Reprinted Fromm Canadian Dimension
Chomsky, Epstein, and the responsibility of intellectuals
What the Epstein files reveal about moral exception on the left
Noam Chomsky is seen with Jeffrey Epstein in this undated photo released by House Oversight Committee Democrats on December 18, 2025.
Although celebrated linguist, foreign policy critic, and leftist icon Noam Chomsky had previously acknowledged his relationship with child rapist and serial sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, it was the recent release of photos of the two engaged in seemingly pleasant conversation on Epstein’s private jet that exploded on social media.
In her meditation on the power of images, the late Susan Sontag wrote that the “ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say, ‘There is the surface. Now think—or rather feel, intuit—what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks that way.’”
The photos illustrate what Chomsky himself confirmed was an unapologetic association with Epstein—for which, he told the Harvard Crimson in 2023, he had no regrets. They immediately drew powerful insights into what that reality must have been like. Author Cryn Johannsen writes that she found it “deeply disturbing that so many men seem to overlook this relationship and continue to defend the now disgraced leftist intellectual.”
Women’s rights activist and professor Kavita Krishnan was equally disturbed, and took issue with Chomsky’s statement that Epstein had “served his time” and therefore had a clean slate. She asked whether Chomsky would have issued a similar rationale for a wealthy CEO trafficking working class children to perform dangerous work. She concluded that “the rules seem different when the working-class children in question are girls, trafficked and enslaved not for factory labour but for sex work. In Chomsky’s political world, these individual survivors of sexual predation are invisible.”
Miriam Markowitz, the former deputy literary editor of The Nation (a touchstone liberal-left publication in print since the end of the US Civil War), had for months before the photo release challenged colleagues and online followers to centre the Epstein survivors. Her calls were amplified last week by United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, who highlighted Markowitz’s reminder that “the elite plan is clear: slavery… We are all swimming in a sea of misogyny so gigantic we only notice when there’s a shipwreck, and usually not even then. See: the survivors.”
Then emerged a classic rejoinder from The Nation that appeared hauntingly familiar to anyone who had read and understood the propaganda model at the core of Chomsky and Edward Herman’s classic text, Manufacturing Consent. Written in the magazine’s authoritative essay style, the piece—titled “What the Noam Chomsky-Jeffrey Epstein Emails Tell Us”—and much of its subsequent apologia seems an effort to rally elite progressive opinion to establish the narrative of Chomsky as a naïve but well-intentioned rube who, despite being one of the best-read, whip-smart individuals on the planet, somehow was unaware of who he was dealing with, much less the trail of human misery left in Epstein’s wake.
Written by professor Greg Grandin, it produces a laudatory resume of Chomsky’s considerable achievements and glowing references, then proposes that the man often described as the world’s most important intellectual was perhaps just too preoccupied to notice. “Tunnel focused on geopolitics and on crimes of state,” Grandin writes, “Chomsky apparently didn’t see what others saw clearly: that Epstein was a pimp servicing a privatized global aristocracy, and that his victims were children.”
Such “Great Men of History” rationalization was immediately challenged (Markowitz herself called for the piece to be retracted with apologies issued, to no avail), prompting a follow-up comment in which Grandin, a historian, also carelessly and ahistorically asserted: “I think we live in a world different from the one Chomsky came up in, where it is no longer morally acceptable, if you claim the egalitarian vision Chomsky did, to spend time with people like Epstein.”
While it hardly seems controversial that such an association was never morally acceptable, what seems telling is that Chomsky, who built his career on a foundation of morally righteous outrage and indignation at the crimes of state, simply did not care enough to concern himself with the serious crimes of his associate.
As Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write, Chomsky “was a frequent visitor to Epstein’s New York mansion—he says he enjoyed the intellectual conversation at the parties. There is debate among agonized leftists about whether Chomsky used the girls. This is beside the point. [Virginia] Giuffre said rightly that every person who entered that mansion could see the sexy photos of young girls all over the wall. They knew, all of them. They just didn’t care about working class women.”
Equally telling is that in the four years after Epstein’s death, and long before Chomsky suffered a massive stroke in 2023, Chomsky made no public statement condemning the crimes of a man he had socialized with and sought out to handle some financial matters, much less assert solidarity with Epstein’s victims in the manner he might have done were it Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, who condemned the mass rape of Guatemalan women.
Epstein’s victims have been largely cast aside in these discussions as mere backdrops whose suffering is occasionally acknowledged but then followed by endless caveats trying to contextualize and diminish Chomsky’s normalization of a child predator.
None of this requires us to discard Chomsky’s intellectual contributions. Manufacturing Consentand For Reasons of State, among many other books and essays, remain powerful tools for understanding how power operates and how elite institutions rationalize violence. What this episode forces us to confront is something more unsettling: whether the ethical standards articulated in those works are meant to apply universally, or whether certain figures are granted exemptions by virtue of fame, prestige, and standing within elite circles.
It is helpful to examine Chomsky’s own work in this regard. In his still relevant 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” he critiques an academy and media milieu in which “it is an article of faith that American motives are pure and not subject to analysis,” condemning those state-aligned thinkers who use their prestige and academic standing to justify horrific crimes. In one pointed response, he rightfully condemns state apologist Arthur Schlesinger’s rationalization for bombing Vietnam as a statement that is “less an example of deceit than of contempt for an audience that can be expected to tolerate such behaviour with silence, if not approval.”
Yet when the world’s most important intellectual was asked about his own dealings with a moral monster (the private jet, the dinner with accused child molester Woody Allen, the emails, the financial dealings), he immediately shut down the conversation as “not subject to analysis” with exactly the kind of “contempt for an audience that can be expected to tolerate” that association with the silence he described above. In a much-quoted email, Chomsky lashed out at Wall Street Journal reporters: “First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.”
Had Chomsky taken his own advice seriously, the response required no rhetorical brilliance—only moral consistency. He could have said: Yes, I knew him. I made a profoundly bad and harmful decision in socializing with and engaging him for financial help, even knowing he was a convicted sex offender. The record since then makes clear that he committed horrific crimes against women and girls. I regret my choices, and I stand in solidarity with the survivors. Here is how I intend to make amends for my role in normalizing a predator.
Instead, he chose silence and dismissal.
The 2023 Wall Street Journal email came four years after the unsealing of an indictment in which Epstein was charged with “sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors.” The indictment alleged that, between 2002 through 2005, Epstein “sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls by enticing them to engage in sex acts with him in exchange for money. Epstein allegedly worked with several employees and associates to ensure that he had a steady supply of minor victims to abuse, and paid several of those victims themselves to recruit other underage girls to engage in similar sex acts for money.”
On these crimes, Chomsky was silent. And that was a choice.
Chomsky defenders—not of his work but of his poor choices—continue to claim his advanced age must be a consideration here, but in one of his final interviews on a wide range of topics a month before his stroke, he was lucid enough to discuss Cambodia, Iraq, disinformation systems, and much more.
It is difficult to believe that someone as widely read as Chomsky would not have done a simple Internet search on his associate before deciding to engage him for bank transfers and embark on a private jet flight to visit Allen, against whom high-profile allegations of child molestation were made by his daughter, Dylan Farrow. With respect to the latter, there was a similar lack of sympathy from Chomsky for the child involved: “I’m unaware of the principle that requires that I inform you about an evening spent with a great artist.”
Had Chomsky or one of his researchers done that easy research they would have found, in addition to news of the 2008 conviction and secret agreement not to lay federal charges that would have resulted in far more jail time, that on November 22, 2011, the Palm Beach Daily News reported that Epstein “must register in the state of New York as the highest and most dangerous level sex offender,” which meant “high risk of repeat offense and a threat to public safety exists,” according to the state’s guidelines. According to the four-page ruling, although Epstein was ultimately convicted on two counts in 2008, there was plenty of evidence there were many more victims.
Survivor Maria Farmer made her first complaint about Epstein to the FBI in 1996 but says it was ignored. Almost 30 years later, with the release of the Epstein files, she told NBC News, “I can’t believe it. They can’t call me a liar anymore.” At one point, Farmer reported, Epstein threatened to burn down her house if she did not take photographs of young girls at swimming pools for him.
Burning down houses and raping their female inhabitants is the kind of imperialist standard operating procedure that Chomsky spent his life condemning in Southeast Asia, in East Timor, in Iraq, in El Salvador. But when it came to the threat of and commission of such crimes in his own social circles, Chomsky resorted to the oldest excuse for silence on male violence against women.
It was a private matter, he insisted, and nobody’s business.
Chomsky can no longer offer apologies or consolation to the survivors. But that does not relieve us of the responsibility to do so, part of which is acknowledging that someone who had such a huge impact on so many of us made such profoundly disturbing moral choices.
Matthew Behrens is a freelance writer and social justice advocate.
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