Epstein and the Professors
Undated photograph from collection of Jeffrey Epstein. Photo: House Oversight Committee.
The liberal professoriate
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy professors are alike; all unhappy professors are unhappy in their own way. One resents his colleagues’ success, another their obliviousness to his own. One wants a prestigious, endowed chair, another an appointment as dean. One laments lower standards for admission, another higher standards for promotion. One says she deserves a bigger raise – well, all professors say they deserve bigger raises.
When Jeffrey Epstein began harvesting professors for his dinners masked as seminars, he was drawing from a bountiful crop. It’s the rare professor who can’t be compromised by money. Add celebrity, fine food, first class travel and the whiff of decadence–irresistible. So what if the person offering these things is a convicted sex offender? Epstein served his time, says the liberal professor; he paid his debt to society and it’s right to move on. Those young women with Slavic accents serving canapes and massaging Epstein’s neck are probably in college, or at least seniors in high school–aren’t they?
The Epstein Affair
I confess to knowing less about Jeffrey Epstein than most people who write about him. Until recently, I didn’t follow the scandal closely, and my only real interest was whether it might bring down the president. I was disturbed of course, to hear some two dozen women – at press conferences last Fall – discuss the devastating, long-term impact upon them of Epstein’s predatory behavior. But the abuse appeared tangential to the main trajectory of recent U.S. history: The lurch toward fascism. The Epstein case was about a rich bastard (and friend of Trump) who used his wealth and connections to escape serious punishment for his crimes, but when re-arrested later, killed himself rather than accept more severe consequences. End of story.
But recent revelations concerning the potential number of victims (possibly more than a thousand), and the breadth of Epstein’s contacts and influence, suggest a wider significance. Just as the Dreyfus Affair in late 19th C. France was about more than false charges of treason against a Jewish military officer, the Epstein Affair is about more than the dozens of documented (and hundreds of less verified) cases of sexual abuse against girls and young women. It’s about a culture of privilege and arrogance that arose from a political economy that empties the pockets of the many to pad the wallets of the few. The latter operate, in large part, outside of law; the former (the suckers) within it.
What stands out among the details of the case – apart from the gross misogyny –is the huge amount of cash Epstein swindled from other billionaires, who themselves grifted it through predatory mergers and acquisitions, tax dodges, and stock, currency and commodities trades supported by insider information. If there’s a deep state in the U.S., it isn’t found in the office cubicles of government agencies; it’s in the yachts, living rooms, patios, clubs, private jets, guest cottages, poolside cabanas, saunas, dining rooms, and massage parlors of America’s unspeakable class. Women and children were for Epstein and Trump, commodities no different than any others, to be used, traded, discarded, and replaced by more.
Only such a rapacious system could have produced a man so singularly lacking in knowledge or skills and yet possessed of such wealth and license. Epstein was arrested in 2008 and again in 2019 only because of the scale, blatancy and duration of his criminality. Had he been marginally more discrete, he’d still be active. Some of his pals – financiers, tech moguls, and politicians like Trump, Leon Black, Leslie Wexner, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Peter Mandelson, Peter Thiel, and Bill Clinton – were partners in sex and others in money. Though Epstein did big-money deals with only a few of them – Thiel was one. Grifters generally avoid business with other grifters; it’s the rest of us who are the marks. Dozens more men and women, including professors (especially scientists) and public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Oliver Sacks, Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, Frank Wilczek, Steven Pinker, and Stephen Hawking, were collected by Epstein to cleanse his tawdry reputation, gratify his ego, and provide a veneer of reason for a man guided by appetite. Epstein’s intellectual guests happily supped from the crumbs on his table.
Palm Beach, Florida
I said I didn’t know much about Epstein, but I gained a few early insights from a minor coincidence of geography. I spent time in Palm Beach from the mid 1980s to early 2000s when Epstein also lived there. My Florida hideaway wasn’t a mansion on Ocean Avenue, but a fold-out sofa in a condominium in an unglamorous retirement subdivision called Golden Lakes Village in West Palm Beach. That’s where my parents, Bert and Grace moved in 1982 after retirement. Though dad died just three years later, my mom lived on for another 25 years, mostly in the same condo, which the developers called a “villa”. My visits consisted largely of taking Grace shopping, to doctor’s appointments, and to “early bird” dinners. She was an intelligent and cultured woman, but in her 80s, her world narrowed to bridge games, mystery novels, and Jeopardy. My only escape from her during those weeklong visits – she could be trying – was to drive across Royal Palm Bridge to Palm Beach to shop for bargains on Worth Avenue (there used to be big sales every summer) or sit in the Tapestry Room of the Breakers Hotel and nurse a cocktail while reading novels or academic journals.
I also read the local newspaper – The Palm Beach Post – while I was there. That’s where I first read about Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest and felony conviction. Here’s the first three paragraphs of the story about Epstein in the Post on July 1, 2008:
He lives in a Palm Beach waterfront mansion and has kept company with the likes of President Clinton, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump, but investment banker Jeffrey Epstein will call the Palm Beach County Jail home for the next 18 months. [In fact, he was permitted to spend most days in his plush office suite.]
Epstein, 55, pleaded guilty Monday to felony solicitation of prostitution and procuring a person under the age of 18 for prostitution. After serving 18 months in jail, he will be under house arrest for a year. And he will have a lifelong obligation to register as a sex offender. He must submit to an HIV test within 48 hours, with the results being provided to his victims or their parents.
As part of the plea deal, federal investigators agreed to drop their investigation of Epstein, which they had taken to a grand jury, two law enforcement sources said.
I didn’t give the story more than passing attention. I’d never met Epstein and if I’d seen him, it would have been by accident. Was he perhaps among the louche men with partly unbuttoned shirts and gold chains who dined at Ta-boo or Chuck and Harold’s. I’d see them at the latter, some hot afternoons, nursing iced coffee or Mojitos, beneath a portico and slowly turning ceiling fans.
Epstein, I now know, would never have deigned to sit among the chancers at Chuck and Harold’s. By the 1990s, he was dining among staff and friends at his home at 358 Brillo Way, or more rarely, at one or more of the exclusive clubs in Palm Beach, including Mar-a-Lago. He also spent time at his nine-story mansion at 9 east 71st Street, his apartment in Paris at 22 Avenue Foch near the Arc de Triomphe, a retreat on Little St James Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Zorro Ranch, near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
When I read of Epstein’s conviction, I’m sure I contemplated his last name, and wondered if he’d had a bar mitzvah like me. (He was just a few years older.) I’ve since found out he did, at a synagogue in the wealthy, gated community of Seagate, Coney Island, Brooklyn. His Jewish name was Yudel, a Yiddish version of the Hebrew name Judah. If I discussed Epstein with my mother (I don’t remember if I did) she’d surely have complained: “he’s bad for the Jews,” and she’d have been right. It’s shameful to think of all the Jews who abetted his crimes: Wexner, Black, Alan Dershowitz, media mogul Mort Zuckerman, Peter Mandelson and of course, Ghislaine Maxwell. Fortunately, his friends weren’t only Jews. There are few public figures more goyishe than Clinton, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump: The first was by then a renowned sleazebag; the second an imbecile; and the third a tabloid punchline.
Flash forward 11 years. My mother is dead, the condo in Florida is sold, I’m still teaching at Northwestern University, and Epstein has returned to the news, this time the front pages. His earlier “deal of the century” with federal prosecutors in Florida led by Alexander Acosta (later Trump’s Labor Secretary), was exposed a year before by the Miami Herald, leading to his re-arrest in New York on charges arising from sex trafficking committed between 2002 and 2005. On July 6, 2019, The New York Times reported dryly:
Mr. Epstein, 66, had avoided federal criminal charges in 2007 and 2008 in a widely criticized plea deal whose lenient terms continue to roil the Justice Department and are facing new scrutiny in the #MeToo era.
A bit more than a month later, Epstein was dead in his cell, apparently a suicide by hanging. In 2020, his companion and facilitator, Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty of child sex trafficking and sentenced to 20 years in prison. A million questions were left unanswered. The recent release of FBI files on the two cases has answered a few but raised many more.
Money doesn’t care who owns it
Among the dozens of scientists, mathematicians, and other academics whose names appear in Epstein’s Little Black Book (actually an encyclopedia with 1600 entries!) none is more surprising than Noam Chomsky’s. How could a man with so unwavering an antagonism to capitalism, imperialism, and expansionist Zionism have spent so many happy hours in the company of a capitalist scoundrel and committed supporter of Israel, not to mention a sexual abuser? No one can fully answer except Noam who is 97 y.o. and incapacitated by a stroke. His wife, Valeria Chomsky however, has offered an explanation that is plausible if incomplete.
She writes that she and Noam first met Epstein in 2015, unaware of his criminal history. The convicted sex offender then began to ply them with gifts, invitations to academic seminars and offers to accommodate the Chomskys at his mansion in New York, apartment in Paris and ranch in New Mexico. (Also, an XXL cashmere sweater. Who knew Chomsky was so tall?) It was only in July 2019, after Epstein’s second arrest, that they learned in detail the gravity of the earlier offenses and current charges. Concerning Noam’s private letter of support for Epstein in February 2019, Valeria writes:
Epstein created a manipulative narrative about his case, which Noam, in good faith, believed in. It is now clear that it was all orchestrated, having as, at least, one of Epstein’s intentions to try to have someone like Noam repairing Epstein’s reputation by association.
The Chomsky Valeria describes is far more credulous than the jaundice eye’d debater, interviewee and author we’ve known for decades. Can a scholar generally so well informed not know anything about the man who paid him $20,000 to organize a seminar, provided flights on his private jet, and offered luxury accommodations in Manhattan, Paris and Santa Fe? Did Chomsky not even look him up in Wikipedia? (The first entry for Epstein was August 4, 2006, a week after his initial indictment in Palm Beach.)
Among the documents in the Epstein file is also the following from Chomsky, apparently attributing the charges against his friend to “the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women.” Chomsky’s words were badly chosen, to say the least. Women have for centuries been labeled “hysteric” (ancient Greek for “uterus”) when they resisted patriarchy or refused men’s sexual overtures. Valeria writes:
Noam’s criticism was never directed at the women’s movement; on the contrary, he has always supported gender equity and women’s rights. What happened was that Epstein took advantage of Noam’s public criticism towards what came to be known as “cancel culture” to [falsely] present himself as a victim of it.
If Chomsky was concerned about Epstein being an innocent victim of “cancel culture” (itself a term of the right), why didn’t he say it? More likely, Chomsky was trying to please his wealthy and well-connected friend by telling him what he wanted to hear: that he was an innocent victim of overzealous prosecutors coasting on the prevailing political winds. Chomsky was not at his best on that day.
None of this, of course, has any bearing on Noam Chomsky’s achievement. Her was for more than 60 years, the country’s greatest dissident – active in the civil rights, anti-war and anti-nuclear movements, and an outspoken opponent of imperialist adventurism and violence. His books with Edward Hermann, including Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, The Political Economy of Human Rights, and The Washington Connection and Third-World Fascism awakened a generation to the complicity of U.S. policy makers with torture, kidnapping, extra-judicial killing, and political coups across the globe, all in the service of U.S. corporate interests. Chomsky has inspired untold numbers of young people to demand the creation of a new, political and social order based upon the satisfaction of genuine human needs, not the profits of corporations and what Bernie Sanders calls “the billionaire class.”
What emerges from the Chomsky dossier is the portrait of a man as personally flawed as most other academics and intellectuals. I can sympathize. When I advised a J.P. Morgan Chase V.P. in Winnetka on collecting Impressionist pictures, I charged him $1,000 a day, a pittance to him but a minor windfall for me. I was wracked by guilt for helping an executive from the world’s most grasping bank, but I took the money anyway. (He rarely took my advice. His collection is filled with bad Renoirs the artist should have burned.) I can confess several other minor liaisons with millionaires, billionaires and banks.
I’ve been equally promiscuous in my association with former criminals. In the course of my work with Tamms Year Ten (a prison reform/abolition group in Chicago), I dined with several convicted murderers. I remember one of them, a man I’ll call Jimmy Darko. He was a former gang leader convicted of armed robbery and double homicide. He served about 30 years of a life sentence before being released on parole. Jimmy had courtly manners and a resonant voice, with just a touch of Chicago/Mississippi inflection. He was hard working (a paralegal), kind, generous and deeply sympathetic to other former prisoners and their families. It was an honor to know him.
And then there are the two sex offenders I’ve met in the course of work I was doing in support of reforming sex-offender laws. They were both thoughtful, kind, and repentant men. Sex registry laws in the U.S. are deeply punitive, driving ex-offenders from pillar to post in search of places to live, work, exercise, or go to school. Despite what you see on television, recidivism rates for SOs are extremely low, and most cases are intra-familial, or else committed by teenagers against other, younger teens. If I had been introduced to Epstein upon his release from prison in 2009, and liked him, I wouldn’t have been deterred by his criminal history from spending time with him. Indeed, meeting and talking with a billionaire, convicted sex offender would have given me ample opportunity to ask questions about finance, markets, capital accumulation, tax shelters, and the personal lives and preoccupations of people with his wealth. I would also have asked: “What social and practical obstacles do you face as a registered sex offender?”
Was that what Chomsky had in mind when he accepted an invitation to meet with Epstein? What about when he met Steve Banon? What did the three men talk about? Valeria hasn’t told us. (Somebody should ask her.) Is there any record of their conversations in the millions of still unreleased documents held by the U.S. Justice Department? I suspect, however, the main reasons Chomsky and the other professors spent time with Epstein were banal – the prospect of gifts, grants, donations, luxurious travel and accommodations, fine food and a hint of decadence.
It’s that last bit that troubles me – can so many, intelligent men (few women – itself suspicious), not have seen or heard any trace of sexual abuse? Did Epstein not impart any of the misogynist vulgarity regularly dispensed during parties with his business friends? If there was, did Chomsky (or anybody) call it out? Or were they silent because they were otherwise having such a nice time. Why spoil it?
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