Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker (born 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist and linguist, the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and a client of the literary agent John Brockman. In July 2007, while federal prosecutors in Florida were weighing an indictment of Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein's lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Gerald Lefcourt told the prosecutors that Pinker had analyzed the federal internet-enticement statute and found their narrow reading of it "the sole rational reading." Pinker says he wrote the opinion as an unpaid favor to Dershowitz, did not recall being told it concerned Epstein, never took Epstein's money, and regrets the letter.¹²

Psychologist and Brockman Client

Pinker taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before moving to Harvard in 2003. His books on language, cognition and human nature, among them The Language Instinct (1994), The Blank Slate (2002), The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018), were sold through Brockman's agency, Brockman Inc., and he was a regular contributor to Brockman's Edge, which drew most of its revenue from 2001 to 2017 from Epstein foundations. A December 31, 2010 email from Brockman to Epstein, released in November 2025, reads: "Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting this year's EDGE Question." No direct correspondence between Pinker and Epstein was reported in the released files.³⁴⁵

Pinker's first contact with Epstein came through Brockman. "In 02, my lit agent invited me to join a group of east-coast TED speakers Epstein flew to CA," Pinker wrote in 2019. The group on the 2002 flight to the TED Conference included Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the Brockmans.⁵⁶

Epstein held an appointment as a Visiting Fellow in Harvard's Psychology Department, Pinker's department, for 2005 and 2006, on the recommendation of its chair, Stephen Kosslyn, whose research Epstein had funded with 200,000 dollars; Kosslyn acknowledged that Epstein lacked the qualifications for the research he proposed. Epstein also served on Harvard's Mind, Brain, and Behavior advisory committee, and his foundation's press releases billed him as a "Harvard philanthropist."²⁷

The 2007 Defense Letter

After Epstein's 2006 indictment in Palm Beach County, the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida prepared federal charges; by May 2007 Assistant U.S. Attorney A. Marie Villafaña had drafted a prosecution memorandum and an indictment. One statute under consideration was 18 U.S.C. § 2422(b), which punishes anyone who, "using the mail or any facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce," entices a minor into prostitution or illegal sexual activity, with a ten-year minimum sentence. Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School colleague and personal friend of Epstein, asked Pinker to parse the wording.²⁸

On July 6, 2007, a letter on the letterhead of Lefcourt's firm, signed by Lefcourt and Dershowitz, went by Federal Express to First Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Sloman, Matthew Menchel, Andrew Lourie, the deputy chief of the office's Northern Region, and Villafaña. It argued that § 2422(b) did not reach Epstein because the government had not shown he used the telephone or internet as the means of the enticement itself:¹²

To confirm our view of the "plain meaning" of the words, we asked Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor at Harvard University's Department of Psychology . . . a noted linguist, to analyze the statute to determine the natural and linguistically logical reading or readings of the section. Specifically, we asked whether the statute contemplates necessarily that the means of communication must be the vehicle through which the persuading or enticing directly occurs. According to Dr. Pinker, that is the sole rational reading.

Pinker's own opinion letter was annexed to the defense submission at Tab A. Eleven weeks later, on September 24, 2007, the office signed the Epstein non-prosecution agreement, which dropped the federal case in exchange for two state guilty pleas and immunized named and unnamed co-conspirators. Epstein pleaded guilty in June 2008, received an eighteen-month sentence and served about thirteen months in the Palm Beach County stockade, much of it on daytime work release. The July 2007 letter entered the public record in February 2016 as Exhibit 46 to the victims' motion for partial summary judgment in Doe v. United States, the Crime Victims' Rights Act suit over the agreement. The U.S. Attorney who approved the agreement, Alexander Acosta, resigned as Secretary of Labor on July 12, 2019, the day BuzzFeed News reported Pinker's role.¹²⁸

Dershowitz said he did not remember Pinker's involvement until he saw the document again: "My expertise was in the relationship between law and science, so it was natural that I would call on Pinker." Asked what weight the argument carried, he said: "It was one among many arguments as to why the statutes were not applicable. . . . In the end, the reason we got the deal we did is we had many persuasive arguments." Pinker said he had regularly given Dershowitz linguistic opinions for various cases: "I don't recall his telling me that the question pertained to the Epstein defense. I was not aware of the charges against Epstein at the time. And no, I was not paid for the letter, it's something that Alan and I do regularly, as colleagues." He added: "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."²

The Arizona Photograph and Later Statements

In 2014 Pinker was photographed beside Epstein and the physicist Lawrence Krauss at the fifth-anniversary gala of Krauss's Origins Project at Arizona State University, a project that took money from Epstein's foundation Enhanced Education and from Epstein's client Leon Black. When the photograph circulated after Epstein's July 2019 arrest, Pinker wrote: "I have no relationship with Epstein & have taken no funding from him. Our circles have occasionally overlapped. . . . In 14, Krauss seated me next to him at a lunch, & someone snapped a photo." He told BuzzFeed News: "My appearing in a couple of photos with Epstein is a bitter irony for me, because unlike a number of friends and colleagues I could never stand the guy and always tried to keep my distance. . . . Frankly I never understood why so many colleagues treated him as a serious intellectual."⁶⁹

After the November 2025 release of Epstein's emails, Pinker restated his position, saying that "Dershowitz often asks me questions about syntax and semantics of laws," that he now regretted the letter and found Epstein's behavior "reprehensible," and that "the annoying irony is that I could never stand the guy, never took research funding from him, and always tried to keep my distance." He described Epstein dismissing observations "with an adolescent wisecrack" and repeated a friend's remark that Epstein had "voted me off the island." Pinker noted that the 2002 flight predated Epstein's indictment and that the 2014 lunch came after he had served his sentence.⁵