Epstein Files Reveal How Pathetic Richard Dawkins & Other Men Are

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Transcript:

Well, it happened again. I’m mentioned in the Epstein files. Again. You probably saw my first video on this topic and you came away thinking that I’ve spent the past decade being as awesome in my private life as I am in my public life. And you thought, “wow, she’s so cool that the world’s most famous pedophile hated her guts. There’s no way anything could come to light now to change my opinion of her.”

And so I have to once again offer my sincere apology, because yes, in the latest dump of millions of new files from Jeffrey Epstein’s correspondences, more emails about me have come to light. And I’m sorry to say that your opinion of me is going to change, because I’m actually even more awesome than you thought. 

Look, it isn’t often that a Cassandra like myself gets to see a bunch of people coming around to seeing that she was right all along, so forgive me for this one video where I get just a little full of myself. Just a little.

If you missed the previous video for some reason, my name was in the first Epstein document drop because back in 2011 I criticized physicist Lawrence Krauss for defending his “friend” Jeffrey Epstein, years after Epstein was revealed to be a pedophile running a sex trafficking ring. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Krauss immediately forwarded my critical emails to Epstein, and they whined about what a mean bitch I was. And then in 2016, Krauss emailed quite a bit with Epstein to get his advice on how to deal with Buzzfeed reporters who were investigating Krauss’s long history of women reporting that he sexually harassed and even assaulted them, because of course he did! Epstein was able to evade justice for years after it was well known he was running an international pedophile ring, so surely he would know how to help Krauss wriggle out of some relatively tame attempted rape accusations, right?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really expect that there would be more interesting stuff in Epstein’s emails that would apply to me, so I didn’t bother to even search through the new documents for my name.

Friends, I was wrong. So, so wrong.

Helpful followers pinged me on social media to let me know that not only was I mentioned AGAIN, but this time it wasn’t directly from Lawrence Krauss. This time it was Richard Dawkins.

Before I get into it, I’m going to give you a reason to stick around until the end of the video: on BlueSky, I got a little giddy and announced that if I got a certain amount of likes, I would share some petty and embarrassing Richard Dawkins news in this video. I got those likes within five minutes. So I’m going to do it. But first, I also said if it got a ridiculous number of “likes” I’d also share something about Michael Shermer, who you may know as the editor of Skeptic Magazine and an ardent defender of fascism. Well, it DID get enough likes so here’s your dish on him: Michael Shermer was well known for two things at conferences: trying to fuck as many women as possible, who would leave his room with a signed copy of his latest book and a “Skeptic Magazine” pin, and delivering the most boring powerpoint presentations possible, to the point where two of my friends came up with SHMINGO. Before Shermer delivered a talk, they’d hand out SHMINGO cards with squares like “mentions libertarianism” and “slide with way too much tiny text on it.” We’d text each other our wins but there was a special prize for anyone who had the guts to yell it out loud. After he was accused of sexual assault, we joked about making the free middle square “sex pest.”

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s talk about Dawkins. Before I share the hot tea, I want to give a brief overview of my history with him. For several years, we were polite to one another at events and I thought he was a nice guy. But in 2011, a few months after my post about Lawrence Krauss defending Jeffrey Epstein, I was on a panel in Ireland with Richard Dawkins called “Communicating Atheism,” in which I talked about some of the crazy, misogynistic hatred I get by being a female atheist in the public eye.

A few days later on July 2nd, Dawkins posted a comment on PZ Myers’ blog mocking me for complaining about the treatment I get, comparing me to a fictional “Muslima” who isn’t allowed to drive and gets beaten by her husband. Misogynistic AND racist! Fun.

Within hours, I was being flooded with death and rape threats from Dawkins’ fans, the likes of which I could not have even imagined at the time. My website got DDoSed, Google canceled my Adsense, my entire family got doxed and started getting threatening messages, and basically my life was never the same. Even today–literally, today, the day I am filming this video, I got a new threat. It sucks!

So, on July 5th of 2011 after I got the site working, I posted about it in a blog titled “The Privilege Delusion.” Remember that because we’re going to be hearing about privilege again soon. In the post, I mentioned that I thought it was an odd thing for him to have posted at all, but especially because he sat next to me on that panel and heard all about the really awful things people send me.

Unbeknownst to me, the day prior, July 4th 2011, Richard Dawkins reached out to John Brockman with a question. Brockman was a powerful New York literary agent who ran Edge.org, which was bankrolled by Jeffrey Epstein. Brockman served as a connection between Epstein and all the various scientists and public intellectuals Epstein wanted to meet, and so his name shows up a LOT in these files. Here’s what Brockman looks like, in a photo taken of him along with Steven Pinker, Daniel C. Dennett, Katinka Matson, and, oh, Richard Dawkins from one time they flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane together.

So on July 4th, 2011, Richard Dawkins wrote to Brockman:

“There is a rather nasty young woman called Rebecca Watson, who seems to be running some

kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.

> http://skepchick.org/2011/04/lawrence-krauss-defends-a-sex-offender-embarrasses-scientists-

everywhere/

There are people on her blog talking about organising a walkout when Lawrence speaks at TAM

in Las Vegas. I remember that you told me something of the circumstances of Jeffrey’s arrest,

and that his case is not as black as painted. Might you possibly remind of it.

Thanks (and greetings from Jackson Hole, Wyoming)

Richard”

Brockman, naturally, immediately forwarded the letter to Jeffrey Epstein, which is how I can now read it. What interesting timing! Three months after Lawrence Krauss alerted Jeffrey Epstein to my evil machinations, Dawkins has decided to seek out information so that he might debunk my reporting that Epstein is a pedophile, just a few days after he posted an incredibly racist and sexist comment and was getting dragged for it. And before I had even commented on it!

Dawkins is mentioned in a lot of other files, but it’s all things like Epstein talking about hanging out with him and Krauss talking about getting him to the island, but obviously we already knew Dawkins knew and hung out with Epstein because there are photos. These guys didn’t care about leaving evidence because, as I mentioned in the previous video, they thought raping little girls was a normal thing that rich men are just allowed to do. And they were right, in a way.

But this email is very funny to me, because it really highlights how much I got under Dawkins’ skin without even trying and without even knowing. For me, his post came out of nowhere, and then I watched as he blackballed me from every major skeptic, atheist, and humanist organization in the world. His employees let me know that a person couldn’t even say my name in his presence without him blowing up, and one volunteer even related how she saw him scream at the president of American Atheists for even suggesting I be invited to Reason Rally.

Today, obviously, it’s more well known that Dawkins is a weird freak because in the years following this he kind of went off the rails on Twitter, posting about dogs 69ing and crying because airport security took his honey and whatnot. But back then I was really confused about what was going on with him.

It was a few months later that a friend of mine mentioned a possible reason for his meltdown, and it made a lot of sense but I never talked about it publicly because, well, it was just a hypothesis and I thought people would accuse me of being a bitchy gossip. But now I don’t care, and it’s relevant, so I’m going to tell you.

At that panel in Dublin, I specifically talked about my experience with rape and death threats in response to women on a previous panel who all agreed that that sort of thing did not happen in the secular/atheist world. I wanted to offer my own perspective that, well, yes it does. The woman who was most insistent that it doesn’t was prominent secular writer Paula Kirby, and I addressed her directly by saying that I really admired her writing and that I was surprised by her ignorant take on misogyny in our movement.

At the time, I knew Kirby was running Dawkins’ foundation’s UK operations. What my friend revealed to me months later is that Richard Dawkins was also, in fact, fucking Paula Kirby.

Now, when he told me that I believed him immediately, because I had helped organize prior conferences and I had heard from several different people that if you invite Dawkins to speak at your conference, you also have to invite whatever woman he happens to be fucking at the time–usually but not always a blonde, 20 to 40 years his junior. So I had already assumed he had some kind of “arrangement” with his famous wife of more than a decade, Doctor Who’s Lala Ward. But it hadn’t occurred to me that he might be so furious with me because I disagreed with a woman he was fucking.

And fucking her, he surely was: months later, someone sent me emails that were revealed in a court case. In 2010, the Richard Dawkins Foundation sued Josh Timonen, who ran their website, claiming that he was fraudulently pocketing funds. As part of that case, this email appeared in the public record, from Robin Elisabeth Cornwell, the blonde evolutionary psychologist 20 to 40 years Dawkins’ junior who was at the time the Executive Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation:

Hi Josh,

I’ve managed to get a bit of sleep and while I do need to rush off… I do want to discuss some possibilities.

First – I am behind the idea of simply closing the entire forum down – archives and all after the 30 days. Richard will also back you on this. He really did misunderstand – and his absolute goal was to protect you.

One of the things I know extremely well about Richard is he is conflict-avoiding and he female-dependent. There is a lot of psychology at work here… but Richard is extremely weak when it comes to demanding females.

While Richard and I are not together any longer, we do have a friendship. It has been under a great deal of strain. When Paula, who has been his mistress now for over two years, found out about me she demanded that he end his friendship with me. It has been a struggle and I will be very honest here – extremely painful on an emotional level. The irony is that I would never have become (Executive Director) if Richard and I were still in a sexual relationship. I have done my best not to use our relationship to move the Foundation in the right direction, and in fact – when Karen was trustee – she did all she could to keep me out of the loop on all financial decisions. 

She succeeded.

Paula will remain an influence on Richard, and for whatever reasons but she does not have to be the one that Andrew goes to for advice. Unfortunately, Richard had constantly assured me that she was not involved in the Foundation decision making processes. But apparently this is not the case. The fact that RD excluded me from the discussions and directly misled me is a matter that I need to clear up with him. What I don’t want is for you to feel in the middle nor do I want you to have to take sides. There is no reason to take sides. I am not giving RD any ultimatums… that is not my style. And given that RD is very conflict-avoidant, he is not going to be comfortable with having to go back to Paula and tell her that he is not taking her advice.

So, I am in a bit of an awkward position because while I will through myself in front of a train for you and Andrew… I also would do the same for Richard.”

Then she talks about what to do about their internet forum.

(By the way, Lala eventually left Dawkins, as noted in this exchange between Deepak Chopra and Jeffrey Epstein.)

Remembering all of this, I decided to see if Cornwell is in the latest Epstein drop, and guess what she IS! 

It turns out that Cornwell claims that she was in attendance when one of Lawrence Krauss’s many accusers said Krauss rubbed up and down her leg. Krauss reached out to her during the Buzzfeed investigation in the hope that she could testify that in fact it was the woman who was being a creep and Krauss turned her down and she’s probably just angry about it and that’s why she’s claiming he touched her inappropriately. Krauss then forwarded her testimony to the Buzzfeed reporters, who sadly were unable to verify her account.

And then, obviously, Krauss forwarded the entire exchange to his best friend, famous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who is clearly getting fed up with Krauss’s shit.

Finding that exchange made me wonder if there was any more funny Krauss stuff in this latest drop and BOY IS THERE! First of all, we could figure it out from the first drop of emails but this one really makes it clear how Jeffrey Epstein could not STAND Lawrence Krauss. 

In 2010, Epstein gave Krauss money to invite a bunch of intellectuals like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins to a conference on the island, but a lot of people said no and so Krauss started inviting “fillers,” and then started cc-ing Epstein on plans to go snorkeling and shit, at which point Epstein finally snapped and told him to stop fucking around.

Then in 2013, Krauss forwards Epstein a fan letter he got saying that he, Dawkins, and others have inspired this kid, and Epstein replies, “great, its you dawkins and others. is this the best of use of your brain and time,” which clearly cuts Krauss to the quick: “maybe not.. but it is one use.. it is also easy for me, and also it seems that exciting good young people to do science is one of the things professors can and should do.. I just do it globally instead of in a classroom.”

Epstein dunks on him again calling him a performer, at which point Krauss waves a little white flag and begs him to stop.

Understanding how much Epstein clearly loathed Krauss is essential to truly appreciating this next email from 2017, which reveals that at some point, Krauss assumed that Epstein was going to help him make a vampire movie called “Vampire Noir.”

My favorite Krauss email thread, though, is the one where he is trying to retain a lawyer to help defend him in his university’s investigation into the Buzzfeed allegations, and while he’s chatting with the lawyer Epstein is telling Krauss to just drop it and not hire a lawyer and finally Krauss gets all confuzzled about who to listen to so he actually EMAILS THE LAWYER HE HASN’T EVEN HIRED YET and says, “Hi Justin. I have a slightly unusual request. I have been advised through much of the BuzzFeed experience, both before and after, by a friend, who is also somewhat infamous. His name isJeffrey Epstein, and you may know who he is already. Bottom line Is that Jeffrey is not only friends with most of the famous people from finance, to business, to Hollywood, who have either been brought down during ‘,meta° and he also speaks regularly with people ranging from the awful white house people, who he is friends with, to ken start etc. He is concerned about exactly how we play this, as he thinks because of the variety and number of different things being discussed in the media and online, that this will be considered beyond title IX. I should say that all indications I have thus far do not suggest this. But anyway, Jeffrey would like to speak with you, as he has concerns about my having counsel who directly represent me in interactions with the University at this time vs having someone to act as an advisor and draft letters that I can send… I will pay for your time to do that if necessary. Would you be willing to do this in the next day or so? Please let me know, and I can get you contact Info. Thanks.”

Lawrence Krauss is so fucking stupid. Holy shit. He’s being investigated for sexual assault and he told his potential lawyer that he’s not sure whether to listen to the lawyer or his friend, famous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, so he wants them to speak to each other and work it out for him. The lawyer ACTUALLY AGREES to talk to famous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein on behalf of Lawrence Krauss, and eventually the lawyer is like “Look dude this is getting extremely annoying and you’re wasting a lot of my time” at which point Krauss finally agrees to retain him. I assume the lawyer accepted the relationship for all the great stories he would get out of having a client that stupid. Also for the money.

Also included in the Krauss files was another name I wasn’t expecting: Ron Lindsay, former executive director of Center for Inquiry, which, fun fact, merged with the Richard Dawkins Foundation at which point RDF’s executive director at the time took over: Robyn Blumner, a brunette woman 20 to 40 years Richard Dawkins’ junior who assumed that role from Edwina Rogers, a blonde woman 20 to 40 years Richard Dawkins’ junior.

But Ron Lindsay was the head of CFI in 2011, when Lawrence Krauss publicly defended Jeffrey Epstein. That was also the year that Lawrence Krauss was a featured speaker on a cruise for CFI, when he propositioned a CFI guest and asked her to join him in a threesome with his partner. When this latter information came to the attention of CFI employees in 2014 thanks to the woman’s friend reporting it when she was too embarrassed to, they begged Lindsay to stop inviting Krauss to events, particularly events when unsuspecting women might be stuck on a boat with him.

In full disclosure, one of those employees was my boyfriend at the time. He loved working for CFI and believed in the mission of building a secular, rational world but was horrified when Lindsay not only refused to do anything about Krauss but invited him back for another cruise AND made him an honorary board member.

The final straw came in 2013: women at CFI had worked hard to put on their second annual Women in Secularism conference, and Ron Lindsay insisted that as president of CFI he should be able to deliver the introduction. He did so, and he used that spotlight to criticize feminists for silencing male voices because they have “privilege.”

He bemoans “the situation where the concept of privilege is used to try to silence others, as a justification for saying, “shut up and listen.” Shut up, because you’re a man and you cannot possibly know what it’s like to experience x, y, and z, and anything you say is bound to be mistaken in some way, but, of course, you’re too blinded by your privilege even to realize that.

“This approach doesn’t work.  It certainly doesn’t work for me,” said the man addressing an audience of women at the “Women in Secularism” conference that was entirely organized by women, for women. It’s “enforced silence,” he said. “Dogma,” spread by the likes of the religious and Marxists.

This was incredible to hear live. I Tweeted about how ridiculous it was, and Lindsay immediately went on the attack, confirming that I am in fact one of the mean feminists silencing him. The next day I wrote a post explaining why it was a pretty tone deaf way to start a women’s conference, which infuriated Lindsay. That evening there was a fundraising dinner that speakers were expected to join, but Lindsay wasn’t there. He was up in his hotel room, composing a blog post responding to me by saying I “inhabit an alternate universe” and saying my “recent smear” “may be the most intellectually dishonest piece of writing since the last communique issued by North Korea.” He insists that he is on the side of “reason and evidence” and I am doing identity politics, as if he wasn’t the one up on a stage claiming that he was being silenced for being a man.

That attack, which was immediately bolstered and echoed by the men who were already harassing me, was what finally pushed my boyfriend to quit his dream job at CFI. He held out because the board of directors said they would investigate the matter, and a month later they met and announced that they would do nothing.

The hosts of the podcast he produced for them, Chris Mooney and Indre Viscontas, also left and their show was quickly picked up by Mother Jones.

So. How did Ron Lindsay end up in the Epstein files? I’m sure you’ve already guessed, but yes, it was because of Lawrence Krauss. The Buzzfeed reporters reached out to Lindsay to confirm or deny the story told to them by several employees: that the employees went to Lindsay with the details of Krauss sexually harassing a woman on the cruise, and asked that Lindsay stop platforming Krauss, which he refused, leading to at least one employee’s resignation (my boyfriend).

The reporter also asked him to confirm that another employee told him that Krauss had cornered her in his hotel room and tried to molest her.

Lindsay responded by telling the Buzzfeed reporter that he heard the cruise incident from just one employee, and that he immediately got the victim’s information and called her. The victim “substantially confirmed” what the employee said, and said that “she did not want to pursue the

matter further.” Then he talked to Krauss, who “denied the allegation.” And so, there we go, that’s the end of things. He decided that that meant it was perfectly fine to invite the pedophile defender to cruise the Galapagos with CFI, and he’s sure that was the right decision because he “received no complaints about his conduct.” Just like the cruise where he made two women horrifically uncomfortable by inviting one to have a threesome with him.

Oh, and yes he acknowledged that the employee DID tell him about the assault in the hotel room but she didn’t seem too scared of Krauss and didn’t volunteer to make an official report about it so he didn’t think it was a big deal.

Then he clarifies for the Buzzfeed reporter that my boyfriend didn’t quit over all this–no, it was just because Lindsay had a “public spat” with me, the girlfriend, which “is a whole other story, tangential to your Krauss piece, so I will not get into it here.”

But it’s not tangential, is it? Because guess what happened after Lindsay wrote this reply? Well, you already know, don’t you? Ron Lindsay forwarded his defense of Krauss to Krauss, who promptly forwarded it to his best friend, famous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. It is not “tangential” that our “public spat” started with Lindsay literally using his privilege as a rich man to get on a stage at a women’s conference that he didn’t organize and blame feminists for silencing men. It’s not “tangential” that he then used his online stage to dehumanize me and stir up the men’s rights activists to punish me for daring to criticize him. It’s not “tangential” that he did all of this in an attempt to protect male supremacy in his “movement,” to castigate mouthy broads like myself who dared to say, “Hey, maybe we can be better. Maybe we don’t need famous men who treat women and girls as objects, as prizes to win and dispose of when they’re inconvenient. Maybe we can build a secular movement through progressive humanistic ideals and good people doing good things for their communities.”

The idea that someone would think that, let alone say it out loud, terrified Ron Lindsay, just as it terrified Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins and Jeffrey Epstein. “What do you mean you don’t need us? We’re rich! We’re famous! We throw super cool parties on tropical islands where all of our wildest dreams can come true!” I don’t give a fuck! You fucking suck! Look how scared of me Lawrence Krauss is: in one email, he’s talking about some stupid letter he wrote to try to defend himself from the Buzzfeed article. I couldn’t find it, but I did find this evidence that he spent a lot of time working out exactly how vague he could be when trying to castigate me as “ringleader of the movement to impugn leading male atheists” “because Rebecca and her crowd are very very vicious and I don’t want to start too much of a fire there..”

Yeah, you were fucking right to be scared, you pathetic sex pest. I hope you never give another lecture again where at least one person in the crowd doesn’t ask you exactly what you did on Jeffrey Epstein’s island. And I hope that Ron Lindsay is excited that he gets a little cameo in the Epstein files to really cement his legacy as a man who enthusiastically helped run interference for a man who openly and gleefully harassed and abused dozens of women and who kept company with the absolute worst men in the human race, all so that Ron could keep his boys’ club running without the pesky interference of women saying “Hey, maybe you could stop talking just long enough to listen to what we’re saying.” I hope it was all worth it.