Noam Chomsky Is a Scumbag

From Jeffrey Epstein to Lawrence Krauss to Woody Allen, Chomsky has shown a clear pattern of poor judgment and low moral standards. Hard to express how disappointed I am in him. (2,800 words.)

He quickly became a highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation. — Noam Chomsky, referring to Jeffrey Epstein

Since the early 2000s, Noam Chomsky has been an intellectual hero of mine. I won’t bore you with a cringe-inducing hagiography, but I think the guy is an absolute genius: his contributions to philosophy, linguistics, and political activism have been utterly profound. He has an eidetic memory and an encyclopedic knowledge of a vast range of topics. He’s like three or four world-class geniuses crammed into the same body.

I met Chomsky on multiple occasions while living in Cambridgeport, MA, which is located between the campuses of MIT and Harvard. He was incredibly kind, gracious, and amicable. On one occasion, I approached him in Trader Joe’s and we briefly spoke about philosophy. Chomsky has been a major source of inspiration in my life for nearly two decades.

Unfortunately, it turns out that Chomsky isn’t the moral paragon that many of us once thought he was. In fact, he’s kind of a scumbag, with shockingly poor judgment and low moral standards. This article explains why my opinion of him has shifted 180 degrees, and why the “kill your heroes” adage remains sagacious advice.

Chomsky and Lawrence Krauss

My view of Chomsky’s moral character first changed in 2019 — years before the Wall Street Journal reported that Chomsky had more-than-casual connections with the most notorious pedophile of the 21st century: Jeffrey Epstein.

What happened in 2019? Chomsky appeared on Lawrence Krauss’ podcast. Krauss was Chomsky’s student at MIT, and they remained friends over the years.

One year earlier, Buzzfeed News published an article titled: “He Became A Celebrity For Putting Science Before God. Now Lawrence Krauss Faces Allegations Of Sexual Misconduct.” I played a very small role in helping these allegations come to light, and am quoted in the article under my previous name, “Phil Torres.” The article reports an incident between Krauss and the former executive director of the Center for Inquiry (DC branch), Melody Hensley:

Krauss made a comment about her eye makeup, and got very close to her face. Suddenly, he lifted her by the arms and pushed her onto the bed beneath him, forcibly kissing her and trying to pull down the crotch of her tights. Hensley said she struggled to push him off. When he pulled out a condom, Hensley said, she got out from under him, said “I have to go,” and rushed out of the room.

The article adds that

Buzzfeed News learned that the incident with Hensley is one of many wide-ranging allegations of Krauss’s inappropriate behavior over the last decade — including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at Arizona State University, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave. In response to complaints, two institutions — Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio,¹ and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario — have quietly restricted him from their campuses. Our reporting is based on official university documents, emails, and interviews with more than 50 people.

After this was published, women flooded social media with additional accusations. It seemed like everyone in cosmology and the New Atheist movement had some bad experience with Krauss. I catalogued many of these in a Medium article, which you can read here.

A few examples from my article, here.

A friend of mine also told me of an incident in which she sat next to Krauss at an event and he repeatedly rubbed her leg under the table. Even anti-woke crusaders like Jerry Coyne, a friend of Krauss’, found the accusations of sex pestery credible, writing:

After that article appeared, I did some digging on my own, and came up with three cases that have convinced me that Krauss engaged in sexual predation of both a physical nature (groping) and of a verbal nature (offensive and harassing comments). The allegations that convinced me are not public, but the accusers are sufficiently credible that I believe their claims to be true.

(Note that Coyne has since deleted this post. Maybe his view that “women are not objects for someone’s one-sided sexual pleasure, but fellow humans with dignity, autonomy, and the right to be free of sexual predation” has changed. Lolz.)

Why, then, did Chomsky choose to appear on Krauss’ podcast? Why did Chomsky continue his friendship with Krauss, knowing that Krauss had hurt and traumatized so many women?

Chomsky is famous (among other things) for answering almost every email he receives, and prior to 2019 I had — as so many of us had — exchanged numerous emails with him on a range of topics. Hence, I decided to send him the questions above. His response was deeply disheartening, and it was at this point that Chomsky’s moral turpitude started to become apparent to me. I won’t copy-paste his response without permission, so here’s a summary:

He can’t comment on the experience of my friend (which I mentioned to him). He’s read the charges of sexual misconduct made against Krauss, as well as Krauss’ response to those charges, and he found Krauss’ response compelling. He then adds that he knows people, including some women, who’ve worked with Krauss and never heard anything about a whisper network surrounding the guy. [So freaking what??] He concludes by saying that his decision to continue being friends with and supporting Krauss is made on the basis of the evidence available to him, which suggests that Krauss is innocent.²

This is ridiculous. I shared the Buzzfeed article and my Medium piece, but Chomsky wouldn’t update his opinion of Krauss. I also noted in my response to Chomsky that his excuse for remaining friends with Krauss (the last sentence above) reminds me of Krauss’ excuse for remaining friends with Epstein after the latter plead guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008, for which Epstein received a shockingly lenient sentence: 13 months in a minimum-security prison, although he was allowed to leave prison during the day, six days a week! (WTF?) He was subsequently registered as a sex offender.

Here’s what Krauss said about Epstein:

As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people … I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.

This looks very similar to what Chomsky said in his email to me. As it happens, the recent dump of emails released by House Democrats shows that Krauss actually contacted Epstein for advice on how to deal with sexual misconduct allegations (!!). One email specifically references the Buzzfeed article quoted above, after the authors reached out to Krauss for comment before it had been published. On dodging such allegations, Epstein told Krauss just days after the Buzzfeed article came out: “Break the charges into ludicrous. ogling. jokes. . etc.”³ I kid you not! As a science journalist wrote on Bluesky: “by my count there’s 65 documents with emails between Krauss and Epstein. In many of them Krauss seems to ask Epstein for advice about the allegations of sexual misconduct leveled toward him.”

Here’s some more on Krauss and Epstein, from Wikipedia:

In 2006, Krauss helped organize a conference on gravity funded by a foundation run by financier and later convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The conference was held on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands and included a trip to Epstein’s private island for dinner. Krauss helped invite roughly 20 well-known physicists to the conference.

Steven Pinker — who has also been photographed hanging out with Epstein — said that “Krauss was one of several colleagues who invited him to ‘salons and coffee klatsches’ that included Epstein.” In one email exchange from 2018, Krauss suggested to Epstein that they should organize a conference featuring Bill Clinton, Woody Allen, and Keven Spacey. This came in response to an apparent joke made by Epstein: “Let’s do a men of the world conference.” Krauss also sent Epstein a birthday letter, just like Trump did.

This is the guy that Chomsky continued to support through 2019 (and, to my knowledge, up to the present). Little did I know at the time that Chomsky himself was buddies with Epstein.

Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein

Here’s what we know about Chomsky’s relationship to Epstein. If you have additional information, please leave it below as a comment, or email me — I’ll update this article accordingly.

In an undated letter of recommendation, Chomsky described Epstein as “a highly valued friend and regular source of intellectual exchange and stimulation,” adding that they met “half a dozen years ago” and have “been in regular contact since.”

Chomsky corresponded with Epstein from at least 2015 to 2017, during which they met numerous times. “In March 2015,” the Wall Street Journal reported, “Epstein scheduled a gathering with Mr. Chomsky and Harvard University professor Martin Nowak and other academics, according to the documents. Mr. Chomsky said they had several meetings at Mr. Nowak’s research institute to discuss neuroscience and other topics.”

Also in 2015, Chomsky had dinner with Epstein at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. On a different occasion that year, Chomsky and his wife flew with Epstein to have dinner with Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Allen’s ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow, who Allen is now married to. (Previn was a young child when Farrow and Allen were dating. Farrow ended their relationship when she found out that Allen was sleeping with her adopted daughter.) Accusations that Allen had molested Dylan Farrow had been public for decades at this point, and in fact Dylan published an article just the previous year (in 2014) about Allen’s abuse in the New York Times. Chomsky no doubt knew about this, but didn’t care.

When asked about his night out with Epstein and Allen, Chomsky said: “If there was a flight, which I doubt, it would have been from Boston to New York, 30 minutes … I’m unaware of the principle that requires that I inform you about an evening spent with a great artist.” As someone noted on X: “Pretty wild that part of Chomsky’s defense for flying on Epstein’s plane is that it was to an ‘evening spent with a great artist’ … that artist being Woody Allen.”

Photos from Epstein’s NYC townhouse. Among them is a picture of Chomsky smiling with Epstein. From here.

PBS reports that, in August 2015, “Epstein told Chomsky … to only fly to Greece if he feels well, joking he previously had to send a plane for another ‘lefty friend’ to see a doctor in New York.” In the same exchange, Epstein wrote: “You are of course welcome to use [my] apt in new york with your new leisure time, or visit new Mexico again.”

The following year, Epstein wrote to Chomsky and his Brazilian wife: “Caribbean is close to Brazil. If you wanted, you are always welcome, and Valeria can meet you there.” Chomsky wrote back: “Still eager to make it to the Caribbean, but it looks as though we’ll have to wait.” So far as I can tell, this was probably a reference to Epstein’s private island, which I don’t think Chomsky ever visited. (Is there another explanation?)

On yet another occasion, in 2018, Epstein wrote to someone that Chomsky had arranged a meeting between the two and former Brazilian President Lula, who was serving a prison sentence at the time. “Chomsky called me with Lula . From prison . What a world,” his email read. Newsweek further reports:

Another scheduled event involved former Israeli Prime Minister Barak, which Chomsky said was for the purpose of discussing “Israel’s policies with regard to Palestinian issues and the international arena.”

As discussed in the video below (beginning around 3:00), a photograph surfaced in 2022 of Chomsky with Epstein’s butler in Paris, which was apparently taken close to Epstein’s apartment in Paris. Why was Chomsky hanging out with Epstein’s butler?

From here.

When the Wall Street Journal asked Chomsky in 2023 about his friendship with Epstein, Chomsky said: “First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.” He added: “What was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate.”

In response to an investigation published in The Harvard Crimson, Chomsky said this:

Like all of those in Cambridge who met and knew him, we knew that he had been convicted and served his time, which means that he re-enters society under prevailing norms — which, it is true, are rejected by the far right in the US and sometimes by unscrupulous employers … I’ve had no pause about close friends who spent many years in prison, and were released. That’s quite normal in free societies.

When pressed about whether he regrets associating with the notorious child sex trafficker, Chomsky wrote: “I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.”

The problem with such excuses is obvious. First, this isn’t about merely meeting someone who’s committed atrocious moral crimes. It’s about befriending them, flying with them, dining with them at their Manhattan home, and writing a glowing letter of recommendation for them in which Chomsky describes Epstein — the sex offender — as “a highly valued friend.” To quote Hasan Piker after the 2023 Wall Street Journal article dropped: “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Second, did Epstein actually pay his debt to society, as Chomsky claims? This is Chomsky’s main excuse for palling around with a sex pest. But, as noted above, Epstein received an outrageously light sentence — the victims, of which there are apparently more than 1,000, were absolutely denied justice. When Chomsky was asked about Epstein’s light sentence, he said that Epstein shouldn’t be blamed for that, the prosecutor should. (Excuses, excuses, excuses.)

Third, even if Epstein had paid his debt to society from a legal perspective (which he didn’t), so what? Pedophilia, child sex trafficking, rape, CSAM,⁴ etc. are moral crimes that, um, aren’t easily forgivable, because such crimes reveal a profoundly rotten moral character. There’s something shockingly abhorrent about saying: “Yeah, this guy sexually abused some underage women, but he spent 13 months sleeping in prison at night, so I’m cool with him.” Again, WTF?

Fourth, was Chomsky really oblivious to the fact that Epstein continued to abuse young women after his release in 2009? Everyone knew that Epstein had a penchant for young women. Only an idiot and a fool would think that Epstein, a pathological narcissist and extremely powerful guy, had completely stopped his abusive behavior after getting a gentle slap on the wrist. Chomsky is no dummy. He had to have been suspicious. (At the very least, he should have made some effort to make sure that Epstein wasn’t involved in sex trafficking before fostering a friendship with him. GRRRR!)

In an interview with dunc tank from 2020 (below), Chomsky was asked about Epstein giving money to MIT. He dismissed the question by pointing out that Epstein isn’t “the worst person” to donate to the university. Again, so what? This is utter BS whataboutism. Someone can be bad without being the worst, and if Chomsky had higher moral standards, then “bad” would have been sufficient to have cut ties with Epstein. Unbelievable.

Conclusion

There is a clear pattern of bad behavior here: Chomsky doesn’t care about accusations of sexual misconduct against powerful men who he considers friends. He apparently doesn’t care about the victims, and doesn’t put much weight on their reports of abuse. He chose to fraternize with Krauss after an avalanche of allegations surfaced, he fostered a friendship with Epstein after Epstein plead guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor, and he willingly went to dinner with Woody Allen despite clear evidence, in my view, that Allen is a predator.

For all the good he’s done in the world, Chomsky is a man of incredibly poor judgment and low moral standards — at least in his personal life. I can’t avoid the conclusion that this will seriously tarnish his legacy, as it should. Perhaps somewhat insolently, I actually brought this up during our email exchange in 2019. He did not express any concerns — again, terrible judgment on his part.

Chomsky’s reputation now lies in the graveyard where so many other intellectual heroes of mine are now found: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Nick Bostrom, to name a few. (I know, I know — I have a knack for choosing the worst people to have once looked up to, lol!) What a shame that Chomsky didn’t make better choices — choices that reveal he’s quite the scumbag. RIP.

But am I missing something? Could this all somehow be one giant misunderstanding? (Surely not!) To what extent can one separate the artist from the art, as it were? I can’t see myself ever citing Chomsky again, given his deplorable pattern of shitty behavior.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!

1. That’s my university! Good job, Case Western!

2. I’d be happy to share these with journalists or friends in confidence, of course, if anyone has any doubts about the veracity of this summary.

3. Also, why the f*ck does Epstein write like this? Lol.

4. When Epstein was arrested again in 2019, officials found “hundreds — and perhaps thousands — of sexually suggestive photographs of fully — or partially — nude females,” at least some of which were of underage girls.