Yes, there was testimony by the alleged victim: she said that she was ordered to seduce Minsky (the alleged perpetrator) by her pimp, not that she succeeded in doing so, and she never testified that she had any sexual contact with Minsky. Stallman did not claim that he saw nothing morally wrong about this situation (his public denunciations of the pimp have been vehement and extreme), but rather that, if she succeeded, Minsky wasn't the guilty party.

You seem to be trying to express the idea, however ineptly, that statutory rape is, morally speaking, a strict-liability offense, with no component of mens rea: that a person who commits statutory rape is morally culpable regardless of whether they knew, or should have known, or even could have known, that the other party is underage.

The legal criterion for statutory rape varies from place to place, but in many jurisdictions it is legally a strict-liability offense. This is a controversial idea; Catherine Carpenter, for example (professor at Southwestern Law School; formerly Vice Dean, Assistant Dean, etc., at Southwestern Law School, and former chair of the Accreditation Committee of the American Bar Association) made an influential argument in 02006 that statutory rape should not be a strict-liability offense: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=907682; and, also in 02006, the Irish Supreme Court struck down Ireland's existing statutory-rape law as unconstitutional precisely because it was a strict-liability offense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_rape#Current_issues.

Your evident repugnance for any opinion that differs from your own would, I suppose, drive you to punish Dr. Carpenter and the Irish Supreme Court for their scandalous opinions, given the opportunity. I hope you don't own a gun or have a way to travel to Ireland.

However, there are practical reasons for treating the legal question as a strict-liability question; in particular, mistake-of-fact defenses in rape cases commonly amount to dragging the victim's reputation through the mud, enumerating for the jury all the reasons the perpetrator "reasonably believed" the victim to have consented to sex --- and to have been of age to do so, if that is in question. This does not apply to the corresponding moral question.

The moral strict-liability criterion you're proposing, when applied to adultery, is the criterion under which husbands consider it justified to kill their wives because those wives have been raped. When applied to homosexuality, it is the criterion under which fathers consider it justified to disown or kill their sons because those sons have been raped. And, when applied to statutory rape, it is the criterion Jeffrey Epstein used to acquire blackmail material on a large number of rich and influential men, though evidently he failed with regard to Minsky in particular. He invited them to his private island resort, instructed his underaged sex slaves to seduce them, and filmed the resulting rape, archiving it on CDs in a safe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Video_recordin...

He did this because he knew that people like you would blame the men he was blackmailing if he revealed the material, and that under the legal strict-liability standards that apply to sex with 17-year-olds in the Virgin Islands, they would also be legally guilty. That way, he knew he could count on their support whenever he might need a favor from them. This is precisely the sort of scenario Hubin and Haely describe as "admittedly concocted (but not impossible)" in their 01998 Law and Philosophy article, "Rape and the Reasonable Man" https://philpapers.org/archive/HUBRAT.pdf:

> Suppose a man – we’ll call him Horgan – threatens a woman with severe harm to herself or her children if she doesn’t do as he demands. His demand is that she entice a man to have sexual intercourse with her while Horgan is watching and never let the man suspect that she is not doing it of her own free will. The woman is, we will imagine, an accomplished enough actress to carry this off. We believe that she has not consented to the sexual intercourse because her actions were the result of the wrongful coercion by Horgan. Nevertheless, the man she encourages to have sexual intercourse with her is not guilty of rape if there was no reason to suspect that she was being coerced in this way.

Unfortunately, it turned out not to be as concocted as they naively hoped. I was dismayed to learn the other day that Buster Hernandez had done the same thing to at least one of his victims, in which case the man was her own boyfriend.

Clearly you disagree with Hubin and Haely about whether the second man in their scenario, like many of Epstein's male houseguests, is guilty of rape; and you would punish them for writing such a scandalous article if you could, because this is precisely the opinion you think it is justified to retaliate against Stallman for expressing.

But the strict-liability criterion in the law, in accordance with your preferences, gave Jeffrey Epstein an enormous amount of power, allowing him to continue raping enslaved trafficked children with impunity for a decade --- and, with a little more luck, he might have been able to continue for another 30 years.

Perhaps that means it is a bad criterion. Perhaps, on balance, it is a good criterion anyway. But I think it's clear that we should at least be able to have the debate without retaliation from thugs like you and Buster Hernandez, because that will just cede the debate to whichever side has more efficiently brutal thugs. Instead, we should decide the question with reasoned argument, and do our best to protect the people making the arguments from intimidation and retaliation.

In any case, the rape allegations against Minsky do not hinge on this question, since they are rape allegations against a dead man, made on the basis of no evidence, by people who didn't know the alleged victim Virginia Giuffre --- who has, herself, made no such allegations against the dead man in question; and they are allegations that the alleged perpetrator's wife has given evidence against. So, regardless of whether Minsky would have been, morally speaking, a rapist if they had had sexual contact, there's no reason to suspect that they did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_Minsky#Association_with...

So, downplaying those rape allegations was the right thing to do in any case, and Stallman, whatever his other sins, should be commended for his bravery in doing so.