What a blurry four-second Epstein video reveals about the world’s great minds

By now, we’ve probably all got certain scenes or events from the released files of Jeffrey Epstein that snag in our mind’s eye and won’t go away. The dump of Department of Justice (DOJ) material in February has made 3am sleuths of us all. Each one of the redacted pictures and film clips and emails raises questions that seem to dramatise a state of mind as much as a news story. They are like the items pinned up on one of those procedural whiteboards at the start of a ten-part Norwegian crime drama: you stare at them in the hope that connections will occur, sense will be established.

I was first alerted by a colleague – “have you seen this one?” – to the image that my mind currently keeps nagging at. It is a four-second video clip of Epstein in one of his private jets with the distinguished professor of psychology at Harvard, Steven Pinker. The clip, now available in perpetuity on “JeffTube” (the citizen-created searchable archive of DoJ Epstein-related footage) shows Epstein and Pinker turning to glance toward the camera – held by Ghislaine Maxwell? – and momentarily breaking off from a conversation. They are on their way to a TED talk in California in 2002.

The disquieting thing is not the proximity of Epstein to a paid-up member of the world’s intellectual elite – we’re all used to that by now and are invited to understand that the lavish funding of research programmes was one of the many strategies the pimp used to inveigle his way into Ivy League high society. The disturbing element is rather the snatch of audio in the background. As the pair look into the camera, the slightly dreamy voice of a young woman with an accent can be heard off camera. The voice is saying to no one in particular: “Where are you taking us?”

There is no evidence or suggestion that Pinker was aware of or involved in any of Epstein’s crimes, and he has repeatedly expressed his regret about any proximity to the sex trafficker. “I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him and always tried to keep my distance. 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.” It was inevitable, however, Pinker said, that because “Epstein had insinuated himself with so many people I intersected with,” and since “I was often the most recognisable person in the room, someone would snap a picture; some of them [have] resurfaced, circulated by people who disagree with me on various topics and apparently believe that the photos are effective arguments.” All but one of their joint engagements were before Epstein’s arrest in 2005, though the pair are pictured together at a dinner in 2014.

There is no reason to doubt Pinker’s statement. But still, as a viewer you can’t honestly help but be struck by the accidental choreography of the scene on the plane. It’s a feeling that points to a wider question about the whole fallout of the Epstein case – the way it threatens to make obsessive conspiracy theorists of us all.

The clip looks like the opening frame of an Adam Curtis film that seeks to explain the hidden currents of our baffling globalised world. The wolfish Epstein and the great Harvard cognitive psychologist – celebrated author of How the Mind Works – and the plaintive young woman’s voice, all for one instant sharing airspace, and now flying together in our heads: “Where are you taking us?”

The Epstein files were released in a spirit of grudging political transparency. A month or so on though, the principal questions they raise seem to be: what exactly are we looking at here? What is the status of the information these emails and images provide? Is the material to be trusted? And – in the absence of any substantive formal inquiry or legal proceedings (in the US at least) – what are we supposed to do with such knowledge? Without context each file is like one of those riddling dark web data drops that set QAnon in motion. It seems designed for a random global crowdsourced investigation; we are all left to pull at threads, follow internet trails.

If you do that in the case of the Pinker video, you’ll quite quickly find yourself along with several others – bloggers, substackers, trolls – in the small print of a document from Epstein’s original 2007 legal proceedings at which he was eventually convicted of one count of sex trafficking and one count of sex trafficking a minor. His defence in that case, settled by plea bargain, was led by Alan Dershowitz, the youngest-ever professor of law at Harvard, who also famously created defence strategies for OJ Simpson, for Mike Tyson in his appeal against a rape conviction in 1991, and for Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial.

When you are following those links you discover – of course you do – that at the same time he was conducting the Epstein case, Dershowitz was also teaching a standing-room only lecture series at Harvard along with his old intellectual sparring partner and friend, Steven Pinker. The class was entitled “Morality and Taboo”. In an academic world increasingly marshalled by trigger warnings and identity sensitivities, Pinker and Dershowitz were making the robust case for saying the unsayable, for following the truth and the data wherever it may lead, even into uncomfortable questions of racial and gender difference. (Harvard was at the centre of those debates at that moment, following its President Larry Summers’s caveated observation in 2005 that one plausible reason for a relatively low number of women in senior research positions in science faculties was a “different availability of aptitude at the high end”; Pinker was his stalwart defender of his right to make this argument).

By all accounts Pinker and Dershowitz’s lectures were a freewheeling masterclass in the philosophy and the particulars of the first amendment. For trigger-happy students it was an opportunity to experience two of the most curious minds in the world address some of the thorniest questions of our times from both a legal and a philosophical perspective.

It was around the same time they were delivering this lecture series, you then discover, that Dershowitz called on Pinker, his esteemed colleague, to provide a commentary or gloss on a point of law in a case he was preparing. It was a statute concerning trafficking a minor for sex. This wasn’t the first time Dershowitz had asked for the professor’s linguistic help. One of Pinker’s many specialties was in the field of semantics, teasing out the precise meaning of sentences, the intentions behind syntax, as well as simplifying legal jargon.

There was no suggestion of a conflict of interest for Dershowitz or for Pinker. Still, the trail of links also takes you to the fact that, at the same time that allegations against Epstein first surfaced, the disgraced financier had use of an office at Harvard, and had been a “visiting fellow” in the psychology department in which Pinker was a senior professor. Epstein had been particularly generous in his donations to Harvard, including giving more than $6.5m to support its pioneering work in mathematical models of evolutionary psychology. Reports suggest a total of $30m had been pledged.

When he was presented with the legal statute to examine, Pinker insists that at the time he had no knowledge that the case his lecture-partner Dershowitz was engaged in was on behalf of their would-be colleague (and there is no evidence to doubt him). He approached the favour, it seems, simply as a kind of thought experiment of the kind he relishes. The statute he was asked to examine concerned the law about the “use of mail” or other communication to “persuade, induce, entice or coerce” a girl under the age of 18 from another state or country to engage in sex. The crime, if proven, carried a mandatory penalty of at least ten years in prison.

It’s worth reading Pinker’s note, if only to marvel at the professor’s intellectual peacockery. Pinker, in the abstract, provided a gloss on how he believed a “literate English speaker” would interpret that statute. It boiled down, he suggested, to the question, does the statute apply “1) to someone who uses the mail and then persuades a minor to engage in sex, or does it apply only to 2) someone who uses the mail in order to persuade a minor to engage in sex.”

Over two pages of analysis of the precise relation between “appositive gerunded phrases” and “causative main verbs” he concluded that “the sexual come-on would have to be in the letter”. It would not be enough in his terms for the accused to use a letter to invite the minor to, let’s say, a private island, if the intention to have illegal sex was not explicitly stated in that letter. In effect, the commentary was the linguistic professor’s version of Dershowitz’s famous glove strategy in the OJ trial: if the glove doesn’t fit, then you must acquit. The argument, footnoted in Dershowitz’s defence statement, was no doubt among those that proved persuasive in limiting Epstein’s eventual sentence to just eighteen months.

There is of course nothing illegal in providing the best possible defence for a man charged with heinous crimes. It is, however, striking, reading Pinker’s commentary, that not for a moment in his note to Dershowitz did the world-famous professor appear to pause to question the real-world case – and the implicated harm – that might have been behind his friend’s inquiry. Pinker says he regrets writing that letter, which was an unpaid favour to Dershowitz, a friend.

If there is one certainty in Epstein-related stories it is that they required, over two decades, no end of blind eyes to be turned; many of them the otherwise most enquiring eyes on the planet. Harvard has issued a mea culpa about its eagerness to take money from Epstein over many years, while rumour swirled around him. Pinker acknowledges that he knew Epstein was a creep but went along anyway, with hundreds of his peers, for example, to the lavish and virtually all-male “Edge Foundation” events – those annual gatherings of eminent scientists and thinkers that Epstein bankrolled to ask “the most dangerous questions”. None of that is remotely revealing of wrongdoing, of course, but it does expose a wider academic culture of self-styled free thinkers apparently committed to always asking every hard question under the sun except perhaps the million-dollar ones about the Victoria’s Secret mogul who was paying for private jets and supper.

It is for this reason, I think, that the strange voice of the girl in the video clip now seems so stubbornly troubling – it provides the tiniest emblematic glimpse of one of the most curious minds of his generation appearing not remotely curious about the situation on the plane. Pinker was very far from alone in that response and we are all knowledgeable in hindsight. But in the context of what we know now, what status does this kind of information reasonably have? What can we take to be a reasonable understanding of such images?

If you were to try to nail down the precise parameters of such questions, one very good place to start would be Steven Pinker’s latest bestselling book When Everyone Knows What Everyone Knows. It’s a lucid inquiry into the way that common knowledge – the things that we know to be true and know that others know to be true – underpins all of our relationships and the functioning of society.

Pinker displays all of his compelling easy erudition on every page of the book, which kicks off, inevitably, with a deconstruction of the emperor’s new clothes. Still, it is hard not to read it, as I did over this weekend, without just a little of that other less secure information intruding into your head.

You find yourself highlighting passages like this one, say:

“The historical trend toward openness has a natural limit, with radical honesty turning out to be the greatest hypocrisy of all.”

Or this one:

“Just as common knowledge may be generated at scale to enable our formal institutions, it may be squelched at scale to protect them.”

Or this one:

“The police often choose to look away from infractions that the offenders try to veil, however thinly, such as ‘escort services’... Enforcing the letter of every law would be exorbitant and intrusive, but allowing it to be common knowledge that laws may be openly flouted would signal that the legal system has forfeited its authority.”

The truth is you could end up underlining almost every passage in the book, such is the way that doubt works. Common knowledge about the events surrounding Epstein is impossible to come by and no one seems minded to make it so. Pinker ends his book with a sentence that might accurately sum up our relation with the DoJ archive, that mass of records in which every single email and image demands investigation, but none ever remotely promises closure or certainty. “What is most special about our kind is that we not only have thoughts, but have thoughts about our thoughts and thoughts about our thoughts about our thoughts.”

Epstein is of course not mentioned in Pinker’s book. His name is not the only one I found myself scanning the index for. Some of the material in the book seems directly drawn from Pinker’s lecture series with Alan Dershowitz – it details several of those same taboo-breaking questions that the pair used as evidence of their pursuit of fearless free speech back in the day – but for whatever reason, I found myself noting, the lawyer does not warrant a mention in Pinker’s three pages of effusive acknowledgements. Should such tiny observations prompt you to have thoughts about your thoughts about your thoughts? Who knows?

Photograph by US Department of Justice