Followed the link from the above article:

https://www.mtracey.net/p/julie-brown-epstein

The critique seems fair, and quite revealing in the way Brown seems to have relayed Virginia Giuffre's account as fact without acknowledging that it was 'fictionalised' in therapy as a way to help deal with trauma. Whether 'fictionalised' means invented wholesale as Tracey seems to imply, or based on factual events but embellished is unclear, and it doesn't appear to have been tested in court. He doesn't talk in the article about the early police & FBI investigations which formed the basis at least of Brown's initial report (discussed here: https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1770857321.html ) and were based on testimony of around 80 young girls, mostly aged 14-16. This to me is the most telling evidence, and Tracey can't dismiss it as the rantings of a few unstable women.

Chomsky may have been on solid ground when referring to the 'hysteria that has developed about abuse of women' in some instances, and the questions Tracey raises about Giuffre and Ransome deserve to be answered. However, if we're demanding a full grasp of the facts from NC then we have to ask why he wasn't apparently disturbed by the contents of the police/FBI investigation revealed in Brown's 2018 reports. Hedges' accusation remains true in light of that:

'I can assure you he is not as passive or gullible as his wife claims. He knew about Epstein’s abuse of children. They all knew. And like others in the Epstein orbit, he did not care. [...] Noam, of all people, knows the predatory nature of the ruling class and the cruelty of capitalists, where the vulnerable, especially girls and women, are commodified as objects to be used and exploited. He was not fooled by Epstein. He was seduced.'

cheers,
I