The Epstein thing is a relatively minor incident of Stallman just being really stupid about what hill to die on and when. In the most charitable interpretation of it, he's defending Minsky as an ingenue who couldn't possibly have known that it is wrong to have underage women pimped at you just because they might be willingly pimped. Most reasonable people would recognise that making this defense, as a public figure who is supposed to be representing an entirely different political movement, is extremely bad PR for your other movement. It's a bad way to be a leader, to be sort of by proxy kind of defending Minsky's associations to Epstein. It leads to bad press, which it did, and it weakens support for your other, actual cause of software freedom.