So at least some lay people easily realized he wasn't worth getting involved with.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1180481...

"The victims described herein were as young as 14 years old at the time they were abused by Jeffrey Epstein... Epstein intentionally sought out minors and knew that many of his victims were in fact under the age of 18, including because, in some instances, minor victims expressly told him their age."

> why do we assume that the people he was hanging out with knew the details of what he did wrong?

Some of them were emailing long, long after his conviction.

> Epstein pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2008 by a Florida state court of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute.

If someone did a few months of house arrest for "pleading guilty to solicitation of prostitution involving a minor" it would be incredibly easy for that person to say - whoops, she said she was 25 and then they threw the book at me." And not terribly unreasonable for someone to take him at his word on that.

The real crime is that the prosecutors massively under charged him for doing an insane gigantic awful pedophile recruitment ring. No one really knew that til a long time later.