economic and social differences, as well as the special difficulties faced by any relationship involving teenagers or people in their early twenties stemming from inexperience and higher levels of impulsivity.<p>Of course, the relationship that provoked this controversy had nothing of this egalitarian character.  According to the account of Virginia Giuffre, the victim, she was enslaved by serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein, who preyed on teenagers precisely because of their economic and psychological vulnerability; he ordered her to have sex with a variety of men who were presumably unaware of her enslavement. Her obedient efforts at seducing Stallman’s friend Marvin Minsky included accompanying him on travel around the country, but she has not alleged that they actually had sex or that he knew of her enslavement.  Physicist Gregory Benford testified to observing Minsky reject Giuffre’s advances.<p>Epstein may have had an additional motive for preying on teenagers: he maintained a large library of surreptitious video recordings of famous men having sex with enslaved underage women. There is evidence that Epstein was working for the US Intelligence Community; prosecutor Acosta accepted an unconscionable level of impunity as a result.<p>Stallman defending his dead friend Minsky from wholly unfounded allegations of “sexual assault” on the basis of the above facts is what provoked the current controversy.<p>I find it profoundly appalling to see people like Andy Wingo equating people like my beloved first wife to perpetrators of atrocities like Jeffrey Epstein, asserting that the most important fact about our relationship is that I, like Giuffre, was 17 years old when it began.