CBS News editor Bari Weiss has been slammed for promoting an event featuring Steven Pinker, the famed Harvard psychologist occasionally described as being one of Jeffrey Epstein’s “pals.”
Weiss hosted a faith debate Thursday between the 71-year-old Pinker and The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, but most attention was not on the substance of the event, but on the featuring of Pinker.
“Weiss can’t seem to stop promoting Epstein’s pals,” wrote Mehdi Hasan, the former MSNBC host who founded the media company Zeteo, on X.
Hasan’s post included a selfie of Pinker with Epstein and the physicist Lawrence Krauss. The photo was posted to the Facebook page of the “Jeffrey Epstein IV Foundation” in August 2014.
Many others reshared the selfie on Thursday night while criticizing Weiss.
“Ross Douthat and Stephen Pinker debate God for @TheFP, moderated by the brilliant @whignewtons,” Weiss posted on X, misspelling Pinker’s first name. “Nowhere I’d rather be. Though I hear there’s some news?”
The event was organized by The Free Press, which Weiss co-founded with Nellie Bowles and continues to oversee. CBS News did not respond to a request for comment on the criticism of its editor.
The three most-liked replies to Weiss’s post about the event all featured the Pinker-Epstein selfie.
“Why are you surrounded by pedophile enablers?” read one reply. “Pinker now? Good god.”
Another said, “Why do you have a thing for constantly promoting people in Epstein’s social circle?”
A third added, “Promoting more friends of Epstein, well done.”
Weiss hired Peter Attia, an anti-aging guru, as a CBS News contributor in January. That was just before the DOJ released a tranche of Epstein files that revealed a trove of emails between Attia and the late sex trafficker, including them making crude jokes about women.
In June 2015, Attia lamented how the “biggest problem” of being Epstein’s friend is that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.” The following year, Attia wrote to Epstein, “P—y is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.
Another thread of emails revealed that when Attia’s infant son was hospitalized in the ICU in 2017, he ignored his wife’s pleas for him to fly home from New York. Instead, he planned to meet with Epstein the next day.
Attia, 52, offered his resignation to Weiss this week.
Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist credited with breaking many of the most-damning articles about Epstein’s abuse of women and minors, also chimed in on Weiss hosting Pinker.
She reminded that Pinker lightly contributed to Epstein’s legal defense in 2007 by providing a linguistic opinion on the semantics of a federal prostitution law when Epstein was first criminally accused of sexually abusing three dozen girls.
Pinker said he gave his opinion to his Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz and that he was unaware of the client or the case. He claimed to BuzzFeed News in 2019—the same year Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges and died via suicide in prison—that he regretted sharing his expertise on the matter.
“Though I did this as a favor to a friend and colleague, and not as either a paid expert witness or as a part of a defense team, knowing what I know now I do regret writing the letter,” Pinker told the outlet.
Brown also posted a screenshot of a 2012 email—released by the Justice Department last month—that shows Pinker saying he would be “delighted” to meet with Epstein.
Pinker has described his relationship with Epstein as involuntary and marked by personal distaste.
“I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him, and always tried to keep my distance,” Pinker said of Epstein in 2019, according to Inside Higher Ed.
He continued, “I found him to be a kibitzer and a dilettante—he would abruptly change the subject, ADD-style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack, and privilege his own intuitions over systematic data.”
Pinker said that those recirculating photos of him and Epstein were not doing so in good faith.
“I was often the most recognizable person in the room, someone would snap a picture; some of them resurfaced this past week, circulated by people who disagree with me on various topics and apparently believe that the photos are effective arguments,” he continued.
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