No Time for Heroes
How the release of the Epstein files shows that misogyny must be toppled down before any attempts at true academic and artistic integrity can happen.
Image Description: US American professor and intellectual Noam Chomsky is pictured inside a private airplane with late child sex offender and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Copyright: Epstein Estate/House Oversight/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
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The month of February started with a bang, as the second batch of the Epstein files was released on January 30, thanks to the United States law Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by the 119th U.S. Congress and signed by President Donald Trump on November 19, 2025. 3 million pages of documents, 180.000 images and 2.000 videos were made public, this time making a damning revelation that even some unexpected scholars and public figures had been in association with the US American financier and convicted pedophile. Just as the YouTube algorithm pushed some videos to me about this recent release of documents, I went down the rabbit hole, and here’s what I have to share with you, dear reader.
But before I start, I need to make a quick disclaimer: to be named in the Epstein files is not an automatic admission of guilt, or of any wrongdoing. There are plenty of names cited in the documents that pertain to the numerous celebrities, politicians, and other public figures with whom Epstein had come in contact with, but not all of them necessarily met him in person, nor did they have any particular contact with the convicted pedophile, other than via electronic messaging. This will make sense later, once you learn here how even some public figures that were brought into contact with Epstein via email without their consent, took that unwelcome advance as an opportunity to extricate the disgraced financier from their orbit.
Needless to say, the fact that some academics have associated themselves with heinous ideologies, despite their brilliant work as scholars, is no stranger to history. Take German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), for instance, whose connection with Nazism was once defined by one of his famous students and former lover, the Jewish German and US American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), as being the facet of someone nothing short of “a potential murderer”. Arendt also wrote an entry into her work journal (Denktagebuch), in July 1953, in which she explored a parable of “Heidegger the fox”: a man trapped by his own philosophical thinking, without connection to the shared political reality.
Perhaps the distinction between Heidegger’s entanglement with the Nazi regime and the matter at hand is not merely one of systemic reach, but of what it discloses about the shadow side of extreme wealth: Epstein’s files reveal a closed network of the world’s richest men, consistently cohorting with one another to pursue activities that are both lavish and frequently illegal. With that in mind, what I still found quite shocking from skimming through some of the emails and text messages made available by the United States Department of Justice was in how Epstein deliberately made an effort to extend his financial influence into the academic world, either by keeping a list of more than two dozen of the world’s top scientists or by literally maintaining some of these scholars under his payroll at the hundreds of thousands to millions of US dollars.
However, the more serious and nauseating dealings in the released files could be observed in how Epstein’s exchanges with these powerful men led to the existence of what some feminist thinkers have coined as the “patriarchal pact”—in German, Männerbund, as written by my former academic advisor at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Prof. Dr. Claudia Bruns. These are ”pacts of mutual recognition amongst men with the aim of maintaining their position of domination over women and which involve neither questioning nor seeking justification for the acts of their fellow males”. In establishing a class of male dominance embroiled with power, wealth, and even production of knowledge, Epstein seemed to be making sure that this “patriarchal pact” was cemented into the world order.
One fine example of this mutual recognition of the male subjugation of women can be seen in the 2018 correspondences between the convicted sex offender and the Canadian-American theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, who was ousted from Arizona State University in Tempe after an investigation of sexual misconduct. To this day, Krauss vehemently denies the accusations and keeps a disclaimer on his website regarding the allegations to be false. In asserting that the woman in the university’s conciliation committee “seems like a sweetie”, especially in what relates to her older age, and to her not being “some young metoo bitch”—as seen in Krauss’s own words below—he is reaffirming, with the support of Epstein’s free legal advice, how their patriarchal pact could be further maintained, instead of disrupted. Accordingly, what seems to matter more to Krauss is not the actual veracity of the allegations made against him, but the assumption that he is innocent—”your goals are money and reputation”, writes Epstein to him in a text message exchange also from 2018.
Image Description: Canadian-American theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss emails Jeffrey Epstein here to say that the woman mediating the sexual misconduct investigations brought against him at the Arizona State University is “not some young metoo bitch”.
On another email sent from Noam Chomsky to Jeffrey Epstein in late February 2019, the intellectual is seen advising Epstein to ignore any allegations of sexual misconduct being directed towards him, but the more troubling portion of the email reads as follows: “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 I can understand partially Chomsky’s criticism, especially in what seems to be a plea to respect due process in the prosecution of sexual offenders, it seems like a terrible statement to make at the wake of an international movement for sexual justice, after the hashtag #MeToo went viral in late 2017.
Much like Krauss’s negative opinion of younger women being more likely to not accept the patriarchal pact by being interested in the #MeToo movement, Chomsky reveals himself to be an equally misogynistic tool of the patriarchy. As research has shown that false allegations of sexual assault can be as low as between 2% and 10% of the total cases, to classify the growing social awareness and cultural reproach of sexual violence against women across the globe as some sort of “hysteria” seems to be not just an inadvertent choice of words, or generational difference—it is plain old misogyny.
Deepak Chopra, the famous Indian-American spiritual leader and guru (even though he himself has professed not wanting to be named as such) has been mentioned over 3,000 times in the Epstein files. The press made a sound bite out of one of Chopra’s exchanges with Epstein, in which Chopra wrote “God is a construct. Cute girls are real”, in response to a cheeky provocation by Epstein, who had asked Chopra “so when the girl says ‘oh my god?’”. This same inappropriate tone was evidenced also by other mentions found in the files, for instance on an email sent on February 2017 by Chopra to Epstein, in which he invites him to come to Israel and asks to “bring your girls”.
Image Description: Indian-American New Age teacher is seen here writing an email to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in which he invites the pedophile to meet him in Israel and to “bring his girls”.
Epstein and Richard Dawkins. The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins published one of the books that have been formative in my education as a cultural scholar, namely his 1976 classic The Selfish Gene—in which he introduced the idea of a meme, the analogous genetic structure to cultural transmission that can be perceived as a unit of replication and mutation of human knowledge.
If you would like to move away from Dawkins and his misogyny, British psychology and lecturer Susan Blackmore has written a fundamental book on Memetic Theory called The Meme Machine (1999), where she attempted to constitute the field of memetics as a science, and even to distance the idea of a meme from being subordinated to genes; instead, positing memes as independent cultural replicators.
Another aspect of the Epstein files that has shined light on a widely-spread rumor that Jeffrey Epstein worked for intelligence services is corroborated by a 2020 FBI document included in the disclosed documents. In it, one can see the statement that Epstein had been trained as a Mossad agent under the former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak. These claims have also been made before by other members of the intelligence community, such as by former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou. Interestingly enough, this is not at all a piece of information that is disclosed or discussed extensively on mass media.
Image Description: An email exchange between former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein shows a joke being made between the two of them, as Epstein asks to be validated as not being a Mossad agent during an upcoming meeting in London he helped arrange between Barak and former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani.
Even though the files contain the above-pictured email between Epstein and Barak, there are thousands of other messages between the two parties confirming Epstein’s Israeli ties.
To end on a positive note, the Epstein files do reveal at least a few people who have remained with their integrity and ethics intact despite being cited and/or appearing in correspondence between Epstein and his associates. One of them is none other than US American political scientist and activist Norman Finkelstein, who is renowned for his research on the politics of the Holocaust and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. To know that Finkelstein’s years-long academic dispute with Alan Dershowitz was one comprised of not only higher intellectual pedigree, but also of advantageously better moral grounds brings not a sigh of relief, but confirmation for those who stand on their scholarship as a means of true activism, and not just performative power.
Dershowitz was Epstein’s attorney and close friend. He has been named by the late Virginia Giuffre, perhaps Epstein’s most famous survivor, as Epstein’s co-conspirator in sex trafficking, including as one of the men to whom Epstein lent out Giuffre for sexual abuse. While she later dropped the lawsuit citing “she may have made a mistake” in identifying Dershowitz, another one of Epstein’s survivor’s, Sarah Ransome, claimed in court filings that among the people she was directed to have sex with, one of them was Epstein’s lawyer, Alan Dershowitz. Ransome’s federal civil lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell was settled without admission of wrongdoing from the defendants for an undisclosed amount in 2018.
In the messages in which Finkelstein appears, he is shown having an email exchange with US American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist Robert Trivers, himself entangled in Epstein’s web dating back to 2009.
Image Description: Norman Finkelstein responds to an email thread initiated by Robert Trivers, in which the former was added without his consent, by explicitly citing sowrn testimony of Jane Doe #3 (now known to have been Virginia Giuffre) giving evidence of Alan Dershowitz’s presence around Epstein during illegal sexual activities. Finkelstein adds a second paragraph right below the testimony, which reads as: “My guess is, if Epstein put your daughter at age 15 in such a position, you wouldn’t publicly describe him as a ‘friend’ and person of ‘integrity.’ In fact, I would hope that you’d promptly throttle both Epstein and Dershowitz”.
Trivers can also be seen in other correspondences with Epstein making derogatory comments on transgender women, such as “if you as a heterosexual male and have a minor desire to suck a dick then what better organism to do it with than a transsexual? ‘she’ will smell like a woman, be softer and more hairless like a woman and may, to some degree, actually resemble one morphologically — leaving the dick for you to enjoy in a feminine setting”. The evolutionary biologist also has a well-documented history of trying to validate his transphobia as academic honesty, in addition to being suspended and later leaving Rutgers University for refusing to teach a class, as well as for misconduct with other professors from the institution, and for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein—which are now confirmed to have involved accepting at least $40k from the convicted pedophile.
There is even one email disclosed in the Epstein files in which Trivers thanks Epstein for his financial support, making comparisons between the serial rapist and his political associations as being those of a “polymorphic perverse”.
Yet, a reported 3 million documents remain to be released, and an ad shared by some of Epstein’s survivors together with the World Without Exploitation coalition on the Super Bowl Sunday plead the public to hold US Attorney General Pam Bondi accountable on upholding the truth, and releasing all files to the public domain.