Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein ensured that a Google search for his name would return several websites about his donations to science before any headlines about his 2008 conviction, new documents show — the clearest evidence yet that he courted the Ivy League to whitewash his sexual crimes.
Epstein had help amplifying links about his scientific largess in order to crowd out headlines about his exploitation of underage girls, emails released by the House Oversight Committee on Nov. 12 show. One aide to Epstein described the project as “wack-a-mole,” hammering headlines about his pedophilia into search engine obscurity with hyperlinks portraying Epstein as a benevolent booster of evolutionary biology and mathematics.
Though Democrats have used the Epstein case as a political cudgel against Trump, the new disclosures demonstrate that some of Epstein’s most powerful ties in fact stemmed from liberal Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The House documents shed light on Epstein’s relationships to Democratic powerbrokers like Harvard economist Larry Summers and LinkedIn cofounder and former advisor to the MIT Media Lab Reid Hoffman, whom Trump described as a “sleazebag” while answering questions from reporters on Nov. 19.
“I was never a client of Epstein’s and never had any engagement with him other than fundraising for MIT,” Hoffman said on X on Nov. 14.
“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” Summers said in a statement on Nov. 17. “I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.”
Harvard announced that it would initiate a new probe into its ties to Epstein on Nov. 19, and Summers announced he would leave his role as a Harvard instructor during the investigation. MIT has announced no such renewed probe.
Harvard added J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management CEO Mary Erdoes to the governing board of its endowment on Nov. 25, the Harvard Crimson reported. Erdoes was in constant contact with Epstein while he was one of JP Morgan’s wealthiest clients, according to a Nov. 19 Senate memo.
Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.
MIT spokesperson Kimberly Allen said the university has nothing to add to the 2020 report it commissioned on Epstein.
“Following that review, MIT took a number of steps, including enhancements to our gift acceptance processes and donating to four nonprofits supporting survivors of sexual abuse,” Allen said.
Hoffman could not be reached for comment. Summers did not respond to a request for comment sent to his spokesperson.
‘Profiles In Science’
The cyber scrubbing effort began in 2010 with two bespoke blogs.
Al Seckel — a leader of the “freethought” atheist movement and an author of books about optical illusions, including for MIT Press — helped create two websites portraying Epstein as the benefactor of an exclusive circle of luminaries at science’s frontier, the emails indicate. The websites, though now defunct, are available through the Internet Archive: www.jeffreyepsteinscience.com and www.jeffreyepstein.org. A third website, www.edge.org, documented the gatherings of researchers, science writers and Silicon Valley executives organized by John Brockman and underwritten by the Epstein-funded Edge Foundation.
A request for comment sent to an email for the Edge website did not receive a reply.
Many of the scientists with connections to Epstein also have connections to the Edge Group, a defunct, invite-only club for scientific lectures “at the edge of the world’s knowledge,” which in turn grew out of The Reality Club, scientific realists who met in the 1980s and 1990s, sometimes at the New York Academy of Sciences.
The Edge Group hosted an annual event referred to as “Billionaires’ Dinners” timed with the annual Ted Conference from 1999 to 2015. Attendees included former MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito, who resigned after his solicitations of grants from Epstein for the Media Lab became public; MIT artificial intelligence scientist Marvin Minsky, whom Epstein funded with a $100,000 grant to MIT and whose memorial prompted a visit by Epstein to the Media Lab; Santa Fe Institute theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann, whose research Epstein funded; and MIT quantum information scientist Seth Lloyd, whose research Epstein supported with a $225,000 grant to MIT and who accepted a $60,000 personal gift from the pedophile.
The academics brushed shoulders with other celebrity scientists and tech executives including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Minsky died in 2016. Gell-Mann died in 2019. Ito and Lloyd did not respond to requests for comment. Lloyd acknowledged in a 2019 public apology letter that the donations amounted to “professional as well as moral failings.”
“By continuing to participate in discussions he had with me and other scientists and by accepting his donations, I helped Mr. Epstein protect his reputation, and I disempowered his victims,” he said.
The MIT Media Lab grew out of the earliest Ted Conference in 1984, according to a 2002 New York Times report. Ito resigned when his funding solicitations to Epstein became public in 2019.
Seckel also described “hacking on” Epstein’s Wikipedia page in order to highlight “philanthropic work, Epstein Foundation, promotion of scientists” and to downplay his pedophilia with “careful editing and wording” in a December 2010 email.
Seckel’s emails spell out the purpose of the blogs — replacing “toxic references” with “good ones.”
“It is constant wack-a-mole,” Seckel said in a Dec. 16, 2010, email.
“You have your active detractors out there. Just the way it is,” he said. “On the second page, we have replaced 8 toxic references with good ones, and there are four toxic ones left, which were pushed off the first page.”
The emails indicate Epstein may have paid anywhere from $25,000 to $40,000 for Seckel’s work. The documents do not indicate how much Epstein paid other publicists and consultants.
Seckel, who dated the sister of Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, Isabel Maxwell, died in 2015.
An archived version of Epstein’s “profiles in science” blog, www.jeffreyepsteinscience.com, shows very brief posts stating Epstein’s interest in subjects as diverse as digital currency, theoretical physics, cognitive neuroscience and “minimally invasive surgery,” many with Epstein’s name in the headline: “The Value of Complexity as Seen by Jeffrey Epstein,” “Jeffrey Epstein: Thoughts on Quantum Computing,” and “Why Evolutionary Biology Intrigues Jeffrey Epstein.”
The site features photos from a scientific conference organized by Arizona State theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss at Epstein’s Caribbean island, Little Saint James, in 2006, featuring three Nobel laureates.
Arizona State University Theoretical Physicist Lawrence Krauss is pictured at Little Saint James, an island belonging to Jeffrey Epstein. (Screenshot: Edge.com)
The new emails include emails between Epstein and Krauss, who remained friends with the pedophile during his incarceration and for years afterward.
“Let’s do a men of the world conference. Kevin Spacey, Bill Clinton, Al Franken, Woody Allen,” Krauss wrote to Epstein in an April 2018 email.
Krauss did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2011, Seckel helped Epstein organize a conference he dubbed the “Mindshift Conference” on Little Saint James featuring several eminent scientists — then highlighted the conference on Epstein’s website, the archived site shows.
A second website, www.jeffreyepstein.org, also promotes Epstein as a science philanthropist, an archived version shows.
It prominently features Epstein’s support of Martin Nowak, the head of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) at Harvard, whom Epstein’s website claimed he supported with $30 million in funding by 2010, though the university disputes that figure, placing it at $6.5 million. Summers, then the president of Harvard, helped Epstein establish the lab in 2003 alongside Harvard mathematician Benedict Gross, according to the program’s website at that time.
Epstein describes Nowak’s lab as “my istittue [SIC] at harvard” in an email released on Nov. 12.
“George church and i havng lunch at my istittue [SIC] at harvard sunday. join.?” he wrote to new age guru Deepak Chopra in a November 2018 email. Church is a Harvard Medical School geneticist and former dean of Harvard College who accepted an estimated $2 million from Epstein-connected donors.
Nowak and Church did not respond to requests for comment.
Epstein had an office space at Nowak’s lab, which was located steps away from Harvard Square. Epstein visited at least 40 times, often accompanied by young women, the university acknowledged in its 2020 fact finding report on Epstein’s relationship to the school.
The November 2018 visit revealed in the new documents is not reflected in Harvard’s 2020 report, which described his final campus visit as having occurred in October 2018.
According to that same 2020 report, a public relations associate for Epstein — again seeking to improve his Google search results — persuaded the lab to add a page dedicated to Epstein on its webpage, hosted on the search engine-optimizing harvard.edu domain. The page featured his photo, biography and links to the blogs created by Seckel’s team.
“It would be very helpful in terms of Google results if his name were attached to a Harvard.edu url,” a publicist told Nowak’s lab, per the 2020 report.
Nowak agreed.
The new documents show that this move came amid a 60-day sprint to boot negative headlines from the first page of Google.
“The [Program for Evolutionary Dynamics] set up a page called ‘Friends’ which is where they’ll place jeffrey. I’ll send you the URL when done,” the publicist for Epstein wrote in a 2014 email.
Like Seckel, the publicist recommended that Epstein’s team optimize the algorithm by linking his name to as many prominent scientists as possible, a separate December 2011 email shows. She also sought to fix Epstein’s Wikipedia page, which she described in an email to her boss as having “totally lopsided and damning content on you.”
“I think it’s worth seeing how people like Prince Andrew managed to create an stellar profile—or Bill Clinton for that matter,” she wrote. “You need to update your website immediately by adding the bio on you from The Edge if you can and adding a longer summary of science and scientists that you are/have worked with.”
She recommended using the service Reputation.com.
Epstein continued to direct funds to Harvard and MIT and continued to attempt to scrub Google by promoting these grants up until his 2019 arrest.
In 2017, Epstein positioned himself as a counterforce to Trump in science funding. Another publicist placed an opinion piece in the Huffington Post with the headline “Private Donor Helps Fund Scientists After Trump’s Proposed ‘Anti-Science’ Budget Cuts” featuring Epstein’s support of Nowak, Llyod, Minksy and others, generating yet another positive hyperlink.
The new documents show Ito raising funds for the MIT Media Lab from Epstein in May 2019, just weeks before his July 2019 arrest.
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