I’m driving a car from 1992 and I dont even spend $1000/year on maintenance and gas.

Sorry, I hope it didn’t sound like I posted those additional quotes as direct evidence of abuse towards his daughters. Instead, I only thought they helped paint a bigger picture of his behavior around women and young girls in general. They seem to support the beginning of the original quote, “adolescents attracted and interested him”, and made that paragraph feel more like a conclusion of common themes, rather than a random aside.

As for your question about the contrasting quote, I agree. This seems to be intended to show that these relationships with young girls wasn’t always about sexual fulfillment. However, I believe it was telling that such a disclaimer was needed, and that this reputation was considered the general consensus of other aristocrats at the time.

Also, I won’t argue against the label of “womanizer”; however, I don’t believe that term should be used in the context of “young girls”. Just as I don’t believe we should give a pass to US founding fathers owning slaves just because it was common at the time, I don’t believe we should give pass to those who took advantage to young girls from a position of power, even in a time when it may have been a social norm for a grown man to marry a young teenage girl. In modern times, we wouldn’t consider such a person a womanizer, but instead, a pedophile.

I can’t say for certain whether such a person, with a reputation for being a “womanizer” of young girls, would take advantage of the girls in his care. However, I don’t believe it is a far leap to come to that conclusion based on the original quote and the supporting evidence of his character.

In the previously posted quote, I don’t believe the terms and phrases “harem”, “groom them”, “lover”, “he could use them as he chose”, and “wife and children became in effect one” give a vague impression of his relationships with his daughters. I find these hard to interpret as anything but describing an abusive sexual relationship.

I’m by no means an expert on this subject, but I found a few other segments from the biography that I believe contribute to the bigger picture of how he viewed young girls and women in general:

Thus the dining-rooms of the embassies and the clubs and the Ankara Palace Hotel hummed with the latest gossip about Atatürk’s public behaviour. No woman was held to be safe at his hands. Turkish mothers might indeed thrust their daughters at him (and Turkish husbands their wives), but Diplomatic mothers would hurry their daughters away from a party for fear he would invite them to his table.

Madame Kovatcheva, the wife of his friend the Minister of War, was a Macedonian, and Kemal’s growing association with her young daughter Dimitrina was assumed by the local gossips to have political undertones. In fact, it had a more romantic flavour. Kemal had never before come to know on close terms a young girl of good family and European refinement, and it was this that intrigued him in Dimitrina.

Asked once what qualities he admired most in a woman, he replied, ‘Availability.’

I just downloaded the book from Anna’s Archive, and after a quick search, found this on page 853:

Adolescents attracted and interested him, and when the girls reached the age when they sat regularly at table he began to take notice both of their charms and their talents. None of them was exceptionally pretty; nor had they the graces of women of the world. But they provided him with the ideal ‘harem’. They were in his power, thanks to their youth and their dependence on him. He could groom them and mould them and guide them in the direction he wanted them to follow. He could use them as he chose – and when he no longer chose, could ‘wean’ them and launch them into marriage or into a career. For the girls themselves, so ambivalent a father-lover-schoolmaster relationship might create certain psychological stresses. But for Kemal it provided the family background he needed, one from which irksome ties of blood were missing, and in which wife and children became in effect one.

We’re paying for the general infrastructure upgrades around the DC area to support the 400-million-dollar military AI datacenter. But ultimately, this project under the ballroom is being privately financed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Palentir, whom will surely want some influence over how it is used.