The Epstein and Chomsky Friendship: A Symbol of White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy

How Girls Were Treated As Currency, Even Among Intellectuals from Prestigious Academic Institutions

[Reader Warning: Disturbing details about sexual trafficking, child molestation, sexual abuse, and rape.]

The Predatory, Uncaring Men

A mannequin in a white wedding dress, hanging from a rope, could be seen at the entrance to Jeffrey Epstein’s mansion at 9 East 71 Street in New York City. Noam Chomsky would see this debased piece of artwork when he entered Epstein’s house.

After entrapping her in a depraved situation of rape, financial control, sexual sadism, and abuse, in Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s harrowing memoir, Nobody’s Girl, she writes about how Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein began to sexually traffic her, too. These men weren’t just any run-of-the-mill individuals, but at the top of their industry, which also included academia, a space where professors like to set themselves apart from corporate America executives, yet we’ve learned through the Epstein files that the sickening rot there also runs deep when it comes to finding men who can be easily corrupted by capitalistic money, power, and treating the bodies of underage girls as currency and mere commodities. As for the now-deceased Roberts and her unfortunate introduction to academia, the first person she was sexually trafficked to was an academic, insidiously a psychologist, a man whom she suspected was “awkward and socially immature,” incapable of developing intimate relationships with women. So instead, the balding acadenuc reached out to Epstein to engage in raping an underage girl. Such encounters only expanded from there. Guiffre explains:

The pyschologist was only the first of many academics from presitigious universities who I was forced to service sexually. I didn’t know it then, but Epstein had spent years campaigning to keep company with the world’s biggest thinkers and bestselling authors—among them the physicist who discovered the quark, for example, and the computer scientist who consulted with Stanley Kubrick for his iconic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. At one point, Epstein would even host the theoretical pyhsicist Stephen Hawking, among others, at a symposium around the question “What is gravity?” Epstein convinced himself that he—a college dropout—was on the same level as degree-holding innovators and theoreticians, and because he funded many of their research projects and flew them around on his jets, he was largely welcomed into their fold. Then Epstein offered some of them a bonus: sex with one of us girls. In the coming months, I would be told to serve many men whom I’d later learn were illustrious in their fields. On any given night, Epstein would tell me to wait in the massage room until one of these strangers entereed, clearly expecting sex.

This piece isn’t about the academics who raped underage girls like Giuffre, although they do figure into it here and there; it’s more about those who were, and are, complicit and benefit from a system of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,¹ many of whom hypocritically stand alongside individuals like Epstein, and others like him, while talking out of both sides of their mouths, especially leftists like Chomsky. But the men who both raped these girls and those who didn’t, all of them developed deep relationships with a capitalistic, power-hungry pedophile, at the center of a corrupt, unequal system of power. One wonders: Even though Epstein is gone, who has filled his shoes since he died? After all, he is not the problem. He is a symptom of something much bigger than himself.

As for Epstein himself, all of these academic wankers, along with a slew of corporate twits, also knew he had been convicted in 2008, spent 13 months in a county prison, had pleaded guilty, and was convicted in a Florida state court of two charges: procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute, and yet all of them willingly turned a blind eye to his unadulterated, brash, unbridled power, a power that treated girls, which I mentioned above, as commodities of the market to be used and discarded at will. That’s part of the missing piece of this story: how Epstein and his cronies, again, all of them (even the intellectuals who just went out to dinner with him and stroked his ego by bringing him, a “college dropout,” as Guiffre describes him, into their intellectual milieux) reveal the way in which power under capitalism operates—as its intended to do so—to undermine systems of justice, ultimately subjugating, abusing, and torturing the most vulnerable, and making a mockery of our democratic institutions, which are supposedly intended to protect and uphold the law. Instead, these systems, i.e., our democratic institutions, including our academic universities, are twisted and brazenly bent to the interests of the billionaire class, at the expense of the rest of us, all while intellectuals, such as Chomsky and others, willfully denigrate them, just as some our politicians, lawyers, and justices do the same to their respective institutions of power just for the pathetic enjoyment of fine dining, rides on sumptuous billionaires’ jets, and the ability to kiss a rich ass like Epstein’s for other pleasures that most mere mortals never enjoy. (On a side note, I refuse to believe, as I have said in previous pieces about this topic, that Chomsky, a voracious reader of newspapers worldwide, did not follow the crime news about his famous billionaire friend Epstein before meeting him later, which by then had been published everywhere back in 2008. See here, here, and here.)

To be clear, again, there are no indications that Chomsky engaged in sexual crimes that Guiffre describes above. There is also no evidence that she met the now-disgraced political activist and linguist while she was being sexually trafficked. However, it is clear that Chomksy was deeply enmeshed in a relationship with Epstein that was more than merely transactional or about finances (Epstein helped with a slew of financial transactions for the academic), as evidenced by the latest tranche of documents released in early February (it seemed more than obvious to me, however, in my previous essays that they were already in deep; these latest emails provided further proof, so Greg Grandin’s passive and flippant defense of Chomsky over at The Nation was way off the mark, and his recent Addendum to his piece is a pathetic attempt to say, “Golly, gee, I guess I was wrong.” Well, it’s too late, pal. The damage has been done. Besides, who actually goes back to read an Addendum?). Indeed, rather than viewing Chomsky as an outsider to Epstein’s world, these emails indicate that he was deeply involved with him. In fact, when one searches the Department of Justice's Epstein Library for “Noam Chomsky,” there are 3,794 results. Granted, there are some duplicates, but it is important to keep in mind that not all the files have been released, and that is still a staggeringly high number of returns.

Epstein showed the linguist the high life, and Chomsky enjoyed trips to the country's Southwest to visit the jet-setting billionaire and to meet people like far-right insurrectionist Steven Bannon (“Would love to connect,” Chomsky told Bannon in an email on May 18, 2018, after Bannon wrote Chomsky an introductory email, telling him Epstein had given him Chomsky’s email), visits and stays at Epstein's mansion in New York City (where he hobnobbed with Woody Allen), and received drop-ins from Epstein in Cambridge (see emails below—the first one written on behalf of Epstein to Chomsky’s assistant; the second one shows the two men making plans; the third one is a discussion about meeting in Cambridge in January of 2016). Finally, we also know that Chomsky flew on Epstein’s infamously named “Lolita Express” jet, yet another location where sex crimes took place. Interestingly, if you peer closely at Chomsky’s face on Epstein’s jet, Chomsky doesn’t seem too pleased that a snapshot is being taken of him, but perhaps he was just deep in thought.

An individual, presumably an assistant, is scheduling a time for Epstein to fly up to see Chomsky sometime on January 5th. It can be inferred that Epstein was planning to visit him in Cambridge. It can also be assumed that it was sent to Chomsky’s assistant.

Chomsky and Epstein plan to meet in Cambridge after the first two weeks of January 2015.

Chomsky and Epstein plan to meet in Cambridge in January 2016, according to their email correspondence.

Noam Chomsky on Epstein’s infamous “Lolita Express.”

Further down in this essay is that of an empty picture. There is no Chomsky or Epstein to be seen. Instead, it is an image of Epstein’s disgusting massage room in his New York City mansion, a place where “illustrious” professors forced Guiffre to perform sex acts on them when she was, as noted above, coerced by both Epstein and Maxwell to do so (she was also forced to perform sex acts with Epstein and Maxwell there). This room, where countless sexual crimes took place in the same location, the mansion, where Chomsky and his wife dined with Epstein and others, including Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn. In fact, he and his wife had dinner on several occasions with the “Allens” and “woody” [sic], as Epstein clumsily referred to him, as the two men wrote about the couple in several emails (see emails directly below). In addition, we know that Chomsky and his wife stayed at Epstein's residence in May 2016 after giving a lecture in New York City. Again, the fact that they stayed there illustrates just how close they were to Epstein.

Prior to that, on February 1, 2015, in an Op-Ed that Nicolas Kristof shared in the New York Times, Allen’s other adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, publicly accused him of molesting him. Apparently, this accusation about Allen didn’t faze Chomsky. Nor apparently did the strange, unhealthy, and bizarre relationship Allen has with Soon-Yi Previn, whom he knew as a 10-year-old girl, seem to bother him. Prior to her relationship with Allen, the well-known actress Mia Farrow had adopted Previn, with her then-husband, André Previn, from South Korea in 1977. Shortly thereafter, in 1980, Farrow became romantically involved with Allen (she divorced Previn in 1979). The couple never married, but they did adopt Dylan Farrow in 1985. As for Soon-Yi Previn, she claims that when she first met Allen, she despised him. She found him to be “mean.” That eventually changed, undoubtedly due to Allen’s grooming, and on January 13, 1992, when she was a mere 22-years-old, Farrow discovered pornographic pictures of her in Allen’s apartment. He was 56 at the time. Later that summer, on August 4, 1992, Dylan Farrow says that’s when Allen sexually assaulted her. Farrow was only 7 years old.

As can be seen in the emails between Epstein and Chomsky, Chomsky appears to be chummy with the Allens around the time Dylan Farrow comes out, accusing her adoptive father of molesting her. He’s also married to a woman whom, for all intents and purposes, he essentially raised from the age of 10.

The questions here become: Why would one wish to befriend and interact with a man accused of molesting his adopted daughter? Why would one wish to have dinners with a man who began dating a young woman he had essentially raised? Don’t these facts raise red flags for ethics?

But then again, he had been cultivating a relationship with Epstein… so, it appears he is not only accepting of a pedophile, but also a child molester. Sexually abused girls be damned. It’s difficult not to conclude that men in positions of power, whether they are Epsteins, capitalistic titans such as himself, or those at the top of their game in academia, appear to perceive girls as commodities to be traded, used, and easily discarded. They are certainly not at the center of this story when examining their conversations. Far from it. They are decentered, minimized, unimportant, and never discussed.

Emails between Chomsky and Epstein from August 27-28, 2015, planning a dinner for October 5 with Woody and Soon Yi Allen.

Epstein and Chomsky are making dinner plans on May 7-8, 2016, for later in the month. Chomsky indicates that he hopes to see the Allens again.

Returning to the labyrinthine mansion that Epstein owned, one cannot say whether Chomsky was aware of or saw the now-infamous massage room there. As Guiffre states in Nobody’s Girl, which I first quoted above, the room was located behind Epstein’s primary bedroom in his New York City mansion. (Guiffre does, however, mention numerous times how Epstein “bragged” about his sumptuous residences, showed off every room, provided details about the tapestries, the artwork, where things had been purchased in each of the locations, the meaning behind the art objects, and also liked to exhibit his yachts, luxurious jets, and other toys to her. While it’s conjecture, it’s possible to imagine him taking guests like Chomsky and Chomsky’s wife on tours of his properties, just as he did with Guiffre; a man like him was, after all, a braggadocio.) But one thing is clear, and as mentioned already: based on curt and testy email exchanges with a reporter at The Wall Street Journal in April 2023, Chomsky was certainly aware of Epstein's prior crimes in 2008, and he didn’t care. In those emails, he said to the reporter, “First response is that it is none of your business.” He then added, “I knew him and [sic] we met occasionally.” However, as this piece has already illustrated and will further demonstrate, that was not true. To reiterate, the two of them met more than “occasionally.” This response was Chomsky’s attempt to distance himself from Epstein. The files, as I’ve shown, tell a story of significant enmeshment, one that continues and almost seems to intensify, even as more came out about Epstein’s true nature and hideous sexual abuse against underage girls.

Jeffrey Epstein’s despicable massage room, depicting young naked women on the walls, was a crime scene where hundreds, if not thousands, of underage girls were sexually abused and raped by Maxwell and Epstein.

Before discussing Chomsky’s emerging role as an adviser and an ad-hoc PR man to Epstein, it is important to mention investigative journalist Julie K. Brown. After all, she is the linchpin who surreptitiously created these roles for Chomsky and ultimately helped bring Epstein down. In 2021, an in-depth Guardian article about Brown and her work detailed the questions she began to ask herself and the research she began in earnest in 2016 on the pedophile and rapist. At the time, working for the Miami Herald, Brown wanted to pursue the topic of sex trafficking, and she found herself drawn to the original 2008 Epstein case. She found it surprising that he got off so easily. Usually, cases like his, especially in Florida, a defendant faced far harsher punishment, often 20 years in a gang-dominated penitentiary.

The investigation lasted three years and involved state and federal investigators. Initially, the state police discovered that Epstein forced countless young women and girls into sex acts (some of the girls were as young as 13). Many of the victims came forward and told the police he had raped them. However, the prosecution did not appear to want to bring him to court, and the police were always off the mark. As the Guardian notes, “Epstein appeared to be tipped off that he was going to be arrested.” Furthermore, when police went to his mansion in Palm Beach, numerous hard drives and video recordings were missing. This evidence was never recovered.

When he was eventually arrested, he only served 13 months of an 18-month sentence, as previously mentioned. He enjoyed far more than the average person at a county jail, too. He was able to go to work daily, slept with his jail door open, and watched television that was specifically set up for him.

Brown was vexed by this outcome, and as the Guardian noted, she kept asking herself in 2016, “How did he get off so lightly? And how was he able to return to his gilded world of billionaire friends and celebrity playmates without any real stigma attached to his name?” It made no sense to her why he got such a “sweetheart deal” after she did more research.

To me, the answers to these questions seem obvious, many of which I’ve already discussed, but we’ll put those answers aside for a moment. Brown continued to dig deeper. Her hard work led to a three-part piece in the Herald, which prompted federal investigators to reopen their case against the pedophile and financier in 2018. As is now known, that eventually led to his arrest as well. While in custody, Epstein would die by suicide, as is claimed by officials, on August 10, 2019, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City.²

Here’s where Chomsky enters the picture once again, illustrating the strong bond the two men had together. At one point, in an email dated December 28, 2018, Chomsky complained to Epstein about his friend, the physicist Lawrence Krauss, a man accused of sexual misconduct and sexual assault. He then proceeded to excoriate “mansplaining,” calling it “another power play.” Epstein also turned to Chomsky for solace and advice on the legal and media problems that erupted after Brown’s explosive, critical exposé of him. Shortly after the three-part piece came out, Epstein wrote to Chomsky, in usual style, that is, in an email fraught with typographical errors,³ grammatical atrocities, and lowercase letters, on February 23, 2019, saying:

Noam. I d love your advice on how I handle my putrid press. its is spiraling out of control. do I have someone write an oped. ? defend myself . or try to ignore. realizing that mobs are dangerous. ! On your situation. it breaks my heart. .! I thought of a work around. . you can do a video ,, doctor or lawyer by your side. . stating that you are fuly competent. intend to leave your estate to valeria. minus, some ip. ( not sure you should leave them any of it now). so in the future if they decide to make a claim against valeria the video and potentailly affadavits from doctors lawyers that you are of sound mind and are making the video to protect valeria agarnst arizona laws being used against her by your children, you can also write and have notarized a declaration that you are appalled by the idea of the children bringing a suit against a person that you have loved dearly and who doesnt deserve to have to deal with such horrible allgegations.

The second half of this email, when Epstein refers to Chomsky’s wife, Valeria, and Chomsky’s children, was an ongoing dispute between his children and his second wife. Epstein is obviously providing additional advice to him and ways in which to solve it. But the first half is a desperate Epstein asking Chomsky for sound guidance on how to contend with a situation that kept worsening. Here’s how the “beloved” leftist intellectual replied about Epstein’s situation on February 23, 2019 (I’m truncating the parts about Chomsky’s financial situation; that can be read in the image below):

What the vultures dearly want is public response, which then provides a public opening for an onslaught of venomous attacks, many from just publicity seekers or cranks of all sorts—which are impossible to answer (how do you prove that you are not a neo-nazi who wants to kill the Jews, or a rapist, or whatever charge comes alone). That's particularly true now with the hysteria that has deveroped [sic] about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder. For virtually everyone who sees any of this, the reaction will be "where there's smoke there’s fire, maybe raging fire" (whatever the facts, which few will ever think of investigating). In general, it's best I think not to react unless directly questioned, particularly in the current mood—which, I presume, will fade away, even if not in time to prevent much torture and distress. Hard to say, but it’s the best advice I can think of.

Noam

The language here speaks for itself, but still needs to be dissected. Chomsky opens with a sexist trope, “vulture,” that is often used to describe women who prey on vulnerable men. He goes on to describe the “onslaught of venomous attacks,” which conjure the image of a viper, another creature with deep historical roots dating back to Eve and Medusa, suggesting that women are treacherous and poisonous. He quickly pivots to how those who are attacking are “publicity seekers” or “cranks of all sorts,” both of which are used to describe women’s behavior, i.e., women who seek the limelight and attention and “cranks,” women who are seen as “crabby,” irascible, and thus easily dismissed. That’s why he immediately states that they “are impossible to answer,” and then outrageously moves on to invoke the comparison to a neo-nazi who wants to kill the Jews, a rapist, or “whatever charge comes along.” Adding more misogynistic vitriol to this litany of embarrassing commentary to Epstein, he further adds that “hysteria has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.” I want you to sit with that sentence for a moment. Consider, too, that this was now the era of the #MeToo movement (it gained popularity in 2017 and continued to gain steam as Chomsky wrote these emails). Chomsky had the audacity to choose the word hysteria to discuss the abuse of women. At this point, almost all people are aware that the term “hysteria” comes from the Greek hysterus, which means uterus. With its complex etymological history, a diagnosis of hysteria—epileptic-like states, paralysis, sensory disorders, and states of emotional outbursts, all of which were believed to originate from the uterus, were things only women suffered from. Chomsky is a first-rate linguist, probably the best one in his field. He knows exactly why he’s using this language, and that’s to denigrate the opposite sex to his close friend, a pedophile and rapist. He then proceeds to suggest that questioning the charge, as stated above, is “worse than murder,” which is simply not true (talk about a “hysterical” comment). As statistics show, when a man who sexually abuses a woman, even when the woman comes forward and charges are brought against the man, he often gets off with a slap on the wrist, just as Epstein did in 2008, and his crimes weren’t even against women; they were against girls.

Finally, Chomsky wraps up the email by advising Epstein to essentially lie low, ignore the purported facts (i.e., the truths coming out), and only answer questions if asked “directly.”

Emails from 2019 between Chomsky and Epstein in which the embattled financier and pedophile asks for advice, and Chomsky offers it in language laden in misognyistic tropes and tone.

Guiffre wrote in her memoir that “Epstein… cast himself as my mentor.” As a young teen, this role he took on confused her. It also struck me when thinking of Chomsky and the other intellectuals he befriended, those “academic-y” men whom Epstein showered with gifts, wined and dined, and invited to stay at his sexually-sadistic lairs that were the scenes of atrocious and countless sex crimes, which now, according to an independent human rights council appointed by the U.N., might be considered crimes against humanity.

Would it faze Chomsky to know that Epstein manipulated a teen Guiffre into believing he was guiding her to do better things, when in reality he was using her body for his own sexual gratification, just like the hundreds, most likely thousands, of other girls he trafficked? Unfortunately, the answer for me is that it’s unlikely, given that Chomsky was already aware that Epstein had been found guilty of crimes against underage girls. Again, it would appear he simply didn’t care. It’s also hard to think that most of these men, the ones who weren’t sexually involved with the girls, weren’t somehow aware of them, since Guiffre spoke of how she was a constant presence at Epstein’s residences (she indicates that she moved into his NYC mansion after she “disappeared” once when staying in one of his other residences when she went sightseeing when she first arrived in New York), and she wasn’t the only girl. In her memoir, she spoke of a stream of girls who were always coming and going. How were they not seen?

The pedophile and rapist with an extremely young-looking woman in NYC. Date of photo unknown.

Perhaps they were seen, but they were simply ignored, or even admired, just like Epstein’s paintings, elegant chandeliers, luxurious tapestries, and other pieces of fine artwork he’d collected in his mansions. Or maybe theses prestigious guests, including Chomsky, could hear the girls’ muffled whispers or even mournful cries above the polite dinner conversation about physics, gravity, generative grammar, or transformational grammar, the latter two subjects which were Chomsky’s specialities, and simply chewed quietly on their food, politely nodded, and leaned in to hear what a child molester like Woody Allen had to say about his latest movie script, ignoring the nafarious hauntings that engulfed them at Epstein’s house of horrors.

After all, isn’t this what we’re all taught under capitalism, even if we don’t dine at the dinner table of a pedophile and rapist, sitting alongside a child molester? Ignore the suffering of others. Turn away from that beggar on the street. When you are instinctually cued in to help those who need it the most, you are taught to despise them, to think it’s their own fault that they’re in the situation they’re in, and so the academics and most certainly the corporate executives who dined at Epstein’s residences could easily write off the girls, perhaps, if they saw them or heard them. Some of them might have even thought, “That is their lot. They found themselves here for a reason. It isn’t my problem.” It’s important to be reminded of the politics of politeness or respectability, as most call it, and how it functions as a tool of cruelty in patriarchal capitalist systems to ultimately dominate, subjugate, punish, and abuse the vulnerable. Guiffre writes about the way in which she finally confronted her father of molesting her for years at a family reunion. The entire extended family was present. They heard everything she said and then witnessed her father take her to their camper and beat her to a bloody pulp. She naïvely thought that with the truth coming out, it would change something, that a family member or more than one of them would come to her rescue, but instead, the next morning, when she woke up with a bloodied lip and black eyes, she came out of the camper, and everyone was silent. The only person who spoke to her was her Aunt Peggy, who was fixing breakfast.

“Want some bacon and eggs?” she asked Guiffre with a chirp in her tone.

These might seem like examples of how the politics of respectability operate in extreme situations (keep in mind, the first one might not be far from the truth, and the second case is true); however, in both cases, whether it’s powerful men, either extremely accomplished academics or executives, or family members, coming face-to-face with a patriarch in their tribe committing the unthinkable, taking the path of least resistance is a common response when it comes to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy capitalistic systems of domination.

For The Girls and Women—the Survivors

Up until this point, this essay has been centered on the rapacious, selfish, misogynistic men and the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy systems of domination that they continue to perpetuate, dominate, and propagate.⁴

So, what about the girls, women, and ultimately the survivors? I made a point to open this essay with Guiffre’s words, and I intend to close it with her statements as well. These victims, who are now survivors, have had a lot taken from them. I know. I speak from experience myself. As I mentioned above, Guiffre said that this dumb, bullshit artist, who somehow became a billionaire, liked to see himself as a mentor to the girls he raped. Pardon me for a moment. My language is going to shift here. It’s going to become more raw. First off, Jesus Christ. What an asshole, loser, creep he was. But, I digress. Epstein also liked to walk around wearing Harvard sweatshirts, even though he was a college dropout, something that Guiffre pointed out, and I appreciated the dig. In any event, what really got my blood boiling about all these “academic-y,” again, pardon the language, shitbags, was what Guiffre said after that. It made my stomach churn. Here’s what she wrote:

Sometimes we’d sit in his steam shower for hours as he held forth on topics I’d never heard of before: game theory, say, or evolutionary biology, financial derivatives, or the mathematical underpinnings of human language. He also gave me books to read. Many of them were sexual in nature, such as Nabokov’s Lolita and Ann Desclos’s Story of O, but his instistence that I read them still felt like a vote of confidence. Frequently Epstein told me something that I needed to hear: that I was smart and full of potential.

Epstein was implementing classic grooming tactics here. Guiffre spoke of how, after she would give him long massages, he would force her to have sex with him, and then they would go into his steam shower. That’s when these cockamamie lectures would take place. Obviously, Guiffre wasn’t the only girl he was lecturing, so he could make himself feel important, as the chapter of the title is called, “A Very Important Man.” Think about what that was doing to their psyches! He was mixing sexual abuse with the beauty of knowledge, something that is supposed to be pure, meaningful, and sought after for one’s own benefit. Instead, he was tainting it with something depraved, mixed with control and power, and pain. It’s unconscionable to think about. Then I consider the emails between Chomsky and Epstein, the defensive tone he took with The Wall Street Journal when asked about his relationship with him, and his misogynistic attacks against girls and women. That’s also unconscionable, and it’s unforgivable.

The survivors—these girls and women—should always be front and center. Period. Their hopes, aspirations, how we, as a society, can assure that they are healed, those are the things that should and must come first, not the reputations of a crusty old wanker who defending a pedophile and rapist, not billionaires who give fuck all about anyone of us, let alone girls they raped, but the survivors who endured years of torture under the thumb of Epstein and his cronies. Right now, we are failing them, all of us, including me. I want to publicly apologize to them. I want to tell them that I will do my best to be better, to show up for them, to speak out more, too, as a survivor myself. Even though I was young when the things happened to me, I wish I had more courage to speak out back then, to refuse to be muzzled, to fight harder, so that others could have heard my story. To the Epstein survivors—I admire all of you so much. Thank you for your bravery, for doing the right thing, for showing us all how to speak truth to power.

Finally, this essay ends with a note to Guiffre. It’s devastating that we’ve lost you. I hope more people will read your book. You didn’t lose, and the battle continues. Thank you for being a warrior for survivors. I’ve found the courage to write all of these pieces, denouncing people like Chomsky and linking these stories to larger structural issues that harm people globally.

At this point, we need to burn this entire system to the ground. I honestly don’t think any of it can be resuscitated. It’s rotten to the core, and it appears that includes our universities.

The reckoning has only just begun. It’s long overdue. It starts with all of us. All of us.

Rest in peace, Virginia Roberts Giuffre.

Further Reading

1. The term, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, was coined by Black philosopher and intellectual bell hooks (1952 - 2021). She later expanded upon the term, referring to the system in which we’re all a part of as imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In an interview in 1997, when asked why she used the term, she explained:

I began to use the phrase in my work ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ because I wanted to have some language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality and not to just have one thing be like, you know, gender is the important issue, race is the important issue, but for me the use of that particular jargonistic phrase was a way, a sort of short cut way of saying all of these things actually are functioning simultaneously at all times in our lives and that if I really want to understand what's happening to me, right now at this moment in my life, as a black female of a certain age group, I won't be able to understand it if I'm only looking through the lens of race. I won't be able to understand it if I'm only looking through the lens of gender. I won't be able to understand it if I'm only looking at how white people see me.

2. Mystery surrounds the cause of his death.

3. For readability, some typographical errors have been corrected.

4. I realize this story is more complicated than I’m making it, as white women also prop up, defend, and perpetuate white supremacist capitalist patriarchy systems of power, but I don’t have the space to explore that in this current essay. I will write a follow-up essay to add to that after I’ve finished this piece. It’s a necessary addition to this piece, which is missing, and I recognize that.