Joe Rogan reacted on Tuesday to being named in the Epstein files.
On Tuesday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the podcaster said he never once considered meeting Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced late financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide while in federal custody in New York City in August 2019 while awaiting trial on new sex trafficking charges.
“I’m in the files for not going,” Rogan said, speaking with podcast guest Cheryl Hines, the actress who is married to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Rogan made the comments after an email exchange released by the Justice Department in January appeared to show theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, a former guest on Rogan’s podcast, offering to connect the pair in September 2017.
In the exchange, Epstein wrote to Krauss after seeing him appear on Rogan’s show and asked: “Can you introduce me.” Krauss replied that he would attempt to do so but later wrote that he had not heard back from Rogan.
“Jeffrey Epstein was trying to meet with me. And I was like, what? Like, no thanks,” Rogan said.
“Aren’t you glad [you didn’t go]?” Hines asked Rogan.
“It’s not even a possibility that I would’ve ever went, especially after I Googled him,” the podcaster replied.
“I was like, what the f--- are you talking about? This was like 2017. One of my guests was trying to get me to meet him. I was like, b---h are you high? Like, what the f--- are you talking about?”
Rogan said he would have had no reason to meet Epstein unless he was “a guy who is sucking up to the rich and powerful.”
He added that “some people get intoxicated by being in a circle of rich and powerful people, even if they don’t have any ambitions of being one of those people. They just want to be around them.”
Rogan also described Epstein’s networking as “very clever,” saying the financier “was getting all of these very powerful and very respected people together.”
He added: “Yeah. And you would figure like, [former President Bill] Clinton’s here. How could this be bad? You know, he’s a genius.”
Rogan, who endorsed Donald Trump for president in 2024, has since criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the release of documents related to Epstein. In July, he accused the administration of “trying to gaslight” the public after officials said no additional material would be released.
Since then, additional documents have been released, including 3 million files made public by the Department of Justice in January. The releases followed the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November mandating the disclosure of Epstein-related files.
