All These Comedians Love Sex Predators

An interesting thing happening in comedy right now is that a bunch of people who are demonstrably good friends with and defenders of sex abusers have taken it upon themselves to commentate loudly and frequently about the unfurling Epstein affair. A brief catalogue:

–Tim Dillon, friend and opener of Louis CK and client of powerful manager Dave Becky, who helped silence Louis CK’s victims. Dillon notably cast Kevin Spacey in a promo for his 2025 Netflix special and to this day is friendly with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who allegedly groped his babysitter in the late 90s (and who apparently went hunting for dinosaur bones with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sometime after that).

–Dave Smith, the antifeminist crusader who a few years ago used the word “whore” to describe teenage victims of grooming, and whose podcast Legion of Skanks frequently hosts alleged sexual and domestic abuser TJ Miller. 

–Andrew Schulz, whose Brilliant Idiots cohost Charlamagne Tha God allegedly raped a 15-year-old and later accidentally confessed to drugging and raping a different woman (a confession he clumsily walked back). Schulz had Louis CK on his podcast as recently as 2022; his March 2024 episode with RFK Jr. famously included a segment where Kennedy catalogued all the sex predators he'd hung out with, like Epstein, Weinstein, and Bill Cosby. (As we know now, he was also lying about how much time he'd spent with Epstein.)

–Theo Von, a friend of both Louis CK and RFK Jr. who’s hosted both on his podcast in the last year.

–Shane Gillis, another good friend of Louis CK and fan of RFK Jr., who once said of Marc Maron: “I got a nice little hit list. Anybody that trash Louis, not for me.”

–And of course Joe Rogan, whose guests in recent years have included Louis CK, alleged rapist Bryan Callen, and the comedian Joey Diaz, who in 2011 bragged about coercing female comics into giving him sexual favors in exchange for stage time. (He later said he was just joking.) 

It’s an unfortunate consequence of the mainstream success these guys have laundered their right-wing audiences into: now they have to walk a narrow ideological tightrope in which the capitalist elite systemically preyed on young girls, but not in the context of a society that enables and encourages men’s predation of women generally. You can see exactly where this tightrope-walk leads in an exchange between Mark Normand and Joe List (also Louis CK’s good friends and frequent openers) in the latest episode of their podcast Tuesdays with Stories:

Normand: All right, Ronnie. That's exciting.

List: He's a dad. How about that?

Normand: Okay, six million and one Jews!

List: “How do you like me now?”

Normand: Well, wait—16 million Jews. I keep a tally.

List: Oh, good.

Normand: Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Only 16.

List: Totally.

Normand: They're very—the tally-ban—they're very minority.

List: Oh, they're minoritized. Yeah. There's not a ton of them.

Normand: But they make a splash. You got Epstein, you got Weinstein, you got Woody Allen. They're killing, they're busy.

List: Yeah, they're busy, alright. They got Matt Lauer—

Normand: He's a Jew?

List: I assume so.

Normand: No, he's handsome.

List: No, there's handsome Jews. Epstein's handsome. What, are you kidding?

Normand: Yeah, that was shocking. Even my wife was like, "He's a good-looking guy." I was like, "Really? I have no idea who's handsome."

List: Oh, he's a good-looking boy.

Normand: You think so?

List: I think so. Yeah.

Normand: Oh, I couldn't tell. He's kind of got a—face is a little out of whack.

List: He's a funky handsome.

Trump’s involvement in Epstein's crimes has also exposed inconvenient truths about the right-wing comedysphere’s embrace of Trumpism. Here, for instance, is Tim Dillon on The Young Turks last week, claiming he didn’t know Steve Bannon was an Epstein friend when he had Bannon on his podcast last year:

Dillon: Bannon, who I interviewed one time, I didn't know that he had a relationship with Epstein. I would've asked him. I think—Bannon is a devout Catholic, right? He's a nationalist. Well—you know. So it's an odd pairing, right? But if you read the documents, they surely had a lot of communication. I guess Bannon was making a documentary? Is that—yeah. And Bannon was advising Epstein on how to reenter polite society.

Kasparian: That's right.

Dillon: That's uncomfortable. And it seems to be, I guess for whatever reason, Bannon thought there was value in a relationship with a guy like Jeffrey Epstein. And that's something he's going to have to—he'll have to answer that.

Of course, Bannon’s friendship with Epstein is not a new revelation at all; it’s been a matter of public record since 2018, when the New York Post reported on Bannon’s secret meeting with the pedophile. In 2021, Michael Wolff wrote in his book Fire and Fury that Bannon served as a “media trainer” for Epstein, coaching him on an upcoming 60 Minutes interview that didn’t end up happening. Per the New York Times:

The media trainer is a familiar figure: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s campaign guru and onetime White House adviser. Mr. Bannon is both conducting the interview and coaching Mr. Epstein on the little things, telling him he will come across as stupid if he doesn’t look directly into the camera now and then, and advising him not to share his racist theories on how Black people learn. Mainly, Mr. Bannon tells Mr. Epstein, he should stick to his message, which is that he is not a pedophile. By the end, Mr. Bannon seems impressed.

“You’re engaging, you’re not threatening, you’re natural, you’re friendly, you don’t look at all creepy, you’re a sympathetic figure,” he says.

That Dillon—who's previously argued that Trump doesn't like girls or sex and therefore likely wasn't implicated in Epstein's crimes—neglected to conduct even a little background research on his guest last year reveals two things: one, his eagerness to consort with far-right luminaries, and two, the extent of his commitment to fighting pedophile cabals. For him as with so many other comedians, it’s much less of a fight than a means of self-promotion.