Rhetorical

 One might expect that victims of sexual abuse and harassment might be sympathetic to the plight of others experiencing similar trauma. Empathetic, even. 

When Megyn Kelly was a rising star at Faux News, she was subjected to a great many unsolicited advances from men at the company all the way to the very top: Roger Ailes. Her former  boss asked her to get up and "twirl" for him. “So I was asked to do the spin, and God help me, I did it. I know people think it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, you have to spin around.’ But I remember feeling like: I put myself through school; I was offered partnership at Jones Day, one of the best law firms in the world; I argued before federal courts of appeal all over the nation; I came here, I’m covering the U.S. Supreme Court; I graduated with honors from all of my programs — and now he wants me to twirl. And I did it.”

She added, “If you don’t get how demeaning that is, I can’t help you. In retrospect, I’d give anything if I had said ‘no.'"

These were reflections from 2019, when a film recounting the harassment scandal that enveloped Faux News and would eventually lead to the resignation of Mister Ailes as well as pundit Bill O'Reilly and commentator Eric Bolling. It seemed, at last, that the "me too" movement had some teeth. 

“I do know somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything. And this person has told me from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile. This is this person’s view, who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 1fifteen-year-old girls. I’m just giving you facts that he wasn’t into, like, eight-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”

This was the rationalization from one (checks notes) Megyn Kelly in the aftermath of the revelation of emails from a man generally considered to be the worst of the worst. 

Who just happened to have demonstrable ties to (checks notes) well, you all know who. 

And so what happened in six years? Should women, especially those considered minors in most states with the lurid exception of Florida where so very much of the alleged abuses took place, be subjected to harassment, rape, and abuse because they didn't happen to work for Faux News? 

That last one was (checks notes) a rhetorical question.