Like millions of people, I couldn’t stop myself from spending a fair amount of time recently doing searches here, where one can read endless emails, texts, etc. showing in detail what Jeffrey Epstein was up to over many years. I was unsure whether to write anything about this here, but finally, this blog comment convinced me to write the following.
Epstein used his mysteriously acquired wealth to pursue his two great interests in life: the sexual exploitation of young women and hanging out with celebrity scientists. You can read all about both in the files in the database. While doing this, you’ll find a large number of prominent physicists and mathematicians making an appearance (you’ll also find my name there, in two emails from John Brockman to a large number of people. No, I never met Epstein or had any contact with him).
Epstein spent a lot of time having his assistants contact scientists and arrange meetings with them. If you were of sufficient interest, you’d get invited to dinner parties at his mansion with other celebrities, and have prospects dangled in front of you of financial support for your research. The contacts with Brian Greene linked to in the comment mentioned above were typical of this kind of thing. Like many other scientists, Brian appears to have agreed to meet with Epstein, in his case quite possibly as part of his fund-raising for the World Science Festival, but had little contact with him besides that. For another detailed description of how this kind of thing went, see Scott Aaronson’s latest posting. Scott had the advantage of advice from a very wise mother:
“be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here! Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least.”
Lots of scientists and others did get sucked up in the slime-machine, to varying degrees. As far as I can tell, very few such scientists had any contact with Epstein’s massive sexual exploitation operation (although arguably they should have been aware of it from press accounts).
A lot of Epstein’s focus was on Harvard, with a large number of emails detailing his efforts to arrange meetings there, often holding out promises of potential financial support for research. Back in 2020 Harvard conducted its own investigation of what had happened, see here. The Harvard Crimson has been reporting on what the newly available files show about the Harvard connection, see for example here and here.
Sorry, but I’m not willing to moderate a discussion here of Epstein and his slime-machine. If you’re interested in the topic, the Department of Justice website is an inexhaustible source of disturbing information.
