My comment was removed.

Edit: The reason for removal was "pedophile."

Then how is that relevant? This is about an adult having sex with minors, which is rape. All you did with your comment was show that you are trying to defend him. This whole "sex with a minor" thing has been a very talked about deal for over a decade now with all the well known pedophiles in places of power and the media not calling them what they are (rapists).
Other than defending him and the others (Epstein, Trump etc.) I seriously don't see any reason to make the comment you did.

I got my relatively prude vanilla ass handed to me for attempting to draw a distinction between rock stars given social consent and then proceeding to break a law and 70 year old power brokers making false promises to get young women in positions where they cannot say no. I believe that conflating even those two by not acknowledging that they have different terms, is disingenuous to the victims who gave all of zero consent and were not interested in the action, but we're subject to violence.

Yes, but what the law says and what is going on in practice are often (or usually) two different things.

In your own example, a forensic psychiatrist might have interrogated you when you were 17 and concluded that you were of sound mind and had the requisite emotional and logical faculty to "consent" in every reasonable definition of the term.

However, the law says that your consent in this case has no legal baring. This is not to undermine your own agency as a 17 year old, but to protect those 17 year olds who were not as well developed as you, or who might be manipulated some how, and so on.

The trade-off is that there usually has to be a complainant. In your own example you or your parents would (in most jurisdictions), need to ask the police to press charges.

Of course, the age of consent varies between jurisdictions. Here I think it's 16. I went to school with someone who got married when she was 16 because she had become pregnant when she was 15. I didn't realise at the time how messed up that was.

I'm reminded of the fascinating and macabre history of Pitcairn Island. The abridged version is that in the 1700's (?) a sailing ship named the Bounty visited Tahiti for several months where many of the crew became involved with Tahitian ladies. Rather than return to their lives they mutinied, and absconded to an uninhabited island with their brides. Much violence and depravity, and later fanatical religious stuff ensued, but ultimately a tiny community of several dozen people survived to the 1990's. At that time it emerged that underage sex / rape was a common and even celebrated practice. It's a truly incredible story for a variety of reasons.