CBS News editor Bari Weiss has hosted an event featuring Steven Pinker, the famed Harvard psychologist who has been described as one of Jeffrey Epstein’s “pals.”
Weiss hosted a faith debate on 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 its 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 and was widely reshared on Thursday night by critics of 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 “news” in question may have been that CNN is next on MAGA’s wishlist to overhaul, like she has done at CBS News.
Thursday’s event was organized by The Free Press, which Weiss co-founded with her wife, Nellie Bowles.
Bowles, 38, met with Epstein in 2018 when she was a reporter at The New York Times. She described the sit-down as a coffee meeting to discuss potential reporting. However, she continued speaking with Epstein over email, in which he referred to Weiss as her “babe.”
After the meeting was revealed in a late January dump of Epstein’s emails, Bowles revealed in an essay that Epstein was “charismatic and dark, sarcastic and quick” in their meeting at his Manhattan townhome. She said she tried to meet “his wit.”
“He made bawdy jokes,” Bowles continued. “He was, you’ll be shocked to hear, a misogynist. He said he has islands where he goes with his friends, and that they have girls stay on one island since girls just yap yap yap, and he needs some peace and quiet, you know what I mean?”
Bowles is not the only mutual associate Weiss has with Epstein.
One of her first moves as head of CBS News was to hire the anti-aging guru Peter Attia as a contributor. His hire was announced just before the DOJ released a tranche of Epstein files, which revealed numerous 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.
CBS News did not respond to a request for comment on the criticism of its editor for hosting Pinker on Thursday.
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 said that Pinker 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.
