By Sheeva Azma
I keep looking into science in the Epstein files just because kind, just people I’ve never met told me to persevere.
I was never planning to become an Epstein files journalist, but this week marks four months that I have been poring over the files and finding more and more stuff. I feel like the number of audible gasps I have made staring at the Epstein files is more than any other investigation I have undertaken in my life — and I started out as a scientist. What can I say, I studied brain structure and decision-making and various other topics in grad school, which is not a thing that can be terribly surprising in obvious ways, for many reasons, unlike the Epstein files — it was definitely cool and exciting, but in a different way.
I was not prepared for how deeply-entrenched Epstein culture would be in science — down to the people who wrote the neuroscience textbooks I used at MIT and Georgetown and even quite a few of the people we have applauded for being brilliant enough to win the Nobel Prize. It’s all so troubling.
What’s even more troubling is the way that this behavior seems collectively normalized and acknowledged, but not used as the basis for any action or improvement. I’m working on that part, if only to be a hero to my now 2,000+ followers who, like me, are mad as hell about it all.
At times, I have even questioned whether I’m the best person to write about science in the Epstein files, since it all makes me so angry. I totally just want all of these people to resign and let who I envision as the ‘real’ scientists in science cook (as the young people say these days) — those would be the ones who would easily say ‘no’ to the things these people said ‘yes’ to. I’m trying to figure out who that would be — probably a lot of the scientists in our comments, for instance.
How it started
This all started on a sleep-deprived day in early February when I decided to search for people and institutions in my circle on the Department of Justice’s Epstein files website. Of course I would not find anything interesting, I told myself — such a dually naive and limiting belief in action, in retrospect.
That’s when I found my own professor and tons of names I recognized from MIT, where I studied for undergrad. I posted a reel about it which went viral, gaining 123k views.
It wasn’t the best-produced reel ever — I just felt disillusioned and just needed to share it with the world. After that, I produced a couple other reels that got way more views than I had ever gotten and generated an interesting discussion about the culture of science that I’d never been able to have with anyone before.
How it’s going
People reached out to me to tell me to persevere with this project. A couple of my fellow women alums from MIT reached out and told me that this all rang true in their experience, that the highest level of academia was rife with sexism and structural inequality, and that there were no consequences.
“This explains my experience in grad school,” wrote a commenter.
“This explains so much,” chimed in another. “This explains why I ended up orbiting academia rather than returning to it after my ballet career. I kept looking for the environment that would allow me to develop my studies properly and it clearly didn’t exist, despite the need for intersections of scientific knowledge that have been lacking due to funding restrictions and domain silos with virtually no interdisciplinary collaboration.”
Besides chiming in with their own experiences, commenters also often added essential insight that helped me better understand the topics I was researching quite often.
A.V. Flox, author of Disrupting the Bystander: When #metoo Happens Among Friends, commented on this post about sexism in Epstein’s orbit: “Lawrence Krauss had a long history of sexual harassment that was finally publicly revealed ten [years] ago. The thing that is really gross is that at the time, we were kind of baffled by the fact that other eminent voices in academia would join him on his podcast. Now we know maybe of those voices were all in the files too. They protected each other, normalized each other, and mischaracterized any concern as hysteria and kill-joy feminism.”
On one occasion, an Instagram user reached out to me with an annotated list of Epstein files on an academic named Corina Tarnita, which helped me quickly create this reel about her. Tarnita’s academic advisor, Martin Nowak, was linked to Epstein’s trafficking operations in a House Oversight Democrats report.
Why I persevere in exposing scientists in the Epstein files
If journalism is a public service, I have continued on this project not to get more clout and fame (that has not happened at all, by the way — especially given the Iran War which, I can say, has actually had a tangible effect on my views when military action ramps up), but to help people gain information into a topic they care about, but has been neglected by the media.
Why? Well, the media aren’t scientists, for one thing. Another reason is that many of the media organizations are themselves embroiled in the Epstein saga. Take Scientific American, for example…its editor met with Epstein in 2014.
The community forming around this topic has been incredible
The Science in the Epstein files has amassed a modest following of people concerned about science who love to research and think critically about what went down with Epstein and how we can move forward.
The concern is real in our comment section — and often from women who concede that this is just business as usual in the world.
One commenter wrote, “The more you read it just get worse and worse! And no arrests!!! And these men are parading around gutting women’s rights, health care and economic power. They are taking every step to solidify there power hoarding wealth as the go through their corrupt government activities.”
I’ve had so many great and illuminating conversations in the comment section of these posts and even in DMs. Sometimes, they turn into a new story idea for an Instagram reel or the beginnings of a blog post — other times, they are simply commiseration and acknowledgement of the fact that we live in a weird, twisted world where people have gotten away with some pretty bad stuff in science, which has had indirect harms on our own lives, not to mention our worldviews, and, sadly, involves our tax dollars.
There’s oh, so much more science in the Epstein files…
There’s so much more science in the Epstein files, unfortunately! Read all of our “Science in the Epstein files” blogs here, check out our Instagram for shortform video storytelling, or visit our Substack for more behind-the-scenes insights into this project.
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