In Pirates and Emperors, Noam Chomsky retells the story from St. Augustine’s City of God in which a pirate, captured by Alexander the Great, is asked how he dares to molest the sea. “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replies. “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an Emperor.”
For nearly half a century, that parable anchored one of Chomsky’s central moral arguments: that the crimes of the powerful often mirror, in moral structure, the crimes of the marginal, but are vastly greater in scale, and that prestige, scale, and institutional cover render the former invisible while the latter are prosecuted with theatrical outrage. The argument applies to state terrorism, imperial war, capitalist exploitation and ecocide.
Chomsky has insisted, repeatedly, that most people in the Global North are participants in these systems—that our friendships, professional alliances, tax payments, consumption patterns, acceptance and admiration for wealthy elites and celebrities make us complicit in violence that dwarfs, in scope, the intimate horror of any individual predator.
This means that Chomsky’s logic of complicity applies not only to the powerful but also to the householder—the ordinary participant in a materialistic society, who is not immune to the lure of status, comfort, and access. That is the deeper vulnerability of someone like Chomsky: not lack of moral backbone, but the very ordinariness of his attachments. His life was not that of a renunciant monk but of a householder embedded in the “dusty life” of family, wife, children, academic prestige, investments, middle‑class comfort, social and other entanglements, which made him susceptible to the very gifts Epstein could offer— especially, as we will see, when he married a socially ambitious much younger woman at 85.
The recent release of millions of pages of Epstein documents by the U.S. Department of Justice has exposed a relationship between Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein far more intimate, sustained, and materially entangled than anyone had previously acknowledged.
The revelations are damning. But if we accept Chomsky’s own argument about the diffuse complicity that sustains imperial violence, capitalist exploitation, and environmental destruction—if we accept that most of us maintain cordial relationships with people embedded in systems that kill and cause suffering on a vastly larger scale—then the great moral outrage clustering around one elderly intellectual’s friendship with a charming predatory financier begins to look less like a principled reckoning and more like the phenomenon he spent his life describing: selective indignation that focuses on the sexualized crimes of the elite, while the more legitimized structural, legal, and economic crimes they commit or enable remains largely invisible.
It isn’t, for example, the war crimes of U.S. presidents that we (or certainly the corporate media) object to so much as the idea that they might have lied about sex or committed sex crimes e.g. the Monica Lewinsky scandal or the possibility that Bill Clinton might have had sex with underage girls at Epstein Island—and not, say, his bombing of the Al Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.
And not only do we not object to the existence and power of centimillionaires (like Epstein), or even billionaires — we praise them and strive to become them. We only permit ourselves to criticize narrower forms of abuse.
Moral panic is directed at the crimes of the ‘emperor’ only when they leave intact the more legitimized and central aspects of his structural crimes—leaving intact the much broader network of everyday friendships and professional alliances. Politicians, generals, corporate executives, and many ‘ordinary’ professionals live off and enable systems that kill, dispossess, and exploit on a global scale, yet their complicity is rarely treated as a reason to cut them off personally or socially.
The intensity of outrage directed at Epstein’s sexual predation operates within a familiar pattern: the crimes that are socially and politically sanctioned—imperial war, neoliberal dispossession, financialized exploitation, ecocide—are treated as nearly inevitable, while the crimes that are intimate and sexualized are treated as scandalous betrayals. The result is a pattern Chomsky himself described in Pirates and Emperors: the “putrid” press treatment of predators like Epstein becomes the scandal, while the far larger systems of killing and exploitation they sit within remain largely unchallenged as structures of everyday life.
That does not excuse Chomsky’s behavior. It complicates the terms of judgment. And it makes the story that follows—of grief, aging, mortality, manipulation, and a second wife who reshaped every dimension of Chomsky’s late life—all the more important to tell clearly.
The Architectures of a Life
For six decades, the facts of Chomsky’s private life were, by the standards of an upper middle class professor, monotonously virtuous. He wore simple clothes, lived modestly, gave away book royalties, answered anybody’s e-mails, gave countless interviews, talks, and Q&As, and shared every dimension of his existence with Carol Chomsky, his partner since childhood and his wife since 1949. He was a workaholic who had to be reminded to eat. His authority derived not only from revolutionary linguistics and relentless political dissent but from a perceived incorruptibility—an intellectual life organized around the exposure of power’s lies, not the enjoyment of its comforts.
Carol died of cancer on December 19, 2008. She was 78; Noam was 80. Those close to the couple noted an immediate change. Norman Finkelstein, a longtime friend, stopped spending time with Chomsky after Carol’s death, saying “things felt different.” The filmmaker Michel Gondry captured a moment in which the mere mention of Carol’s name caused Chomsky to visibly unravel on camera. Researchers on late‑life spousal bereavement describe what happened to him in clinical terms: identity disruption, social withdrawal, heightened vulnerability to outside influence—especially when the survivor lacks strong alternative support networks.
Valeria
Five years after Carol’s death, at 85, Chomsky married Valeria Wasserman, a 50-year-old Brazilian woman (35 years his junior). Where Carol had been the household’s practical anchor—fixing cars, managing schedules, pulling Noam away from conversations he was too generous to end—Valeria was socially ambitious, enthusiastic about elite company, and drawn to the world of status, luxury, and access that Chomsky’s politics had long held in contempt.
It’s reasonable to infer that providing and indulging in this lifestyle was something that Chomsky knew was the “price” that had to be paid in exchange for what was a kind of social and emotional luxury as a very elderly man nearing death—a younger partner to love, an “unexpected, wondrous gift that fell into my arms,” as he called her, who offered not just companionship that would lift him from his grief, but visibility, status, and a life far more expansive than the modest routine he had long inhabited.
In interviews from this period he put it bluntly: “life without love is a pretty empty affair,” and by then “love” meant precisely this late‑life marriage, i.e. romantic love. That conviction was a major motive behind the choices that followed.
There is even a phallic joke from Epstein—“At your age, if anything sticks up, be proud,” to which Chomsky replies, “Ouch,” and Epstein answers, “Good, it still has feelings as well”—explicitly about Chomsky’s penis. In the context of a man in his late 80s with a much younger wife, and a relationship with Epstein built around travel, luxury, and stimulation, it is hard not to hear this as part of a pattern in which Epstein offers not only money and access but a teasing reassurance of virility and appeal, the kind of compensatory “luxury” that helps sustain a late‑life relationship shaped by structural sexual asymmetry.
In this arrangement, all three parties—Chomsky, Valeria, and Epstein—were adding value to gain value from the others: Chomsky offered prestige, financial support and intellectual heft, Valeria offered the company, intimacy, and social‑life presence of a younger woman, and Epstein offered money, charm, luxury, and elite connection. Each in turn was willing to give up something they otherwise might have guarded: for Chomsky, the more modest, relatively self‑contained life he had long inhabited; for Valeria, the possibility of a younger, lower‑status partner; for Epstein, the time and resources required to sustain a relationship that lent his image a veneer of intellectual legitimacy.
Over time, this arrangement reshaped the household’s emotional and financial landscape. The resulting change was striking and rapid. The emails released in January 2026 make clear that it was Valeria, far more than Noam, who drove the deepening relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. She described Epstein as “our best friend. I mean ‘the’ one.” She wrote to him: “You are a hero, Jeffrey!!!” She was the one who forwarded private family correspondence to Epstein, who primarily solicited his advice on financial and legal matters, and who treated him as a personal consigliere on questions ranging from trust restructuring to social connections.
The luxury gifts flowed through Valeria’s orbit: cashmere sweaters, Carnegie Deli hampers, private car services, stays in Epstein’s Manhattan and Paris apartments, expensive hotels, lunches at his New Mexico ranch. In a 2016 email, Chomsky himself wrote that “Valeria is always eager about New York” and that he was “genuinely fantasizing about the Caribbean island”. For a man who had spent his life in campus offices and far more modest homes, this was a different world entirely, and it was Valeria who had opened the door to it.
If Chomsky had remained single, or had not entered this late‑life marriage, a relationship with Epstein—if it happened at all—would have likely stayed limited to occasional financial help and sporadic intellectual exchanges, the kind of generous but non‑entangling connections he has had with countless people over the decades. It was Valeria’s presence, her needs, and her own desire for high‑status social connections and a more active, affluent lifestyle, amplified by Epstein’s direct involvement, that transformed him into a recurring, quasi‑familial figure in Chomsky’s late 80s and 90s.
The Estate, the Children, and the Confidant
The most consequential dimension of Valeria’s influence was financial. Chomsky and Carol had established trusts for their three children and grandchildren, structured on the assumption that Carol would outlive Noam. When that assumption proved wrong and Noam remarried, the family’s financial architecture became a source of escalating conflict.
Chomsky’s children noticed what they called a “dramatic and unexplainable” increase in his spending after the 2014 marriage. “This unexpected outflow is placing your financial future at risk,” they warned. They objected strenuously to Valeria and Noam’s plan to place Epstein’s personal accountant, Richard Kahn—who would later be named co‑executor of Epstein’s own estate and bequeathed $25 million in Epstein’s will—on the board of the Chomsky family trust. Kahn was not just a financial advisor; he was Epstein’s gatekeeper, and his placement on the trust’s board concentrated Epstein‑aligned control over the Chomsky estate.
In July 2017, the three children wrote a joint letter begging for a mediated meeting. Chomsky, now in his late eighties and emotionally dependent on Valeria, sided with his wife. He characterized his children as caring more about money than his quality of life, arguing that they didn’t need the money. The dispute was, he wrote, a “painful cloud that I never would have imagined would darken my late years.”
Valeria went further, dismissing the children’s warnings as “abusive and unacceptable” and accusing them of behaving “like Nazis”—a remark that, from the wife of a Jewish intellectual whose life’s work was shaped by the legacy of fascism, underscores how completely her own worldview had come to dominate the household.
Socially ambitious and financially savvy, Valeria had become the main conduit between the Chomsky family and Epstein’s financial and legal team, overseeing the restructuring of trusts and inheritance arrangements that increasingly favored her.
Throughout this rupture, Valeria and Noam forwarded private family correspondence to Epstein, who advised them at every turn. In one of his last known messages on the subject, Epstein wrote: “I wanted the release to acknowledge that they are aware that you’ve decided to leave your entire estate to Valeria.” By the time the dispute was resolved, the family trusts had been restructured to Valeria’s decisive advantage, and Chomsky’s children had been marginalized from the financial arrangements their mother had helped to build.
The Trump Episode
Perhaps nothing reveals Valeria’s priorities more starkly than her attempt, in November 2016, to use Epstein as a conduit to Donald Trump. Days after Trump’s election, Epstein emailed Valeria with the message: “we called it.” She replied affirmatively, claiming she had predicted Trump’s rise before the primaries. Then she reminded Epstein that he had previously asked whom she would like Noam to speak with. “Here is a guy!” she wrote. “Can you arrange it? He could make good use of Noam’s advices.”
Nothing in the public record suggests Valeria ever asked Chomsky whether he actually wanted to meet Trump. Chomsky is a man who had spent decades arguing that “speaking truth to power makes no sense” because “the powerful already know the truth”. Valeria treated Epstein as a broker of access and visibility, regardless of whether any of it aligned with the politics her husband had spent a lifetime articulating. What mattered to her was the connection itself.
The Advice That Most Of Us Would Give
On February 23, 2019—weeks after the Miami Herald published Julie Brown’s exposé documenting at least 36 allegations of Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls—Epstein wrote to Chomsky asking for advice on managing his “putrid” press coverage. When Chomsky replied he condemned “the horrible way in which you are being treated by the press and society” and advised Epstein to ignore the coverage, drawing an analogy to his own experience enduring “hysterical accusations.” He then added: “That’s particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a charge is a crime worse than murder.”
While the ‘presumption of guilt’ perspective certainly described widespread tendencies within the MeToo movement, Chomsky failed to apply the ‘presumption of uncertainty’—the moral standard that the law tries to achieve when it balances the presumption of innocence against the natural human bias toward presumption of guilt.
The bias toward siding with the accused in a private communication between friends is, of course, very common. What percentage of people wouldn’t privately tell a friend under such fire things like “I’m sorry you’re going through this; it’s better if you do X (e.g. just ignore it)”? Especially if that friend charmed them with their personality and was treating them to dinners, travel, fancy hotels and elite access. Chomsky’s advice is morally troubling not because it is uniquely immoral but because it is a particularly visible instance of a reflex many of us share—and one that becomes a scandal only when the person on the receiving end is a world‑famous critic of power.
Here, Chomsky’s logic of complicity reasserts itself, and simple condemnation becomes insufficient.
The selective intensity of the moral outrage directed at his friendship with Epstein—without the same standard applied to the figures who move through the plutocratic system he has spent his life condemning, reveals something about the critics as much as it does about the accused. Whoever is without complicity may throw the first stone. Very few of us qualify.
Corporate media outlets that support and whitewash war crimes and plutocracy, as well as political opponents of every stripe have used the Epstein revelations to attack Chomsky far more aggressively than they have targeted figures demonstrably closer to Epstein’s crimes on the island, such as Alan Dershowitz.
This disparity shows that what they object to is less his relationship with Epstein than his long‑standing political critique of state power, empire, and plutocracy, and that the Epstein episode is being weaponized to undermine his intellectual authority rather than to grapple honestly with the moral complexity of the case.
Vulnerability Is Real—But Not Necessarily Exculpatory
None of the above unambiguously erases Chomsky’s responsibility. But his late‑life choices cannot be understood without acknowledging the context of vulnerability in which they were made. To recap, he was widowed at 80 after a 60‑year marriage to his childhood companion, then remarried at 85 (nearing death) to a much younger woman who became his sole source of companionship, social life, and emotional support. Research on bereaved older adults consistently shows that such circumstances increase susceptibility to isolation, dependence, and the risk of undue influence.
Chomsky’s vulnerability was not only emotional and social but also material. He was not a renunciant monk who had renounced worldly comforts, but a householder whose life still depended on the very things Epstein could enhance—material comforts, access, and social stimulation, especially at death’s door. That made him more susceptible to manipulation and self‑indulgence, but it also makes his moral failure more recognizable, because it is the failure of the ordinary participant in a materialistic society, not the saint who falls from grace.
Valeria (exculpating herself) has invoked this framework, describing Epstein as a “Trojan horse” who “ensnared” them through flattery, intellectual access, and financial‑lifestyle incentives. In elder‑care law, undue‑influence doctrine treats as potentially exploitative any arrangement in which an older person—even one not fully incapacitated—is steered into decisions that primarily benefit a manipulative confidant. The installation of Epstein’s accountant on the family trust, the marginalization of Chomsky’s children, and the redirection of the entire estate to Valeria look, by that standard, less like a fair family arrangement than a pattern of targeted influence on a vulnerable elder.
But vulnerability is not necessarily exculpation. Commentaries and interviews from this period confirm that Chomsky remained linguistically and politically sharp well into his nineties—still publishing, still debating, still capable of correcting Epstein’s sloppy political reasoning in emails and of arguing in detail over estate arrangements with his children. His vulnerability was emotional and social—grief, loneliness, mortality salience, dependence on Valeria—not primarily cognitive. He seemed to have retained enough agency to recognize what Epstein was and to withdraw—but did not. Without a psychological examination, however, we cannot determine to what extent he truly knew what he was doing.
How Significant Is This for His Legacy?
In the end, Chomsky’s moral and political significance was fundamentally grounded in his intellectual work—revealing the reality of elite power structures. His “dusty life” and the moral failures of his final years do not diminish that contribution.
One might even imagine him dying at 85, before these entanglements, and still recognize that the analysis and moral questions his work poses would not be erased by a neater, more decorous biographical end.
Yet even as his final years took on a morally discordant shape, right up to the end, Chomsky remained an activist in practice, generously devoting hours to responding to emails from anyone, speaking to small, independent YouTube channels and heterodox political projects with the same sharp, uncompromising analysis that had defined his career. He never tailored his message to win favor, and he never retreated from unpopular positions. That continuity makes his entanglement with Epstein not a late‑stage betrayal, but a jarring, morally discordant coda to a life that remained politically unswayed by age, power, or social pressure.