CBS News’ newest “star” contributor once chose to meet with Jeffrey Epstein—ignoring his wife’s plea to come to the hospital where their infant son was being treated.
Peter Attia, who joined the ranks of MAGA-curious Bari Weiss’ CBS News last week, regularly communicated with perhaps America’s most notorious pedophile until Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges and later killed himself in 2019. That correspondence resurfaced Friday with the Justice Department’s latest tranche of so-called Epstein files, in which Attia is named more than 1,700 times.
But it was Attia’s own admission, detailed in his book, that revealed he ditched his family in their hour of need rather than cancel plans with Epstein.
“Tuesday, July 11, 2017, at 5:45 p.m., to be exact—I had received a call from Jill, my wife,” Attia wrote in his book, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity.
Attia said his wife was in the back of an ambulance with their son, who had “suddenly stopped breathing” and had no heartbeat until Jill, a nurse, resuscitated him through CPR.
“When Jill called me from the ambulance, I was in New York, in a taxi on Fifty-Fourth Street, on my way to dinner,” Attia wrote. “After she finished telling me the story, I just said, without a shred of emotion, ‘Okay, call me when you get to the hospital, so I can talk to the doctors in the ICU.’”
Attia remorsefully detailed how his wife spent four days alone in the ICU, pleading for him to come home to no avail. “I stayed in New York, busy with my ‘important’ work,” he wrote. “Ayrton’s cardiac arrest happened on a Tuesday, but I did not come home to San Diego until Friday of the following week. Ten days later.”
Meanwhile, an email from the day after his son’s near-death shows Attia solidifying plans to meet Epstein the next morning.
“Sure,” Attia writes to Epstein of a meeting at 9:30 a.m. the following day. “I can come earlier, also, if you have a hard stop at 10. Let me know.”
A trove of emails between Attia and Epstein outlines the pair’s seemingly playful friendship. Attia joked with Epstein and even voiced concern for his legal well-being after serious allegations were made against the disgraced financier.
In June 2015, Attia gushed in an email to Epstein that the “worst” part about being his friend is that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.” The message was written seven years after Epstein was first arrested for procuring a child for prostitution and four years before his federal sex-trafficking arrest.
In 2016, Attia wrote to Epstein, “P—y is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.”
In December 2018, Attia asked Epstein if there was any legal “fallout” from a recent story, apparently referencing the November 2018 Miami Herald report by Julie K. Brown exposing 80 of Epstein’s victims.
Critics regard Attia as a “wellness grifter” and liken him to a snake-oil salesman-turned-podcaster who offers clients tips on longevity through a $2,500 subscription service despite having only fundamental medical training.
Attia is among several controversial figures introduced by Weiss as contributors intended to elevate the network. Others include Niall Ferguson, who resigned from Stanford’s free speech program after emails leaked of him asking for “opposition research” on a left-wing student; conservative author Elliot Ackerman, who advocates reinstating the draft and calls five-time draft dodger Donald Trump a “combat leader”; and “wellness bro” YouTuber Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist who sells dietary supplements through partner companies.
The Daily Beast has reached out to CBS News and Attia, neither of which has responded to the ongoing developments.
Rather than address the controversy, Attia kept posting about wellness treatments on his social accounts. On Sunday, he shared a link on X to a diabetes drug that has not been proven to deliver anti-aging benefits. “A closer look at the MET-PREVENT trial and what its null results reveal about aging interventions and trial design,” he wrote.
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