We Dug Up Jeffrey Epstein’s Old Science Blog. It’s as Weird as You Think.

Chronicle illustration, Getty Images

Scientists who took money from and hobnobbed with Jeffrey Epstein, the philanthropist and registered sex offender, have been issuing apologies and excuses in recent weeks. Joi Ito, the director of MIT’s Media Lab, called his dealings with Epstein an “error in judgment.” The Harvard biologist George Church blamed “nerd tunnel vision.” Meanwhile, more names have been added to the list of scholars who accepted invitations to the late investor’s private island or hung out at his Manhattan mansion.

What they very likely saw in Epstein — his willingness to sign sizable checks — is obvious. But was there more to it than that? And why did Epstein, who didn’t have a bachelor’s, much less a doctoral degree, seek to surround himself with biologists, mathematicians, and neuroscientists?

A few clues can be found on a now-defunct website (jeffreyepsteinscience.com) that boasted the generically grandiose title Jeffrey Epstein’s Profiles in Science. The site went live in the fall of 2010, just after Epstein’s house arrest in Florida had come to an end — timing that suggests it was a calculated attempt to polish his public image. The website, which you can pull up in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, was a slapdash effort, sprinkled with factual errors, typos, grammatical flubs, and passages lifted from other sites without credit. There is scant evidence here of the sparkling intellect some recipients of his financial support attributed to Epstein.

What we get instead are vague banalities. In a post titled “Why Jeffrey Epstein Supports Science,” Epstein informs the reader that science is “still a distinctly human enterprise of creative mind and thought.” In another post, he lets us know that evolutionary biology has been “fundamental to many social improvements in this century.” Elsewhere, Epstein writes that complexity is important to “understanding the fundamental processes that shape almost every aspect of human life.” Each post feels like a setup for a point that never arrives.

Sometimes the writing is merely confusing. The paragraph-long post “Cognitive Neuroscience” ends with this sentence fragment: “Yet, the way brain operations differ from computation of the type taught in computer science and electrical engineering departments.” In a post about his fondness for the writer and mathematician Martin Gardner, Epstein writes that Gardner died in both 2010 and in 1981 (the first one is correct). Here’s a sense of Epstein’s writing style: “Gardner’s numerous books and articles on recreational articles [sic] always inspired me, and I would like to share with you some fun and recreational mathematics that I have come across that are in the fun and inspirational spirit of Martin Gardner.”

An entry titled “Jeffrey Epstein on the Origami of Robert Lang” appears to have been almost entirely cribbed verbatim from Lang’s website; the only content that Epstein added is the observation that origami is “not only fun, but may provide important insights.” The post is tagged “fun stuff.”

But what the site lacked in substance, coherence, and originality, it made up for in shameless self-aggrandizement. The photo gallery consists of snapshots of scientists at Epstein-sponsored events. There is Robert Trivers, a renowned evolutionary biologist, holding a plate of hors d’oeuvres, his arm around the shoulder of Freeman Dyson. There is Marvin Minsky, the late MIT cognitive scientist and AI pioneer, saying something that made Epstein grin (one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre, testified in a court deposition that she was directed to have sex with Minsky). There is Epstein in “deep discussion,” the caption insists, with the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who has also since died. (The caption misspells Mandelbrot’s name.)

The gallery’s introductory text declares that the “photos that follow are indicative of Mr. Epstein’s involvement with the sciences,” just in case you missed that point.

The site’s “Testimonials” section is a compilation of nice things that important people have said about Epstein over the years. Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard psychologist, called Epstein “one of the most intellectual people I’ve ever met.” Richard Axel, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, enthused that Epstein “has the ability to make connections that other minds can’t make,” while Martin Nowak, a professor of mathematics and biology at Harvard, deemed him “one of the most pleasant philanthropists.” Nowak, whose research program received a $6.5-million donation from Epstein in 2003, also stated that “there are not any disadvantages to associating with him,” a curiously defensive assertion that has aged poorly.

For the record, these recycled statements were made before Epstein’s 2008 conviction for “procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18.”

The site offers an intriguing preview of something called the Mindshift Conference, which was held at Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean in January 2011. According to the description, the interdisciplinary shindig would touch on artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, new trends in theoretical physics, and a host of other highbrow topics. Among the leading lights included in the list of “confirmed attendees” are scientists from MIT and the California Institute of Technology, along with Murray Gell-Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who died this past May. Whether all of the figures on the list actually showed up for the island junket is unclear, and the promised summary of the event seems not to have been published.

Epstein’s enthusiasm for Jeffrey Epstein’s Profiles in Science must have have petered out in the months that followed. He wrote a post about forthcoming Q&As with major thinkers that would “candidly explore and discuss their responses to the challenges of their times in intimate and informal language,” but those interviews never materialized. One lengthy interview with Al Seckel, who wrote books about visual illusions and co-organized the Mindshift Conference with Epstein, was posted and later disappeared without explanation. (Seckel died in 2015.) What remained after Epstein apparently lost interest was the shell of a site featuring a dozen or so lackluster posts, a page of embarrassingly fulsome praise for a disreputable character, and not much else. Now, typing in the URL takes you to a domain-registration service.

Profiles in Science was clearly part of a broader PR strategy by Epstein to play up his financial support of science, to brag about his relationships with big-name scientists, and perhaps to create internet content that would make his crimes less prominent in search-engine results. Relatedly, The New York Times reported in July that HuffPost, Forbes, and National Review had published pieces about Epstein that amounted to little more than flattering press releases. The 2013 National Review piece, which praised him for his “passion for cutting-edge science,” was written by Christina Galbraith who, according to the Times, worked as a publicist for Epstein. All three publications have since removed those articles.

Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and ideas. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.