UPDATE: Sastra notes in a comment below that there’s a related piece by Joe Nocera at the Free Press, “The ‘Epstein Fallout’ is Spiraling out of Control.”
The issue of Jeffrey Epstein has brought up a question that still puzzles me. Granted, the man was a horrible pedophile and sex trafficker (he was convicted of it at least once) who probably deserved years and years in prison after his second arrest, but took his own life to forestall that fate. Granted, Epstein sought out a fair number of intellectuals and individuals, associated with some, flew a subset of them around—sometimes to his private island where bad stuff occurred—and gave other intellectuals money for their research. Granted, some of those who palled around with Epstein should have known better than to associate with a convicted pedophile, take his money, or visit his island. Others were involved in rather pathetic interactions with Epstein, like Larry Summers, who asked Epstein for romantic advice. That’s not a crime, but it doesn’t look so good.
Now it seems that almost every academic of note not only had some connection with Epstein, but also has been denigrated and demonized for it. You can be tarred even if you’re several people removed from Epstein: even I get emails and comments on the website (which are trashed) demanding to know why I am friends with people who had some tangential connection with Epstein (viz., Steve Pinker, Richard Dawkins, etc.).
You can look yourself up on the Epstein files at this site, and of course I did, though I never met or had anything to do with the man. I was amazed to see that my name appears ten times! But every mention has to do with my literary agent, John Brockman, who was one of the people cultivated by Epstein (Brockman is the agent for nearly all popular-science writers.)
Below is one example: an email from Brockman to many of his authors calling our attention to an article about him that appeared in the Guardian. I have no idea why this email is in the Epstein files. Email addresses have been redacted.
What puzzles me is that people whose connection with Epstein was tangential or minimal are nevertheless demonized, sometimes with great glee (P. Z. Myers is a great proponent of such glee, expounded in his frequent “Two Minutes of Hate” posts). I really can’t explain it, except that if you already dislike somebody (perhaps because they’re more famous than you), finding that they’re in the Epstein files gives you even more of an excuse to dislike them, and to flaunt your dislike.
I mentioned Steve Pinker, whose connection with Epstein appears limited to flying on his plane to a conference (not to the island!), being at two conferences where Epstein was in attendance (with Epstein more or less forcing himself to get photographed with Steve and even to sit down at Pinker’s table for a bit), and , finally, for helping Alan Dershowitz when Dersh defended Epstein in his first trial. In that case the “help” was free, and rendered because Pinker knew Dershowitz and wanted to help him out with the proper linguistic analysis of a statute. (See Inside Higher Ed for some tarring.) As you’ll see below, Steve has apologized for that help. But I really don’t think that such an apology is necessary, as even a rich person deserves a good defense. Remember that I was on O. J. Simpson’s defense team (refusing a fee), because I thought that even Simpson deserved a decent defense and because, at the time, the FBI was using “match probabilities” for DNA in a manner I considered prejudicial. (Match probability was my area of expertise.) I make no apologies for that, and was appalled when Simpson was found “not guilty.”
At any rate, Pinker has publicly explained his connection with Epstein on Andrew Sullivan’s site (here and here), and I’ll reproduce Steve’s mea culpa below. Greg Mayer put the entire explanation/apology together for me:
You asked “What was Steven Pinker thinking?” with the implication that I was a willing associate of Epstein. I know the question was rhetorical, but let me answer it.
I disliked Epstein from the moment I met him, judging him to be a sleaze and an impostor. I never sought his company, never solicited or accepted funding from him, was never invited to his mansion or island, and would not have accepted. But as we know, Epstein was an obsessive collector of celebrities, including academic celebrities, and he was tight with an astonishing number of my close colleagues, making it difficult to escape associations with him. These included my Harvard colleague and co-teacher Alan Dershowitz; my PhD advisor, department chair, and dean Stephen Kosslyn; my Harvard colleagues Lawrence Summers, Lisa Randall, and Martin Nowak; my former MIT colleague Noam Chomsky; my literary agent John Brockman; and the Director of the ASU Origins Project, Lawrence Krauss. I am astonished that these smart people took Epstein seriously. On the two occasions when I was forced into his company, I found him to be a deeply unserious and attention-deficit-disordered smart-ass.
Nowak, Brockman, and Krauss were prolific impresarios of academic conferences covertly funded by Epstein, and he would often show up unannounced. At one Harvard conference someone snapped a photo with me and Epstein in the frame; it has plagued me ever since. On another, Krauss begged me to allow Epstein to join my meal table for a chat, and the resulting photo has also been endlessly circulated to smear me. In a forthcoming article in a major online magazine, Krauss publicly apologizes for forcing me into that situation. Epstein was also a donor to other Harvard projects, not all of them public.
It’s also important to keep in mind the timeline. I did join a group of TED speakers and attendees (including Brockman, his wife and agency president Katinka Matson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett) whom Brockman had invited to fly on Epstein’s plane to the conference in Monterey, California. This was in 2002, many years before any of Epstein’s crimes came to light. Nothing suspicious took place on the flight.
My other association with Epstein came when Dershowitz asked my advice, as a psycholinguist, on the natural interpretation of the wording of a statute which, it turned out, Epstein had been accused of violating. Alan and I were colleagues who had just co-taught a course, and he often asked me for advice on the linguistic interpretation of laws and constitutional amendments. Dershowitz is, of course, famous for legally defending odious defendants such as O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson on the Sixth Amendment principle that even the most despised defendants have a right to vigorous legal representation. I was not a paid expert witness but was doing a colleague a favor. Still, I deeply regret this, because while Dershowitz is willing to apply his professional efforts to push this principle to the limit, I am not. (Note, too, that in 2007 the full extent of Epstein’s crimes were not known.)
Epstein was a sociopath and, we now know, a heinous criminal. He also was a maniacal collector of famous people who knew how to slosh around enough money to gain entrée into prestigious circles. Perhaps I was too polite to run away on occasions when I should have, but it was almost impossible for me to escape being associated with his far-flung social web.
This is about as straightforward as you can get, and I can’t see that Steve did anything wrong—not even helping Dershowitz clarify wording of a statue for Epstein’s first trial. Steve says he “deeply regrets this,” and I believe him, but I don’t think he has much to regret. Expert witnesses help all kinds of people, rich and poor (as I did, though I mostly helped indigent defendants for public defenders). Ensuring that the law is administered correctly is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, one could make the case that I was far worse than Pinker, as I helped O. J. Simpson, who was later exculpated for a double murder but, in my view, was almost certainly guilty. I knew there was a substantial chance that Simpson did it, but I wanted to be sure that the prosecution used its DNA data properly, just as Steve gave his best linguistic interpretation of a statute. Remember, the prosecution’s job is not to convict, but to present evidence that is supposed to show the accused is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is not supposed to involve twisting the facts, though it does far too often, which is why poor people, assigned overworked public defenders, don’t get the same justice as rich ones.
The big question today is: why are people in almost a moral panic about Epstein? As I said, he was almost surely guilty of odious crimes (I allow him a benefit of the doubt, as does the law, though his associate Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty, and there is other eyewitness testimony.) And yes, perhaps some people, like Prince Andrew, were complicit in Epstein’s crimes. But others were guilty only of associating with him, some more than others and some, like Pinker, hardly at all. Why the demonization of Pinbker? And why should I also be tarred because I’m friends with Steve?
None of this, of course, is meant to exculpate Epstein, nor to minimize the pain and misery that his victims suffered and suffer now. I simply want to discuss a question about a moral panic and its apparent excess.
Greg Mayer brought all this to my attention, and I called him to ask his explanation for the moral panic affecting some people who didn’t deserve it. Besides my own view that people love to see the mighty fall, Greg had three other reasons:
a.) People tend, in moral crises, to believe ridiculous and palpably false things about those considered guilty. An example is the McMartin preschool trial, in which people were arrested for child molestation despite the most ridiculous and unbelievable accusations, including Satanic rituals and flying witches (see here for some of them). It turns out that nobody was found guilty and the allegations were not substantiated. Much of the childrens’ testimony seems to have been due to prompting by therapists. To Greg, who teaches pseudoscience and related matters at U. Wisconsin-Parkside, this is an extreme example of what can happen to a “believe the victim” mentality even when there’s no good evidence.
b.) People believe what they want to believe, and will believe ludicrous or disproven claims if they buttress what they would like to be true. Greg used the example of “facilitated communication“, in which “facilitators” supposedly helped nonverbal people “talk” by holding their hands near a keyboard. We now know that this process has been entirely discredited. Like using a ouija board, the facilitators were actually guiding people’s hands to specific keys. This relates to Epstein in a way similar to my own thesis: people want to believe that some people they already dislike are guilty, and so rush to associate those people with Epstein, despite the lack of evidence that some of the “accused” had anything to do with Epstein’s crimes.
c.) Greg also said that since the 1980s, as inequalities among Americans began to grow, those who had thinner slices of the pie became eager to blame the rich and elite for their troubles. We see this resentment in many places, including politics. And Epstein, of course, gravitated to the rich and elite, as he apparently thought that some of their panache would rub off on him. This is why, Greg says, there are so many articles about the “Epstein elite” being published these days.
At any rate, Pinker’s apologia prompted me to think about all this, and after reading it I really cannot find him guilty of any missteps—even the help he gave Dershowitz. I know I’ll get pushback from people who dislike Pinker, or think that the acccused should not be given help by experts, especially when the crimes involved are dire. But I stand by my claim: I don’t think Pinker did anything wrong. And that is probably true of quite a few people who are being tarred via guilt by association.
It is odd that this one is so damanaging. I saw someone call it “Me Too 2” (I think it was The National Review. Interestingly, the Bill that required the DOJ to release all the files requires that ALL names be unredacted. The DOJ wanted to redact names that were clearly not involved, as in the email example you give. Ro Khanna last week called out six people who were in the files. It turned out that four of them were only people who filled out a police line up. Luckily for him, he did it on the floor, so he is liable for defamation.
I think the law did not require that all names be unredacted, but rather that the victims’ names should be redacted. Unfortunately for them, the administration did just the opposite, redacting names of potential perpetrators, which should not have been redacted, but not names of some of the victims.
Did you mean not liable?
It seems to me that people get a certain sort of pleasure in taking another person down. Ambitious reporters, commentators, “influencers,” and politicians seem almost gleeful in being able to expose this billionaire or that celebrity or the other well-known business figure. They love to bring the high and mighty low.
And it simply doesn’t matter if the association with Epstein was tangential and unrelated to his extracurricular activities. With something like 3.5 million easily searchable documents available—some just a single line of text—the amount of ammunition is huge, access is universal, the effort required is minimal, and the opportunity to defame the famous is unparalleled.
Finally, because Epstein is dead, common decency can be dispensed with. Epstein has become garbage, and everyone still living who was ever near him—even if they weren’t actually near him—smells. The frenzy seems to illustrate an unsavory quirk of human psychology, analogous to a feeding frenzy. (Or is it homologous, perhaps?)
It’s a new witch hunt. The moral panic of our times. Matt Groening accepted a ride from Epstein in his plane in 1998, from North Carolina to New York City. A one hour flight seven years before Epstein’s conviction. On board the flight was Virginia Guiffre, one of Epstein’s victims. That is why Groening’s name appears in The Files*. Ms Guiffre writes that “nothing happened”, but Groening is now a “pedophile rapist”. That’s an actual accusation I’ve seen.
Full disclosure; Mr Groening is a personal friend of my wife’s; they’ve know each other since teen years. Their children are friends. She is in tears, absolutely distraught, seeing him accused of something like that. To say things like that -in public- on such ridiculous grounds…well, the world is full of absolute shits. We’re completely surrounded. And they all have access to the Internet. In the immortal words of professor Hubert J. Farnsworth; “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore”.
*it must be capitalized now, like “The Bible” or “The Q’uran”; the faithful demand it.
The story of Virginia Guiffre is quite sad. She committed suicide at age 41. That said. Guilt by association is diabolical (to say the least).
I am actually ‘tied’ to Epstein. I know Freeman Dyson to a very, very, very limited extent. I feel very guilty.
I hope you mean that you knew him 🙂
When I met Freeman Dyson (and his wife) they were already very elderly. I helped them with AOL (which should date me and them). I was at a conference organized by his daughter (Esther Dyson). I even met Philippe Kahn.
There’s a new article in the Free Press titled “The ‘Epstein Fallout’ Is Spiraling Out of Control.” Author Joe Nocera provides other examples of indignation overreach, including a powerful owner of a major talent agency forced to step down because, for several months back in 2003, he sent flirty texts to Ghislaine Maxwell (“a big, fat nothingburger”), and 4 men “who happened to be in a random photograph that was taken for an FBI lineup.” Nice.
I personally think the overextended tendency towards guilt-by-association here is in part fueled by an unholy trinity of propellants: the remains of the “Me Too” Movement; an ongoing affair with Cancel Culture; and a now entrenched tendency to panic over anything having to do with sexual abuse, children, and, especially, the sexual abuse of children. You cannot be too pure.
Has anyone figured out the source of Epstein’s money and why he was interested in these people and their circles? Was his interest all monomaniacal? Curiously, he didn’t appear to have much contact with the athletic and entertainment worlds. Is that because they have better BS detectors and deal routinely with hustlers? Or is it because hanging out with hot young ladies on tropical islands is rather pedestrian in their circles? Or are they simply more skilled at giving the polite blowoff?
That’s what I’m really curious about. How did this high school teacher get so rich?
There’s been coverups on this guy from the start.
Comment by Greg Mayer
Big article in the NY Times Magazine a few weeks ago on how he got rich.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/magazine/jeffrey-epstein-money-scams-investigation.html
GCM
Thanks, Greg – a fascinating article.
Archived copy for others, just in case: https://archive.ph/LVy6i
John Brockman’s listserv is impressive. I should feel proud and warm if I were a member. This Epsteinology business, if I may borrow a phrase from a fellow WEIT commenter, is a paradigm of trollism and silliness. It does not take anything for a public intellectual or even an accidental public figure in our current interweb world to be slimed. Of course on the positive side of 21st century communication is Coleman Hughes’ pathway to having his thinking available to us all as he explained in a recent youtube interview.
Public service has often required a thick skin.
I took the liberty to write the following response email to a journalist at CBC:
Re: https://www.cbc.ca/news/investigates/….
Dear Mr. D[…],
Yes, scientists can be found in Epstein files. The reason is simply that he was a rich individual who had more than a passing interest in science, just as do I and a (sadly) small minority of Americans and Canadians.
It seems the media are desperate to expand the moral panic beyond Epstein’s political contacts. Now the media circus is after those we really can’t afford to smear. Science is the engine of progress, even though journalists don’t care to acknowledge that it is. These people are the brain of our civilization. We can’t afford to lose the remaining respect for science and scientists. Spreading vague allegations will not help.
—
No response, obviously.
I’m sure it also gave Epstein the appearance of a thin coating of respectability.
Today I was briefly looking at the opening of David Deutsch’s ‘the Beginning of Infinity’, before I went through my recent emails and found this section on JE.
From now onwards in the post literate age, plenty of people throughout the world when asked, ‘name a non-scientist intellectual of the 21st C’ or ‘name a 21st C intellectual from the English speaking world’ will mention JE as first on their list, or very high up. ( On the basis that he was seen with lots of brainy people.) Panic is justified, though not perhaps moral panic.
Ramesh 98% Asian intellectual, 2% Denisovan
I’m in full agreement with you, as I’ve said the same to others. Far too many people are being tarred and feathered simply because their names were mentioned, who had absolutely nothing to do with his depravities. I keep repeating that he, Epstein, had other businesses and that many of the names mentioned were affiliated with those businesses and not his child sex ring, but many of those I talk with do not want to listen.
Guilt by association is close cousin to the idea of collective inherited sin (e.g., “Christ killers”, “settler colonialists”) used to tar millions (rather than just individuals) with a much broader brush. I think one explanation for the Epstein panic is just that many people habitually use that kind of mental shortcut to simplify their thinking about who’s who on the moral landscape.
I take it a very rich individual had cleaners, perhaps paid kitchen staff, a guy at the door who also took his phone calls etc.
Some must have known what was transpiring in Epsteins orbit… or did they?
All this shows to me that life’s grubby hands are everywhere, rich or poor, famous or not.
The Kevin Bacon effect looms large and I see Lawrence Krauss has also written of his association with Epstein.
From what I have seen on social media, those attacking Pinker tend to be conservatives or progressives who dislike his defense of Enlightenment values and human progress. Many progressives hate that he criticizes Marxism and has good things to say about capitalism and Western civilization, so they are using this moment as an opportunity to tar his reputation. It’s very dishonest and vile.
I actually haven’t seen anyone attacking Pinker.
I’m mostly only following Epstein on a couple of sites about royal families.
The former Prince Andrew deserves all the criticism he’s getting.
The Internet is full of criticism. Just do this search.
Steven Pinker hasn’t done anything wrong. It’s harder to say the same about others, such as Lawrence Summers and Lawrence Krauss. Some people remained associated with Epstein long after his 2008 conviction. And yet they all say they had no idea what he was doing and were shocked when it came to light. At a minimum, some of them are guilty of lying.
Yes, but the question is WHO is lying. If you can tell us, let us know how. For example, what did Krauss do wrong vis-a-vis Epstein? Also, do you not think that it is true that some people might really have had no idea what was going on with Epstein–like those who never visited his island? You do not tell us how we are supposed to distinguish the liars from the truth tellers.
Also, should someone like Epstein–if he were convicted only that one time–be avoided FOREVER? Is there no sense that someone who was fired or committed an offense never be forgiven, and always be tarred? That seems unfair, although in the case of Epsteins subsequent behavior, yes, he should have become a pariah among all academics forever.
These issues are, of course, a bloody mess, and what are we supposed to do with people like Summers and Krauss? They did not break the law, and I have no idea, really, if they knew of crimes being committed but failed to report them, which I guess violates the law as well.
Sex offenders would be a no no for me. If it involved underage teenagers, that is a huge turnoff.
I’m not excusing anyone who knew about this and continued to associate with him.
If this makes me too judgmental for your site, unsubscribe me.
Agree. The recidivism rate for child molesters is high compared to other crimes. There is a support group for paedophiles that helps them stop, but one of the founders of it ended up back in court on paedophilia charges recently. I couldn’t trust anyone who abused children.
It’s sickening that Fergie took her daughters to meet Epstein. She needs go to prison too because she was disowning him in public and emailing in private, trying to get money from him.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8370860/
No one in this affair is being accused of having sex with pre-pubescent children, or otherwise molesting them. These women were all post-pubertal teenagers and young adults, some of whom were alleged to have been under the legal age in Florida which is 18, but most would have been of legal age in many states, all of Canada, and Europe where it is as low as 14. This is lechery, aka ephebophilia, but it is not p(a)edophilia. It is, of course, illegal wherever the law says it is.
When you are talking about “molestation”, recidivism, and support groups you are talking about predators against pre-pubescent children, not teenagers able to understand what they are being inveigled into. Sex, or sexual touching, with pre-pubescent children is a very different type of crime and a product of a sick brain as well.
A handy test of lechery is if the woman is younger than half his age + 7. That would mean a minimum age for Epstein’s girlfriends should have been 36.
I agree that her behaviour is sleazy but wonder what crime she has committed.
IANAL, but am quite sure that in liberal democracies one is very seldom legally required to rat on anyone; doing nothing does not by itself make you an accomplice, conspirator, criminal associate, or whatever. AIUI, even if you know for sure that someone is going to commit mass murder, you do not have a legal obligation to report that. Some licensed professionals are required to report if someone is likely to be a danger to themselves or others, but the rest of us are not.
Correct. Unless you’re a “mandatory reporter” you needn’t “rat” on the creep. You could be considered a rat for hanging around with the creep, though.
Unfortunately for Krauss, he already was involved in allegations of sexual harassment and related inappropriate conduct at Arizona State University. And now he has this association with Epstein.
Does this mean that Krauss must be a creep and a lecher like Epstein? No. But…Krauss does not seem to always exercise the best judgement in these matters. After the Arizona affair, you’d think he’d want to get as far away from someone like Epstein as possible.
Comment by Greg Mayer
I tried to read Joe Nocera’s article, and hit a paywall– turns out the Free Press ain’t free! 😉
GCM
Neither is the article you linked to in comment #6
Wasn’t Martin Nowak big on group selection? Not that that justifies taking pleasure in his being called to account here, but you know how people are.
The problem with applying the label “moral panic” to this is the implication that we should “move along, nothing to see here” when elements of the story raise concerning questions about certain individuals whose connections with Epstein weren’t previously known. It isn’t even easy to make a distinction between outright culpability (Maxwell, Andrew, and several other people who seemed to play a direct role in the sex trafficking operation) versus guilt-by-association. One reason for this is that more information has NOT been released than HAS been released, so we don’t know what role the culpable ones played, or how problematic the associations are for many other people
Also, there is a continuum of associations from more tenuous to more direct.
On the more indirect end of the continuum, there people are merely in the same professional orbit with people who knew Epstein more directly.
Moving along the continuum, many people repeatedly spent time with Epstein in contexts where evidence would have been plain that he had an obsession with girls and young women (pictures on the wall, massage tables, girls on his lap). This evidence revolted some people (Tina Brown, Melinda Gates, Joe Rogan [so he says]), so it is totally reasonable to ask of other people why they weren’t inclined to steer clear of Epstein.
More direct associations still, some people exchanged emails with Epstein that express really awful attitudes toward women, or seem to diminish the seriousness of the crimes Epstein was convicted for (Krauss, Attia, Chomsky, Summers, Nowak and others). Yes, expressing these attitudes isn’t a crime, nor is the chummy association with Epstein, but it feels totally reasonable to press these people for explanations, and to have more information revealed to see what further words or actions lie behind those words we have already seen.
Beyond all this, one thing I find really dispiriting about this is the sickening and sordid boys-club mentality that shines through in so much of what has been released. This article by a Times of London writer captures this point really well: https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/celebrity/article/i-studied-the-latest-epstein-files-as-a-woman-this-is-what-i-felt-3nnfd729c
If sunlight is a disinfectant, then this is one dank corner of our modern world that needs a full dose of the midday sun.
Yes, sunlight IS the best disinfectant and I hope something good comes from this. But calling it a moral panic -which you’d have a very difficult time persuading me that it is not- isn’t sweeping it under the rug. It’s an acknowledgment that it’s become something very ugly indeed. People’s lives are being ruined by mere association and everyone knows it. No one on this side of the Atlantic expects anyone over here to face justice for whatever truth, criminal or not, lies in those damned files. It’s not how we do things here.
It may be different elsewhere, but it is a full blown shitshow here. Yes, exposing the contents will help us see how depraved and entitled the wealthy are (in related news, heat is hot and water is wet), and that has value even if no further prosecutions happen. But there isn’t any sweeping of this garbage. One would need a very large land mover to shove this crap under anything.
Coleman Hughes just had an excellent interview with journalist Michael Tracey, who claims that the Epstein affair is a “moral panic” and vastly overblown.
This even extends to the “convicted pedophile” description of Epstein that we all believe…according to Tracey’s research the only conviction was of Epstein having consensual sex with a girl 1 day short of her 18th birthday, which was considered statutory rape in the state it occurred in (Florida).
Epstein was still a sleaze, and definitely had sex with other girls under 18, but if Tracey is correct then I may have to amend my opinion of this entire debacle.
That conviction was what Epstein pleaded to as the result of a really sweet plea deal that vacated dozens of charges, concealed the identity of co-conspirators, withheld the terms of the deal from the victims, and led to a period of house arrest during which there is good evidence that Epstein carried on his sexpest ways with underage females. https://web.archive.org/web/20181128153832/https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html. Suggestions that this issue is “overblown” are crazy.
The prosecution had its chance. If it had thought it had him dead to rights on the consensual paid sex with the woman who was 17 years + 364 days old at the time, plus all the other victims it claimed he committed crimes against too, it didn’t have to make a plea offer. It could have gone to trial, proved its case to a jury, and sent him away for decades. It didn’t do that, so all that other stuff remains rumours and gossip.
I think this gives those prosecutors too much credit.
Or maybe they were quite diligent in evaluating the bribes-and-threats offered them by Epstein and his pals. Maybe someone involved will leak and then we’ll have a better idea of what actually happened.
Through my contacts in theatre I know of a woman playwright whose upcoming production of her new play was abruptly and very publicly canceled by a regional theater because of her ‘association’ with Epstein. This association, it turns out, was that her ex-husband of ten years (apparently a professor at a prestigious university) knew him and invited him to their large wedding. She had no other associations. So real tangible consequences to this scandal fall on a woman in the arts while powerful men in politics who had much more close association seemingly remain unscathed?
Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, and Eric Weinstein all said that they disliked Jeffrey Epstein the moment they met him.
Lawrence Krauss maintained a close relationship with Epstein for more than a decade, even years after Epstein’s first conviction, and called him a “friend”.
So should we demonize Krauss for that? How do we know he knew about Epstein’s later transgressions? In other words, how, according to you, are we supposed to regard Krauss based on the stuff you adduce above?
I don’t believe Lawrence Krauss didn’t see what Pinker, Harris, and Weinstein saw right away.
Google AI:
In a 2011 Daily Beast article, Krauss defended Epstein by stating, “Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed”. He claimed that as a scientist, his “empirical evidence” showed women aged 19 to 23, and he would believe Epstein over accusers.
In 2011 Epstein was 58.
Didn’t Krauss suspect Epstein might have been abusing those young women? Maybe not, but I don’t find it credible.
Before we speculate on what Krauss ought to have suspected, shouldn’t you offer us a definition of what “abuse” is, in the context of women who are between 19 and 23 years old?
Did he tie them down in his dungeon and have nonconsensual sex with them (aka rape), threatening murder if they went to the police? Or did he fat-shame them?
Listen to the interview to Arick Fudali—he represents 11 survivors of Jeffrey Epstein—by Michael Moynihan. (It’s on YouTube.)
But really, if you met a guy in his 50s always surrounded by women 30 or 40 years younger, wouldn’t you feel extremely creeped out?
I’m not happy that you made me look up a video with an hour of two talking heads to find out what you meant by “abuse”, a word you used without definition and ought to have had the courtesy to define yourself. It was incumbent on you to show how the “abuse” was illegal, …you know, an actual crime. Not just sleazy and lecherous. That won’t cut it if we’re going to accuse his living contacts of being guilty of crimes by association. That word, guilt, actually means something.
The video transcript mentions “abuse” 14 times and not once is “abuse” as used by the lawyer guy ever defined. All I know is that Epstein had frequent sex with a lot of young women who must have gotten something out of it. Good on him! Both guys in the video seem envious, an evil emotion that motivates people to do terrible things. Don’t you think that fact that the lawyer represents 11 women who are trying to get money out of Epstein’s estate is relevant here?
This is what we mean by a moral panic. We know Epstein and everyone connected with him are terrible people but deep down we also know that probably no one currently alive did anything illegal except maybe paying for sex. So if no one among his contacts is going to go to jail, we at least have to get frantically indignant about it all and ruin as many reputations as we can, since we won’t get the moral satisfaction of seeing them rot in prison.
I once met Steven Pinker. Am I thereby “connected” with Epstein now?
There is something about this scandal that evoked distant memories of high school, where I remember arrogant 16 year old girls bragging about their sexual relationships and cocaine use with rich forty-something men. Were all the Epstein victims forced into sexual slavery, or did some find it an acceptable trade-off like those stupid girls at my high school? Of course their young age meant they were not legally capable of consent, so Epstein deserved to be put in prison. I just wonder though how many others like him are out there, finding willing underage girls without suffering legal consequences.
I was attracted to older women in my youth – more and better sex, and more interesting.
Quite a number of those guilty of some kind of association with Epstein are also associated with…Harvard. So, we can infer that one way to avoid association with Epstein is to steer clear of Harvard. I myself have managed to steer clear of Harvard for many decades, and have thus minimized the danger of any suspected association with the evil Eps.
Being a former defense atty I have my own ideas about what is un/acceptable in humans. We have a justice system for judgement and consequences.
I despise moral panics and this is their golden age. This scandal being the peak.
I’m with Michael Tracy on this one but every time I try to push back against the mania I get in …. so much trouble. My scandal file is already overloaded as a TERF and a Zionist. 🙂
D.A.
NYC
Late to this one. The key element is that if I don’t have any association with Epstein, I’m morally superior to those fancy accomplished wealthy people who knew him or that he, um, photobombed. If you feel like you don’t got a pot to piss in, a window to throw it out of, and a really short publication list, a feeling of moral superiority is a rich dish.
Mandatory Moral Panic caution — I loathe Epstein and sex party cronies. Punish them, but not those who tangentially wandered through his associations. Will anyone get in trouble for complaining that pedophilia properly defined is an adult attraction to prepubescent children — and that, strictly speaking, Epstein can’t be described as a pedophile? In popular usage the terms — pedophilia/pedophile — are now misapplied to sexual interactions of adults with anyone under the age of consent. It grates on me. There are other terns for sex and age circumstances: Ephebophilia as attraction to and preference for teenage partners ages 15–19, and Hebephilia for a bit younger; say, 11-14, just entering puberty. That might be splitting it fine, but it makes difference. And those young teens can be quite damaged by the sexual circumstances. But it bothers me to hear this dirty sleaze bag Epstein mislabeled. Maybe it’s because I’ve had to hear a few verified stories (fortunately, just a few!) from women about what happened to them when they were 7 or 8 or 10 and that’s order (or two) magnitude of difference in crime.
Repeat Mandatory Moral Panic caution — I loathe Epstein and sex party cronies and I’m sufficiently obscure to have never known his associates or, for that matter, anyone publicly named in the files.
Pinker has nothing to apologise for. He did nothing wrong, unlike Mandelson, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and his sleazy wife or any of the others who continued to support Epstein after it was obvious that he was a paedophile.
Doing linguistic analysis or giving facts about DNA are not defending a criminal, they are supporting the justice system and keeping it honest.
Even the most heinous criminals deserve a decent defence because we cannot pick and choose who gets a defence. Expert witnesses help ensure a trial is fair and above board. If we allow sloppy evidence in court, then it can lead to appeals or mistrials and that helps no one and stresses out families and victims even more or, in the worst case scenario, it can put dangerous people back on the streets.
I can imagine that, with hindsight, Pinker may regret what happened, but that doesn’t mean he should apologise for something he didn’t know about at the time.
We can all have the wool pulled over our eyes. I think Epstein was a master manipulator and many decent people were probably taken in by him. It sounds like Pinker was one of the people who was duped by Epstein, so he has nothing to apologise for.
The ones who knew about it and still stayed friends with Epstein at the ones who should be apologising, and I hope they do it from behind prison bars.
I’m sure Mandelson will be prosecuted, and I hope that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is too.
I have problems with people who “hope” other people will be prosecuted and imprisoned for what their detractors assume they have done. The whole point of a criminal investigation is to determine if a crime has been committed and if so by whom. Then you make a decision to prosecute: do you have enough evidence to have a reasonable likelihood of conviction and is the prosecution in the public interest? Ordinary laypeople who weren’t eyewitnesses have no idea if these two bars can be cleared in any given case, no matter what you think you know and how hungry you are for punishment.
To say you hope someone will be prosecuted means you hope that someone has committed a crime, which means you hope there was a victim of that crime. Which seems rather cruel, to hope that some human being was a victim of crime just so the person you vilify can be prosecuted. Of course if you just know someone is guilty, all it means is that you can’t sit on the jury. It doesn’t amount to one iota of anything else of significance. Literally no one cares what you think you know.
I would prefer to say that I hope an investigation of Mandelson and M-W turns up nothing, because that would mean there were no victims, at least not of acts that can be considered crimes, and we should be joyful for the non-victims over that. Every day I give thanks that no one is going to be prosecuted for breaking into my house and stealing my bicycle, much as I’m sure there are people out there who richly deserve to be.
It is not necessary to have a victim to be found guilty of a crime.
Mandelson will be prosecuted for misconduct in public office, at least. If he isn’t then there’s no justice. I don’t ‘hope’ he has committed a crime, his own emails show him committing a crime and passing on sensitive government information to Epstein. The criminal investigation is looking at the details as there may be more things he has done. He has always thought himself above the law. Even if he isn’t prosecuted, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t committed a crime, it will just mean that he hasn’t been convicted of one.
The only thing in doubt is whether he will take Starmer down with him.
“Literally no one cares what you think you know.” Except you.
The ‘moral panic’ is newsworthy and deflects more intense investigation into the influence peddling that apparently went on.
Yes, we should be concerned about the alleged victims and those directly involved. I am happy for the legal processes to engage.
But how many senior politicians and business people used or were used by Epstein’s patronage exchange?
It is amusing to see PZ Myers trying to make hay out of all this, given his past alleged indiscretions. He also notably defended a self-confessed child rapist who used to frequently post on his website.
I think some context is missing. Remember Pizzagate? From what I hear from maga friends and relatives, Qanon still has a large portion of Trump supporters convinced that “deep state” Democrats and immigrants are involved in sex trafficking and murder in order to harvest “adrenochrome”. They were big supporters of the Sound of Freedom movie. Trump to them is the god ordained warrior against the evil pedo supporting libs. I’m sure his appearances in The Files is validation to the that he has been working under cover for years in his fight.
I think we are now seeing many on the left finding out the effectiveness of labeling anyone you disagree with as a pedo or pedo protector, whether true or not.
Unfortunately what will result is a lot of collateral damage and the resulting delegitimization of the necessary fight against the real problem of sexual abuse and trafficking as the actual criminals laugh all the way back to their “islands”.
I just had a long, useless debate with a pro-Putin account who was adamant the Epstein Files somehow vindicate the Pizzagate conspiracy theory… Madness.
As with Kevin Bacon, just about everybody must be within six degrees of separation from Epstein.