I’m starting this with the revelation (covered extensively on various sites) that Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics’ founding member (Lee Smolin) had ties to Jeffrey Epstein (convicted sex offender and very wealthy man). It was the second part of this posting, the Noam Chomsky portion that proved a bit of a challenge for me. Chomsky’s ideas helped me to see the world differently. I never studies his work formally or met the man. Most recently, I posted this announcement “CHOM5KY vs CHOMSKY, a VR (virtual reality) conversation about AI, opens in Montreal (Canada) from Sept 6 – Oct. 1, 2023,” see my August 14, 2023 posting. There’s also a rather old (1992) National Film Board of Canada documentary about his work.”Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media.” It seems I’m not the only Canadian taken with Chomsky’s work.
Onto the stories.
Wisdom from our elders
“Be careful who you’re friends with” was a piece of advice my parents reiterated occasionally and in various forms throughout my childhood. That piece of advice came back to me in light of how many people had contact with Epstein and oftentimes, far more contact than they had admitted to prior to the document release.
Epstein had an extraordinary circle of contacts. Lee Smolin (Wikipedia entry), physicist and founding member of Canada’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) was one in Epstein’s collection of scientists among other international luminaries such as the previously mentioned, Noam Chomsky.
A February 12, 2026 article by Zach Dubinsky, Aloysius Wong, and Jordan Pearson (with files from Naël Shiab and Andrew Ryan) for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) news online website details Smolin’s current predicament, Note: Links have been removed,
A highly regarded theoretical physicist is stepping away from the Ontario institute he helped found, after his ties to the late American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in recently released files.
Lee Smolin, an American Canadian professor of physics and philosophy, has “agreed to pause his working relationship” with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., according to an email on Thursday [February 12, 2026] from Perimeter’s executive director, Marcela Carena.
Smolin was a founding faculty member of the independent research centre, which is known around the world for pioneering work in quantum theory and got much of its initial funding from BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis.
Smolin was working at the Perimeter Institute part time and also has academic appointments at the University of Waterloo and University of Toronto.
His correspondence with Epstein was part of more than three million new pages of files released by the U.S. Department of Justice on Jan. 30 [2026].
Nothing CBC News has seen suggests Smolin did anything illegal or participated in any of Epstein’s illicit activities, and appearing in the files is not an indication in itself of any wrongdoing. However, questions have emerged after the documents revealed his relationship with the financier continued for years after Epstein’s conviction for sex offences.
The files show that Smolin continued to correspond with Epstein, and the two made repeated efforts to talk by phone and meet up, until at least 2013 [emphases mine] — five years after the latter pleaded guilty in Florida to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor and another criminal count. The paper trail appears to contradict Smolin’s own account of his relationship with Epstein.
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Files appear to belie Smolin’s account
On Thursday [February 12, 2026] afternoon, in response to questions from CBC News, Perimeter Institute executive director Marcela Carena said in an email, “At Perimeter’s request, Prof. Smolin has agreed to pause his working relationship with us as we undertake a careful review of the situation, and we will address this matter accordingly.”
Smolin is one of many accomplished scientists who received research grants from Epstein over the years. He told the Globe and Mail in November 2025 that the funding ran from around 1999 to 2001, five years before Epstein was first criminally charged.
He also reportedly told the Globe he could not recall the exact date of their last communication, but mentioned crossing paths with him at a TED conference in 2003.
Previously, Smolin told the Verge in 2019 that he had “not seen Mr. Epstein since a scientific conference in 2007, and I’ve had no contact with him since 2008″ — the year Epstein pleaded guilty to two sex crimes [emphasis mine]. Earlier this week, he told the Waterloo Record, “My entire relationship with Epstein preceded my moving to Canada and beginning my position with pi [Perimeter Institute] in 2001.”
The latest Epstein files appear to contradict these timelines, however, with emails found by CBC News suggesting that contact between Epstein and Smolin lasted until at least 2013.
Smolin calls Epstein a friend in messages
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Smolin wrote a message in Epstein’s 50th birthday book that included a photo of himself and another with his colleagues, as well as some diagrams he has said were part of his research at the time. The book became a hot topic last year when it was revealed that it appeared to include a suggestive message from Donald Trump.
Smolin is not the only academic to get caught up in the Epstein scandals.
Epstein & academics
Joi Ito\s story is fascinating as one of the earliest in the world of academe to be tainted by his association with Jeffrey Epstein. Ito, then director of MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab issued an apology for his association with Epstein.From Ito’s August 15, 2019 posting on https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/my-apology-regarding-jeffrey-epstein/.
I’m sure that most, if not all of you, have seen recent news stories about Jeffrey Epstein, and I owe it to you to address my prior affiliation with him.
I met Epstein in 2013 at a conference through a trusted business friend and, in my fundraising efforts for MIT Media Lab, I invited him to the Lab and visited several of his residences. I want you to know that in all of my interactions with Epstein, I was never involved in, never heard him talk about, and never saw any evidence of the horrific acts that he was accused of.
That said, I take full responsibility for my error in judgment. I am deeply sorry to the survivors, to the Media Lab, and to the MIT community for bringing such a person into our network.
Regrettably, over the years, the Lab has received money through some of the foundations that he controlled. I knew about these gifts and these funds were received with my permission. I also allowed him to invest in several of my funds which invest in tech startup companies outside of MIT.
I vow to raise an amount equivalent to the donations the Media Lab received from Epstein and will direct those funds to non-profits that focus on supporting survivors of trafficking. I will also return the money that Epstein has invested in my investment funds.
Again, I apologize to you, my friends and colleagues, and most importantly to the survivors.
If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me directly.
– Joi
In September 2019, Ito resigned from his position as director of MIT’s Media Lab. By the way, Mr. Ito is doing just fine. These days he’s the president of Chiba Institute of Technology. You can find out more about Ito and about the Epstein entanglement (which proved to be quite extensive) in Ito’s Wikipedia entry.
Money makes the academic world go around
Alan Blinder’s February 16, 2026 article for the New York Times “Epstein’s Ties With Academics Show the Seedy Side of College Fund-Raising”
Their buildings can be architectural wonders. The discoveries made in their laboratories can be spellbinding and lifesaving.
But America’s colleges and universities are chronically searching for money, a reality that brought academic leaders and researchers into both Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit and his inbox. The schools had the prestige to lend him legitimacy. Mr. Epstein had the money to bankroll projects.
It worked well for some, until it didn’t.
Mr. Epstein, who in 2019 died by suicide in the jail where he was being held on sex trafficking charges, gave money, or simply dangled the prospect of it, before people on a range of campuses, including Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford, Bard College and Columbia.
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Many academics whose names appear within the Epstein files say they turned to him only because of his money and the possibility that it could underwrite college budgets and research efforts — even if their exchanges came after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor.
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Mr. Epstein’s motives for connecting with college professors and presidents were not always clear [emphasis mine]. He gathered celebrities and power brokers into his network; a Harvard professor who benefited from the Epstein largess once noted that the financier also collected scientists [emphasis mine].
Mr. Epstein rarely followed through with the multimillion-dollar contributions [emphasis mine] he suggested were on offer, but he drew people in and appeared attentive to academia’s unending quest to pay its bills. Private philanthropy has long been an essential part of higher education’s business model, and some college presidents say they spend at least a quarter of their time fund-raising.
Much of the money that is collected goes toward endowments. Although the most recent federal data shows American colleges and universities collectively have more than $927 billion across their endowments, many of those funds have severe restrictions, limiting how they may be used and leaving academia more financially squeezed than the headline figure suggests. That is one reason researchers jockey ferociously for grant money and other gifts.
But reliance on private money, industry officials say, leaves schools vulnerable to soliciting or accepting contributions from sources that might be unsavory.
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Mr. Botstein [Leon Botstein, president, Bard College] said in 2023 that Mr. Epstein “enjoyed humiliating and dangling prospects” and had “absolutely strung me along.” Others have wondered whether he luxuriated in conversations with some of the world’s brightest minds. Many also believe that Mr. Epstein sought to leverage academia’s reputation to clean up his own. [emphases mine]
For example, a Harvard professor, whose program received millions from Mr. Epstein, greenlit proposals made by the financier’s publicist to feature Mr. Epstein on a university website. In a report Harvard issued in 2020, the university said the requests “appeared to be part of a larger effort to rehabilitate” Mr. Epstein’s image. (The university also noted that Mr. Epstein’s foundation’s website overstated its gifts to Harvard by tens of millions of dollars.)
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Crime, complicity, and guilt (Epstein and Chomsky)
It was shock and disillusionment (for me and, I imagine, others) that Noam Chomsky had become associated with Jeffrey Epstein in any fashion whatsoever. In a February 11, 2026 article by the Associated Press and found on the US broadcast network’s NBC news site, Valeria Chomsky (wife) responds to the outcry, Note:A link has been removed,
Noam Chomsky’s wife is acknowledging “serious errors in judgment” in the wake of new revelations about the couple’s ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. Valeria Chomsky also says she and her husband never witnessed any inappropriate behavior.
“Noam and I recognize the gravity of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and the profound suffering of his victims,” Valeria Chomsky wrote in a statement she shared this week with The Associated Press. “Nothing in this statement is intended to minimize that suffering, and we express our unrestricted solidarity with the victims.”
The friendship between Epstein and Noam Chomsky, the influential activist and pioneering linguist, has been known for several years. But the latest release of documents by the Justice Department show a more extensive relationship than previously reported on and includes a memo suggesting that Chomsky was advising Epstein on how to rehabilitate his public image.
Admirers of Chomsky, a longtime critic of the U.S. political and media establishment, have expressed revulsion. Vijay Prashad, who has written books on Cuba and the Middle East with Chomsky, released a letter last week saying he was “disgusted by Epstein’s pedophilia, and so by Noam’s friendship with him.”
In her public statement, Valeria Chomsky notes that she was speaking for herself and for her husband, who is 97 and “confronting significant health challenges” since he suffered a stroke in 2023. She writes that they were naive and uninformed, and cites Noam Chomsky’s “overly trusting nature” as a reason for their “serious errors in judgment.”
According to Valeria Chomsky, the two first met Epstein in 2015, and were unaware at the time of his 2008 jail term for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl. By 2015, the accusations against Epstein had been the subject of hundreds of news articles, many of which detailed allegations that he had paid dozens of underage girls for sex.
“When we were introduced to Epstein, he presented himself as a philanthropist supporting science and a financial expert,” she wrote. “By presenting himself this way, Epstein gained Noam’s attention, and they began corresponding. Unknowingly, we opened a door to a Trojan horse.”
Valeria Chomsky goes on to recall that “Epstein began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities for interesting discussions in areas Noam has been working on extensively. We regret that we did not perceive this as a strategy to ensnare us and to try to undermine the causes Noam stands for.”
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Valeria Chomsky’s portrayal of the relationship her now ailing husband had with Epstein allows the reader to sympathize and, perhaps, empathize with Noam Chomsky. It’s hard no to. Who hasn’t make an error in judgment? Trusted the wrong person? Parental advice to the contrary.
One last note about Valeria Chomsky’s response, it looks to me as if she’s putting most of the blame on onto her husband. (You can read the full text of Valeria Chomksy’s February 7, 2026 apology here in this PDF on starscholar.org. It’s subtle and consistent throughout. In her version, Noam Chomsky is the one actively emailing with Epstein; all she does is go to lunch and attend some events with them.)
In any event, the problem is that Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted sex offender by the time Noam Chomsky met him and it stretches credulity a little bit that they were wholly unaware but one can give them the benefit of the doubt. To give some idea of why it’s a little hard to believe, here’s more from Noam Chomsky’s Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
Avram Noam Chomsky[a] (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism [emphasis mine]. Sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics”,[b] Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [emphasis mine]. Among the most cited living authors, Chomsky has written more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, and politics [emphasis mine]. In addition to his work in linguistics, since the 1960s, Chomsky has been an influential voice on the American left as a consistent critic [emphasis mine] of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and corporate influence on political institutions and the media [emphasis mine].
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Did Chomsky and his wife miss reading about Joi Ito, a colleague at MIT? Possibly, I too sometimes miss the obvious. It’s what comes later that is disturbing.
Jonathan de Noche / reddit.com wrote a February 14, 2026 article for filmsforaction.org that explores and dissects the situation, “The Patriarch in Winter: Grief, Complicity, and the Unraveling of Noam Chomsky’s Final Years.” First, de Noche illustrates Chomsky’s philosophy,
In Pirates and Emperors, Noam Chomsky retells the story from St. Augustine’s City of God in which a pirate, captured by Alexander the Great, is asked how he dares to molest the sea. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replies. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an Emperor.”
For nearly half a century, that parable anchored one of Chomsky’s central moral arguments: that the crimes of the powerful often mirror, in moral structure, the crimes of the marginal, but are vastly greater in scale, and that prestige, scale, and institutional cover render the former invisible while the latter are prosecuted with theatrical outrage. The argument applies to state terrorism, imperial war, capitalist exploitation and ecocide.
Chomsky has insisted, repeatedly, that most people in the Global North are participants in these systems—that our friendships, professional alliances, tax payments, consumption patterns, acceptance and admiration for wealthy elites and celebrities make us complicit in violence that dwarfs, in scope, the intimate horror of any individual predator.
This means that Chomsky’s logic of complicity applies not only to the powerful but also to the householder—the ordinary participant in a materialistic society, who is not immune to the lure of status, comfort, and access. That is the deeper vulnerability of someone like Chomsky: not lack of moral backbone, but the very ordinariness of his attachments. His life was not that of a renunciant monk but of a householder embedded in the “dusty life” of family, wife, children, academic prestige, investments, middle‑class comfort, social and other entanglements, which made him susceptible to the very gifts Epstein could offer— especially, as we will see, when he married a socially ambitious much younger woman at 85.
The recent release of millions of pages of Epstein documents by the U.S. Department of Justice has exposed a relationship between Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein far more intimate, sustained, and materially entangled than anyone had previously acknowledged.
The revelations are damning. But if we accept Chomsky’s own argument about the diffuse complicity that sustains imperial violence, capitalist exploitation, and environmental destruction—if we accept that most of us maintain cordial relationships with people embedded in systems that kill and cause suffering on a vastly larger scale—then the great moral outrage clustering around one elderly intellectual’s friendship with a charming predatory financier begins to look less like a principled reckoning and more like the phenomenon he spent his life describing: selective indignation that focuses on the sexualized crimes of the elite, while the more legitimized structural, legal, and economic crimes they commit or enable remains largely invisible.
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The intensity of outrage directed at Epstein’s sexual predation operates within a familiar pattern: the crimes that are socially and politically sanctioned—imperial war, neoliberal dispossession, financialized exploitation, ecocide—are treated as nearly inevitable, while the crimes that are intimate and sexualized are treated as scandalous betrayals. The result is a pattern Chomsky himself described in Pirates and Emperors: the “putrid” press treatment of predators like Epstein becomes the scandal, while the far larger systems of killing and exploitation they sit within remain largely unchallenged as structures of everyday life.
That does not excuse Chomsky’s behavior. It complicates the terms of judgment. And it makes the story that follows—of grief, aging, mortality, manipulation, and a second wife who reshaped every dimension of Chomsky’s late life—all the more important to tell clearly.
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de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article lays the foundation for a story that takes a few twists and turns,
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For six decades, the facts of Chomsky’s private life were, by the standards of an upper middle class professor, monotonously virtuous. He wore simple clothes, lived modestly, gave away book royalties, answered anybody’s e-mails, gave countless interviews, talks, and Q&As, and shared every dimension of his existence with Carol Chomsky, his partner since childhood and his wife since 1949. He was a workaholic who had to be reminded to eat. His authority derived not only from revolutionary linguistics and relentless political dissent but from a perceived incorruptibility—an intellectual life organized around the exposure of power’s lies, not the enjoyment of its comforts.
Carol died of cancer on December 19, 2008. She was 78; Noam was 80. Those close to the couple noted an immediate change. Norman Finkelstein, a longtime friend, stopped spending time with Chomsky after Carol’s death, saying “things felt different.” The filmmaker Michel Gondry captured a moment in which the mere mention of Carol’s name caused Chomsky to visibly unravel on camera. Researchers on late‑life spousal bereavement describe what happened to him in clinical terms: identity disruption, social withdrawal, heightened vulnerability to outside influence—especially when the survivor lacks strong alternative support networks.
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Stray thought: Was Carol perhaps important to Chomsky’s intellectual work in a way that de Noche’s article doesn’t suggest? Some partnerships are more than the sum parts of the two people; the difference after the marriage to Valeria is striking. That said, trying to analyze people’s relationships can be complex and my stray thought is meant to be additive rather than a contradiction of de Noche’s perspective on the first and second marriages.
Now for Valeria’s entrance and the twist, from de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article,
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Five years after Carol’s death, at 85, Chomsky married Valeria Wasserman, a 50-year-old Brazilian woman (35 years his junior). Where Carol had been the household’s practical anchor—fixing cars, managing schedules, pulling Noam away from conversations he was too generous to end—Valeria was socially ambitious, enthusiastic about elite company, and drawn to the world of status, luxury, and access that Chomsky’s politics had long held in contempt.
It’s reasonable to infer that providing and indulging in this lifestyle was something that Chomsky knew was the “price” that had to be paid in exchange for what was a kind of social and emotional luxury as a very elderly man nearing death—a younger partner to love, an “unexpected, wondrous gift that fell into my arms,” as he called her, who offered not just companionship that would lift him from his grief, but visibility, status, and a life far more expansive than the modest routine he had long inhabited.
In interviews from this period he put it bluntly: “life without love is a pretty empty affair,” and by then “love” meant precisely this late‑life marriage, i.e. romantic love. That conviction was a major motive behind the choices that followed.
There is even a phallic joke from Epstein—“At your age, if anything sticks up, be proud,” to which Chomsky replies, “Ouch,” and Epstein answers, “Good, it still has feelings as well”—explicitly about Chomsky’s penis. In the context of a man in his late 80s with a much younger wife, and a relationship with Epstein built around travel, luxury, and stimulation, it is hard not to hear this as part of a pattern in which Epstein offers not only money and access but a teasing reassurance of virility and appeal, the kind of compensatory “luxury” that helps sustain a late‑life relationship shaped by structural sexual asymmetry.
In this arrangement, all three parties—Chomsky, Valeria, and Epstein—were adding value to gain value from the others: Chomsky offered prestige, financial support and intellectual heft, Valeria offered the company, intimacy, and social‑life presence of a younger woman, and Epstein offered money, charm, luxury, and elite connection. Each in turn was willing to give up something they otherwise might have guarded: for Chomsky, the more modest, relatively self‑contained life he had long inhabited; for Valeria, the possibility of a younger, lower‑status partner; for Epstein, the time and resources required to sustain a relationship that lent his image a veneer of intellectual legitimacy.
Over time, this arrangement reshaped the household’s emotional and financial landscape. The resulting change was striking and rapid. The emails released in January 2026 make clear that it was Valeria, far more than Noam, who drove the deepening relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. She described Epstein as “our best friend. I mean ‘the’ one.” She wrote to him: “You are a hero, Jeffrey!!!” She was the one who forwarded private family correspondence to Epstein, who primarily solicited his advice on financial and legal matters, and who treated him as a personal consigliere on questions ranging from trust restructuring to social connections.
The luxury gifts flowed through Valeria’s orbit: cashmere sweaters, Carnegie Deli hampers, private car services, stays in Epstein’s Manhattan and Paris apartments, expensive hotels, lunches at his New Mexico ranch. In a 2016 email, Chomsky himself wrote that “Valeria is always eager about New York” and that he was “genuinely fantasizing about the Caribbean island”. For a man who had spent his life in campus offices and far more modest homes, this was a different world entirely, and it was Valeria who had opened the door to it.
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Another twist, from de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article,
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The most consequential dimension of Valeria’s influence was financial. Chomsky and Carol had established trusts for their three children and grandchildren, structured on the assumption that Carol would outlive Noam. When that assumption proved wrong and Noam remarried, the family’s financial architecture became a source of escalating conflict.
Chomsky’s children noticed what they called a “dramatic and unexplainable” increase in his spending after the 2014 marriage. “This unexpected outflow is placing your financial future at risk,” they warned. They objected strenuously to Valeria and Noam’s plan to place Epstein’s personal accountant, Richard Kahn—who would later be named co‑executor of Epstein’s own estate and bequeathed $25 million in Epstein’s will—on the board of the Chomsky family trust. Kahn was not just a financial advisor; he was Epstein’s gatekeeper, and his placement on the trust’s board concentrated Epstein‑aligned control over the Chomsky estate.
In July 2017, the three children wrote a joint letter begging for a mediated meeting. Chomsky, now in his late eighties and emotionally dependent on Valeria, sided with his wife. He characterized his children as caring more about money than his quality of life, arguing that they didn’t need the money. The dispute was, he wrote, a “painful cloud that I never would have imagined would darken my late years.”
Valeria went further, dismissing the children’s warnings as “abusive and unacceptable” and accusing them of behaving “like Nazis”—a remark that, from the wife of a Jewish intellectual whose life’s work was shaped by the legacy of fascism, underscores how completely her own worldview had come to dominate the household.
Socially ambitious and financially savvy, Valeria had become the main conduit between the Chomsky family and Epstein’s financial and legal team, overseeing the restructuring of trusts and inheritance arrangements that increasingly favored her.
Throughout this rupture, Valeria and Noam forwarded private family correspondence to Epstein, who advised them at every turn. In one of his last known messages on the subject, Epstein wrote: “I wanted the release to acknowledge that they are aware that you’ve decided to leave your entire estate to Valeria.” By the time the dispute was resolved, the family trusts had been restructured to Valeria’s decisive advantage, and Chomsky’s children had been marginalized from the financial arrangements their mother had helped to build.
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de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article documents still another twist, which takes place just before a turn,
Perhaps nothing reveals Valeria’s priorities more starkly than her attempt, in November 2016, to use Epstein as a conduit to Donald Trump. Days after Trump’s election, Epstein emailed Valeria with the message: “we called it.” She replied affirmatively, claiming she had predicted Trump’s rise before the primaries. Then she reminded Epstein that he had previously asked whom she would like Noam to speak with. “Here is a guy!” she wrote. “Can you arrange it? He could make good use of Noam’s advices.”
Nothing in the public record suggests Valeria ever asked Chomsky whether he actually wanted to meet Trump. Chomsky is a man who had spent decades arguing that “speaking truth to power makes no sense” because “the powerful already know the truth”. Valeria treated Epstein as a broker of access and visibility, regardless of whether any of it aligned with the politics her husband had spent a lifetime articulating. What mattered to her was the connection itself.
Now for the turn and this is where protestations of innocence become impossible to believe, from de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article,
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On February 23, 2019—weeks after the Miami Herald published Julie Brown’s exposé documenting at least 36 allegations of Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls—Epstein wrote to Chomsky asking for advice on managing his “putrid” press coverage. When Chomsky replied he condemned “the horrible way in which you are being treated by the press and society” and advised Epstein to ignore the coverage, drawing an analogy to his own experience enduring “hysterical accusations.” He then added: “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.”
While the ‘presumption of guilt’ perspective certainly described widespread tendencies within the MeToo movement, Chomsky failed to apply the ‘presumption of uncertainty’—the moral standard that the law tries to achieve when it balances the presumption of innocence against the natural human bias toward presumption of guilt.
The bias toward siding with the accused in a private communication between friends is, of course, very common. What percentage of people wouldn’t privately tell a friend under such fire things like “I’m sorry you’re going through this; it’s better if you do X (e.g. just ignore it)”? Especially if that friend charmed them with their personality and was treating them to dinners, travel, fancy hotels and elite access. Chomsky’s advice is morally troubling not because it is uniquely immoral but because it is a particularly visible instance of a reflex many of us share—and one that becomes a scandal only when the person on the receiving end is a world‑famous critic of power.
Here, Chomsky’s logic of complicity reasserts itself, and simple condemnation becomes insufficient.
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This disparity shows that what they [corporate media outlets] object to is less his relationship with Epstein than his long‑standing political critique of state power, empire, and plutocracy, and that the Epstein episode is being weaponized to undermine his intellectual authority rather than to grapple honestly with the moral complexity of the case.
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None of the above unambiguously erases Chomsky’s responsibility. But his late‑life choices cannot be understood without acknowledging the context of vulnerability in which they were made. To recap, he was widowed at 80 after a 60‑year marriage to his childhood companion, then remarried at 85 (nearing death) to a much younger woman who became his sole source of companionship, social life, and emotional support. Research on bereaved older adults consistently shows that such circumstances increase susceptibility to isolation, dependence, and the risk of undue influence.
Chomsky’s vulnerability was not only emotional and social but also material. He was not a renunciant monk who had renounced worldly comforts, but a householder whose life still depended on the very things Epstein could enhance—material comforts, access, and social stimulation, especially at death’s door. That made him more susceptible to manipulation and self‑indulgence, but it also makes his moral failure more recognizable, because it is the failure of the ordinary participant in a materialistic society, not the saint who falls from grace.
Valeria (exculpating herself) has invoked this framework, describing Epstein as a “Trojan horse” who “ensnared” them through flattery, intellectual access, and financial‑lifestyle incentives. In elder‑care law, undue‑influence doctrine treats as potentially exploitative any arrangement in which an older person—even one not fully incapacitated—is steered into decisions that primarily benefit a manipulative confidant. The installation of Epstein’s accountant on the family trust, the marginalization of Chomsky’s children, and the redirection of the entire estate to Valeria look, by that standard, less like a fair family arrangement than a pattern of targeted influence on a vulnerable elder.
But vulnerability is not necessarily exculpation. Commentaries and interviews from this period confirm that Chomsky remained linguistically and politically sharp well into his nineties—still publishing, still debating, still capable of correcting Epstein’s sloppy political reasoning in emails and of arguing in detail over estate arrangements with his children. His vulnerability was emotional and social—grief, loneliness, mortality salience, dependence on Valeria—not primarily cognitive. He seemed to have retained enough agency to recognize what Epstein was and to withdraw—but did not. …
So, there’s an expose of Epstein that Chomsky and his wife fail to read? How did they miss information about the 2008 conviction?
I recommend reading de Noche’s February 14, 2026 article in its entirety. His conclusion is a little different than mine. He suggests that Chomsky’s ‘lapse’ is a “… jarring, morally discordant coda … ,” not something that should lead to discounting his life’s work while still holding Chomsky accountable for his failings.
For me, this ‘episode’ casts a shadow on Noam Chomsky’s work and legacy but I do agree with de Noche that this moral failing doesn’t entirely negate his life’s work. Although, getting back to Carol, maybe she deserves a little more credit for Noam’s intellectual output than she has received.
Tell Me What Company You Keep, and I Will Tell You What You Are
“Tell Me What Company You Keep, and I Will Tell You What You Are” could be considered a corollary, the consequence as it were, to the hint in the warning “Be careful who you’re friends with.”
It appears that Lee Smolin, Noam Chomsky, and many, many others in the academic and scientific communities either didn’t know or forgot any words of wisdom regarding friends and the company you keep. Perhaps they didn’t care; Jessica Kutz’s February 24, 2026 The 19th article published on Salon.com offers some eye-opening quotes from scientists in the Epstein files, Note: Links have been removed,
In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned to gather for an exclusive retreat at a luxury farm in the woods of Connecticut. The guests had been hand-picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman, who frequently hosted similar salons for luminaries in science, technology and media.
The problem? Brockman had included two women on the list, and his staunch supporter and biggest funder wanted them out.
“John, the old conferences did not care about diversity. I suggest you not either,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in response to an email about the programming. “The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry.”
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Take Roger Schank, an AI researcher and theorist who died in 2023. He suggested in one email that “intelligence comes about in part from real focus” and that it is rare for a woman to not be “first and foremost focused on what others are thinking and feeling about her.”
“Hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you or why you don’t own a kelly bag,” he wrote. To which Epstein responded: “It’s the tail of distribution , no really smart women – none.”
(Epstein’s emails and those of his correspondents often contained typos; The 19th is reproducing the text as it appears in the files released by the Justice Department.)
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Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, who emailed with Epstein hundreds of times, made a joke in one email about how “half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”
The email was sent in 2017, more than a decade after Summers came under fire for a speech he gave at a conference for women and underrepresented groups in STEM, where he suggested that there weren’t as many women smart enough to be in these professions due to higher variability in men’s intelligence. During his time as president he was also scrutinized for the lack of women in tenured positions. The Guardian reported that under his reign the share of tenured positions offered to women fell from 36 percent to 13 percent.
In another exchange, Epstein and Jeremy Rubin, a bitcoin developer and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] researcher, went back and forth over whether there are any games that women are actually better at than men. It would be “interesting to attempt to make an intellectually stimulating game where women outperform men,” Rubin wrote in 2016. “Unless women are inherently inferior to the maximally talented man at all tasks ;).”
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If you have time, do read Jessica Kutz’s February 24, 2026 article in its entirety. Even if you are inclined to give these academics and scientists the benefit of any doubt regarding their knowledge about Epstein and his proclivities, it seems they were complicit with, if not downright embracing, his misogyny and sexism.
For anyone curious about the origin of “Tell Me What Company You Keep, and I Will Tell You What You Are (article link).” These are some of the proposed sources: “Miguel de Cervantes? Don Quixote? Sancho Panza? Euripides? Lord Chesterfield? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe? Joseph Hordern? Anonymous?” The article is pretty interesting.
It keeps coming: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) website featured this March 18, 2026 article by Sheena Goodyear “Science has an Epstein problem. Women in paleontology say it’s a symptom of a deeper misogyny; Male-dominated field of fossils and dinos is reckoning with ties to wealthy sex offender.” More recently, there’s technology pioneer, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, testifying in US Congress ( see June 10, 2026 article “Bill Gates testifies Epstein pressured him using knowledge of his affairs” by Nolan D. McCaskill.for Reuters.
