Nicholas Kristof

And right now, if you buy sex from a 15-year-old girl, there is approximately zero risk that you will ever face any consequences, zero.

That's a great question.

I mean, the problem is that, A, I think there's not a lot of sympathy for these kids because in reality, look, they are, you know, they are troubled kids.

They don't work well with prosecutors.

They often don't trust the police.

And that's often merited.

The police do arrest them, do mistreat them, and they don't testify well in court.

And so from the policing point of view, it's often just easier to

kind of look the other way and focus on other issues.

But also when you do actually arrest Johns, then they're often pillars of the community.

And so they escape accountability in the same way that Epstein himself largely escaped accountability the first time around.

And, you know, it just requires us to understand that this is a priority.

And I don't think we've made that decision.

You know, I will never forget one time in Boston, sitting in the home of this couple whose daughter had run away, 15-year-old daughter had run away.

I think she'd been on the streets for four or five months at that point.

The parents had been at their wit's end.

They'd gone to the police.

The police had been unhelpful.

And sitting in that living room with the parents, in 20 minutes, I found the girl advertised on Backpage as if she were, you know, a lost puppy by a pimp.

And we gave that number, the pimp's phone number, to the police.