Did scientists in the Epstein files participate in crimes against women and children?

By Sheeva Azma

This blog discusses Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activities and therefore may not be suitable for a general audience.

We can’t know what role scientists played in the Epstein files for sure since no scientists are currently under criminal investigation. That doesn’t mean scientists haven’t done any questionable things, per the Epstein files.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what science would look like if it did not care about women and girls…and my conclusion is that it would look like what’s going on right now with science in the Epstein files.

It’s sad that writing this post has taken me a whole five months, but that’s how long it has taken to make sense of everything happening with scientists in the files.

There’s a kind of quiet obedience that’s kind of part of elite science. At least, that’s what I learned as a woman in science. It took a lot of energy to not only speak up, but actually be heard and respected. It turns out that this might actually be a huge cultural problem in elite science.

Anand Giridharadas is a journalist writing for the Atlantic who has been examining what he calls the “Epstein Class.” Unfortunately for him, he got firsthand experience with the quiet obedience demonstrated by some of the scientists in the Epstein files.

Here’s the story he tells over on his Substack.

Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, emailed Giridharadas in April 2019 to ask Giridharadas to help judge who should get what was called the Disobedience Award, which was sponsored by Reid Hoffman, Linkedin’s co-founder and dedicated to things like “speaking truth to power” and “systemic change.”

Then, news broke that MIT was heavily involved in the Epstein scandal. Ito sent out a mass email to Giridharadas and the rest of the group, saying, “This incident has also made me even more aware of how vulnerable I am to exactly the power structures I am trying to resist.”

Ever the journalist, Giridharadas replied to the group and said to them to “make public all your correspondence with Epstein and any related people, so that we can all make decisions with full information,” as he relates. However, that did not happen. In fact, Reid Hoffman wrote back and said, “Your responses frankly make me concerned about your ability to serve on an awards committee.”

Giridharadas continues: “[H]ere’s what I remember most from that day and the days that followed: the silence. Only one person in the group — an eminent scholar of media and democracy — sidebarred with me (with nobody copied, as is often the case when there is bravery in these networks) to say he agreed with me. Everybody else — including people linked with some of the most prestigious institutions on earth — played ostrich.”

In other words: these elite people in science and technology demanded complete complacency and silence from someone pointing out the obvious question — what the heck were y’all doing with Jeffrey Epstein?!

What a perfect story to highlight a modus operandi for elite scientists in the Epstein files. Fall in line and play along with it all, or we’ll kick you out of our group under the guise of being unqualified in some way, even though the real reason was that they did not want their feathers ruffled (continuing the ostrich analogy).

Another thing that I want to say I intuited as an MIT undergrad was the comfort with which some of these scientific elites avoided women. Yes, I am here to tell you that, even 20 years ago, I could feel when people were more comfortable with me not being in the room as a woman in science, or they were more comfortable with the guys in the room (which, in the end, felt like the same kind of thing).

Well, we find an interesting paradox in Giridharadas’s reporting — men in Epstein’s circle preferred to eat without the company of women, but (at least some) participated in his crimes against women and girls.

How many of these people were scientists, I wonder? I can’t recognize all the people in the photo grid posted on Giridharadas’s Substack article here, but here’s another photo from the Epstein files that Jeffrey Epstein emailed himself. There are very few women at this table.

Per a media report, Jeffrey Epstein might have taken this photo himself. By the way, this was in 2015, well after he had been to jail on lenient terms — then released early, on “good behavior” — after his 2008 sweetheart deal with the US Department of Justice.

These people were sitting at the same table as a known predator — well, at least one, and questionable others — from the scientific community. I’m talking, people who have accepted funding from the Department of Defense and National Science Foundation (aka, our hard-earned tax dollars) potentially participating in Epstein’s crimes. It’s amazing that amidst all of the defunding of science that has happened, none of these people at the table have been criminally investigated, and everyone I recognize at this table actually still has their same (important) job!

This dinner happened after Epstein had written Reid Hoffman in 2013 to tell him that he had “lots of interesting scientists visiting” at his New Mexico ranch, where Epstein had boasted that his transhumanist science experiments on women and girls would happen.

I’ve researched the roles of two people in this photo with respect to the ranch: Ed Boyden, whose ranch visit planning is in the Epstein files, and Joi Ito, who Epstein invited to the ranch a couple days after Boyden’s purported visit. The reason I say “purported” is that, even though Epstein talks about Martin Nowak, a scientist on leave from Harvard, visiting the ranch (see the next screenshot below — it’s kind of vague, but it’s there), there is very little said about Boyden, if anything, post the scientist visit.

I have previously written about Nowak and Boyden planning to visit the ranch, by the way.

Earlier in August, Epstein chats with Ito a bit about visiting the ranch, saying that Ed Boyden might visit, per JMail (which is so much easier to use than the DOJ Epstein site).

Later, looking through the JMail archives, I read that Epstein had been at his ranch for a few days more after he told Reid Hoffman about “lots of interesting scientists visiting” (allegedly, including both Nowak and Boyden) in August 2013. In fact, Epstein, emailing Joi Ito, offered to pick him up from Albuquerque if he could somehow jet there from Utah.

Epstein and Ito talk a lot about vague scientific generalities that are either incredibly pretentious or a cover for illegal activities. Maybe both. I can’t decide, and I haven’t encountered any evidence one way or the other. Like I said, nobody is investigating these people.

If you go by this self-report in the Epstein files, Ito did, in fact, visit the ranch less than a couple weeks after the big scientist meetup.

After resigning from directing the MIT Media Lab, Ito turned over a new leaf in Japan, per the New York Times, which also cites Ito as a frequent visitor to Epstein’s private island.

When I first started writing about scientists and science in the Epstein files, it was because I found my own professor in the Epstein files. I did this reel about it. He has since resigned from his academic positions at UCLA. Some people who protested at his office at UCLA, accelerating his resignation, told me that my reel, which was viewed over 123,000 times, made a difference.

It’s not even just these people. I wrote about the link between Epstein’s science friends and violence toward women and girls in a Substack article.

Marvin Minsky, the father of artificial intelligence, and Stephen Kosslyn, once director of the Harvard psychology department who let Epstein serve as a research fellow, were both accused of sexual assault. Physicist Larry Krauss, another Epstein friend, was forced out of academia due to sexual misconduct. Larry Summers, economist who served in two presidential administrations and was not only an Epstein friend but talked about his affair with a young trainee with Epstein, resigned from his posts at Harvard.

All of this is why I say we cannot take these people at their word. They appear concerned only with themselves and their own careers, despite all of the lives they have ruined, both directly and indirectly. They would rather lie than admit to whatever it is they did or enabled — which is also criminal in itself!

And maybe they’re afraid of me for writing this. “To browse through the Epstein photos is to identify, through its absence, what must be most terrifying to men in this circle: a forty-something woman with thoughts,” writes Giridharadas. Hey, that describes me, I thought, as I read his article. He continues: “For some of these men, the fear of being caught out in a debate with an adult woman must have been greater than the fear of being caught in bed with an underage one.”

It’s wild that I have seen that happen with one of the men in the Epstein files, who I saw frustratedly chided a woman colleague who asked him a tough question. While that frustrated man, Marc Hauser, never faced charges of sexual misconduct, he was forced out of Harvard in 2011 for scientific misconduct. He was a big name in science, too. I was excited, once, to visit his lab and potentially work there as an MIT student or recent MIT grad (I can’t remember anymore — it’s been two decades!), and ironically, I do remember there being a lot of women running things there. It’s sad that his personality was so abrasive — sad for the women working in his lab and anyone who was ever his colleague. (I never got that job, by the way.)

So…there’s some more thoughts on the link between the Epstein files and toxic science culture.

It took five months of me combing through the files to get to this point

Since early February 2026, I’ve been writing about science in the Epstein files on our blog, Substack, Instagram, and YouTube.

Why did it take five months to piece together these particular puzzle pieces? The reason is that there’s way too much science in the Epstein files — so much so that we’ve been talking about it almost exclusively for the past five months, and have no plans of stopping. In a way, we’ve been talking about it all along, as it’s all part of a larger discussion of science culture.

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