A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

  The writer Evgeny Morozov, a client of Brockman’s, has dubbed his agent “Jeffrey Epstein’s Intellectual Enabler”4 for allegedly opening his Rolodex to the child predator. The head of the MIT Media Lab, who accepted most of the money from Epstein received by the university, Joi Ito, was a client of Brockman’s. Same with Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Marvin Minsky, and a slew of other leading thinkers on science and technology who would over the years socialize directly with Brockman, of course, and his buddy Epstein.

  Brockman tried to get Morozov to mingle with Epstein too. “Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire science philanthropist, showed up at this weekend’s event by helicopter (with his beautiful young assistant from Belarus). He’ll be in Cambridge in a couple of weeks [and] asked me who he should meet. You are one of the people I suggested and I told him I would send some links,” the agent wrote to his client.

  “He’s the guy who gave Harvard #30m [sic] to set up Martin Nowak. He’s been extremely generous in funding projects of many of our friends and clients. He also got into trouble and spent a year in jail in Florida,” he explained. “If he contacts you it’s probably worth your time to meet him as he’s extremely bright and interesting.”

  Morozov correctly concludes that Brockman wasn’t just networking. He was, instead, “acting as Epstein’s PR man—his liaison with the world of scientists and intellectuals that Brockman had cultivated.”

  For many intellectuals, getting paid a professor’s salary, working with Brockman represented the real chance that they’d receive handsome checks from prestigious popular publishers. Sure, most had been successful before, but only in academic settings, earning academic royalties for routinely ignored work. Being a client of Brockman’s would change that. All of a sudden a two-page book proposal could generate an advance worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and a contract with a publisher with widespread distribution. For many wealthy people, association with Brockman meant entrée into a world of supreme thinkers that might otherwise be confined to the academy.

  “In Brockman’s world, billionaires, scientists, artists, novelists, journalists, and musicians all blend together to produce enormous value—for each other and, of course, for Brockman,” Morozov observed. Everyone benefited. The insecure wealthy elite got to rub shoulders with leading academics, while the leading academics got to be fawned over and directly pitch their research projects to men who could single-handedly fund their most ambitious work.

  Brockman’s organizing vehicle for his commingling of business was the Edge Foundation, which hosted dinners and get-togethers for many of his clients and friends. It was funded in large part by Epstein, who gave the nonprofit charity $638,000 between 2001 and 2015 and was at times the foundation’s only financial supporter.

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  The most successful in America do not need the trappings of a business suit and tie. Think Steve Jobs (in his black turtlenecks), Mark Zuckerberg (known to don hoodies), and Bill Gates (usually gracing charitable events in a pair of khakis). These titans of industry are so famous, so rich, so successful that they can wear whatever the hell they want.

  It’s a demonstration of what the economist Tyler Cowen calls “countersignaling,” which he explains “is when you go out of your way to show you don’t need to go out of your way.”5

  At America’s fanciest restaurants, for instance, the richest and most famous are not the ones wearing jackets. They wear jeans with holes, T-shirts, and—gasp!—flip-flops.

  Which explains the Jeffrey Epstein ethos. Yes, he was a college dropout from a decidedly lower-middle-class upbringing. But that’s not the image he sought to project to his friends and patrons.

  Instead, he hated dressing up, shunning fancy clothes for casual college sweatshirts, jeans, fancy slippers. He wanted everyone around to know just how important he was, by being the least dressed-up person in the room.

  Epstein’s favorite hoodie, perhaps, showed off whom he wanted to be associated with. It was a crimson Harvard quarter zip with a kangaroo pocket and a drawstring hood. He loved it. Not just because of the obvious cozy comfort it provided, but because it showed off what an intellectual he wanted everyone to believe he was.

  There are few who knew him who dispute that. He had gifts. Mathematics, piano playing, and cunning charm.

  The intellectuals—that is, the academic elite—were also curious about him. Throughout his life, but especially after he accumulated wealth, Epstein cultivated deep and financial relationships with the foremost minds in America.

  “Jeffrey had lots and lots and lots of dough. Scientists are always looking for lots and lots of dough, because most scientists spend most of their time writing grant proposals to raise money. Jeffrey didn’t require a grant proposal. Jeffrey would promise money and so they crowded around, and he also was an extremely personable, amusing kind of person to talk to. He was full of incredible ideas. He was charming in the extreme, and that’s why everyone paid attention to him,” Stuart Pivar explained in his interview with Mother Jones.6

  To many who spent time with him, the former Dalton teacher’s interest in ideas seemed real. Alan Dershowitz recalls many times, myriad meetings and dinners, that centered on sharing and exploring ideas.

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  In the late 1990s, Dershowitz was vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard when he got an unexpected phone call from Lord Rothschild’s then fiancée, Lynn Forester.

  Forester—described by one friend as Epstein’s “social pimp” before she had a falling-out with the financier over a real estate deal—launched into a high-pressure sales pitch.

  “My good friend Jeffrey Epstein is coming to town,” she said. “Do you know who he is?”

  Dershowitz had no idea.

  “He’d like to come over and meet you; he’s heard very good things about you, that you’re a smart guy,” said Forester.

  Dershowitz wasn’t interested. He had been planning to spend time at home with his kids. But Forester was persistent. “Alan, please, just do me a big favor,” she said. “Just let him drop by for an hour, talk, meet him.” Finally, the Harvard law professor relented.

  Epstein knew how to flatter his hosts. Although he never drank alcohol, he showed up at Dershowitz’s house with a bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne tucked under his arm.

  “He met my kids, my wife. Then we went out on my deck and we talked for a little bit, all about academics, about how he was setting up a process of evolutionary psychology,” said Dershowitz in an interview. Before long, Epstein had invited him to fly on his private jet to a birthday party he was throwing for billionaire Leslie Wexner. Epstein claimed that Wexner had asked him to bring the “smartest man” he had met that year, and that just so happened to be Dershowitz.

  “He wanted to get to know me,” Dershowitz explained. And he wanted to know Dershowitz’s friends. “He wanted me to introduce him to some of my colleagues, which I did. And he introduced me to people, like George Church, the man who decoded the genome, who was on our faculty [at Harvard] but I’d never met him. And then [Epstein] would have these seminars at Harvard. He rented an office, and about once every month or so he would have one of these seminars where fantastic people would come from MIT, people he knew, the leading lights: Noam Chomsky; Marvin Minsky, the developer of artificial intelligence; George Church; David Gergen . . . Steven Pinker. All the leading lights were there,” he said.

  “It was an honor to be invited. I went and I enjoyed these events thoroughly; we did have boxed lunches sometimes, and we’d sit around for one and a half, two hours and discuss biology. And he would be kind of like the master of ceremonies, raising hard questions. Or sometimes somebody would present a paper, and we would critique the paper. But it was purely, purely academic. And there were never any young people around. I can’t imagine any of the people who were there would have stayed if they saw anything inappropriate.”
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  If academics had not had their heads in the sand, perhaps they too would have seen the warning signs. Because Epstein was prone to outbursts. Unusual, shocking, and vulgar displays in front of his scholarly crowd, according to one member.

  “So people would come to his dinners, including myself. I even had them,” Pivar recalls. “Jeffrey brought these people together and thought that he was causing basic thought processes to happen, which he sort of was, even though they were sort of irrelevant. I mean, to bring together a bunch of scientists and say, what is gravity? Which is ridiculous in a way, even though it’s a question nobody can answer. But he would do that kind of stuff. Just for the sake of, I don’t know what. And Jaron Lanier and all that group, the greatest thinkers that they were, he brought together with a purpose of thinking, rightfully or wrongfully, that he was going to introduce some kind of logic or something—some special kind of a thought process, which others hadn’t thought of, which of course is absurd.

  “While everybody was watching, we began to realize he didn’t know what he was talking about. Then after a couple of minutes—Jeffrey had no attention span whatsoever—he would interrupt the conversation and change it and say things like ‘What does that got to do with pussy!’” Pivar remembered.

  Moreover, when he did express ideas—and not just shout “pussy”—he offered some of the most radical views one can imagine. He argued in favor of eugenics, masked by a stringent view of science.

  For Epstein, the biological sciences were particularly intriguing. “He thought everything was biological. He was very focused on biology,” said Dershowitz.

  “He was not religious,” Dershowitz said in an interview. “He was fascinated by the law and science.”

  Epstein in time would become an advocate of transhumanism. The New York Times, which first reported Epstein’s view on this matter, defined the ideology as “the science of improving the human population through technologies like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence.”7

  “On multiple occasions starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, according to two award-winning scientists and an adviser to large companies and wealthy individuals, all of whom Mr. Epstein told about it,” the Times reported in 2019, a week and a half before he died in a Manhattan holding cell.

  “Once, at a dinner at Mr. Epstein’s mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, [the author Jaron] Lanier said he talked to a scientist who told him that Mr. Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe.”

  At another event, Epstein praised cryonics, stating he “wanted his head and penis to be frozen.”

  He also donated $20,000 to the World Transhumanist Association, whose stated mission is “to deeply influence a new generation of thinkers who dare to envision humanity’s next steps,” and personally financed individual transhumanist advocates.

  Dershowitz, and other academics, now claim to have pushed back against these radical views.

  Nevertheless, Epstein maintained a collection of impressive friends: the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, and the molecular biologist Richard Axel, among others.

  “I met Jeffrey Epstein at discussions at a research center at Harvard,” explained Noam Chomsky in an email exchange. “Neither I, nor as far as I know any others, had a sense that he was trying to ingratiate himself or anything else . . . He was participating, and sometimes brought with him some outstanding mathematicians and scientists, who we were all pleased to have join the discussions.”

  There was another reason so many scientists were interested in Epstein, but few would acknowledge it publicly.

  “For money, you understand, this was going on, why he had all these scientist friends,” said one academic who was close with the financier. “He had a lot of money, he was known to give it away, so a zillion people would show up asking for it.

  “The feeling of pretension was important to him,” he added. “I didn’t get it. But he was always visiting another academic for no reason.”

  Keeping an academically impressive crew around him nearly always left Epstein the richest man in the room. And, therefore, in certain ways the most powerful. Money, even (and perhaps especially) among academics, is an alluring elixir.

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  But for some, keeping Epstein around might have been out of sympathy. Pivar believes his buddy was “totally, totally, totally, totally misunderstood.”

  While he claims to have cut ties with Epstein after Maria Farmer, one of the first known accusers of sexual misconduct, confided in him that she had been held against her will by Epstein and his buddy Ghislaine Maxwell, he believes Epstein acted out because of a medical condition.

  “The peculiar thing is, let’s put it this way, now that you’ve got me thinking: Jeffrey had a severe case of what’s called satyriasis, the male counterpart of nymphomania. Except that he had the money and the wherewithal to work it out, to manage to supply himself with three underage girls every single day,” Pivar told Mother Jones.8

  “Who knows how many men have that? And the difference is that if there are other ones who have it, I don’t know, they probably go around raping or God knows what they do. Jeffrey had the money to do it politely—namely, by getting [complacent] young girls.”

  So for some in the smart set, Epstein was a psychological tragedy, not a psycho sex fiend. “If Jeffrey Epstein was found guilty of fooling around with one 16-year-old trollop, nobody would pay any attention,” Pivar asserted, bizarrely framing it as a “quantitative” problem rather than a “qualitative” one.

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  Perhaps another reason he developed an interest in a decidedly intellectual cause was to cultivate relationships with charitable enterprises to mask some of his financial shenanigans.

  Epstein’s donations, on the rare occasions he actually came through with them, were given from his various charitable foundations. He had at least half a dozen, with links to several more. And yet the money that flowed through those foundations appears not to have originated from his own accounts.

  Instead, Epstein used the charitable accounts to receive funds from others in his orbit. For instance, his C.O.U.Q. Foundation received a gigantic donation of around $21 million from Leslie Wexner. While his Gratitude America foundation received a hefty donation of $10 million from the investor Leon Black.9

  The money from Black came in 2015, well after the world was aware of Epstein’s admitted sexual crimes. Black also named Epstein a member of the board of his own charitable foundation, but removed him in 2012. (Black claims he was actually removed in 2007 but a clerical error kept him affiliated with his charity for an additional half a decade.)

  Black has avoided answering questions about his ties to Epstein, though in a 2019 statement he told his firm, “I was completely unaware of, and am deeply troubled by, the conduct that is now the subject of the federal criminal charges brought against Mr. Epstein.”

  Whether money received by Epstein’s charitable organizations ever made its way directly back to his own personal bank accounts is a matter of wide speculation.

  Even so, the tax expert Martin Sheil told The New York Times the foundations appeared to him to be acting as Epstein’s “piggy banks.”10

  “It doesn’t pass the smell test,” Sheil told the newspaper.

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  Another thing happened in 2015 to once again thrust Epstein in the news: the gossip site Gawker published “the Holy Grail,” the full but redacted contents of the little black book.11 It was Epstein’s full phone book, detailing the contact information for his friend
s and associates.

  “An annotated copy of the address book, which also contains entries for Alec Baldwin, Ralph Fiennes, Griffin Dunne, New York Post gossip columnist Richard Johnson, Ted Kennedy, David Koch, filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, and all manner of other people you might expect a billionaire to know, turned up in court proceedings after Epstein’s former house manager Alfredo Rodriguez tried to sell it in 2009,” the reporter Nick Bryant noted in his Gawker piece. “About 50 of the entries, including those of many of Epstein’s suspected victims and accomplices as well as [Donald] Trump, [Courtney] Love, [Ehud] Barak, [Alan] Dershowitz, and others, were circled by Rodriguez.”

  The names were shocking. Many had claimed not to have known Epstein, while even more were never asked. The book proved an intimate connection between those in the phone book and the then admitted sexual predator. As New York magazine wrote, the book showed Epstein “deeply enmeshed in the highest social circles.”12

  Epstein’s house manager Alfredo Rodriguez had been trying to shop around the book: asking price $50,000. He had unsuccessfully been seeking a payday since 2009.

  Indeed, his attempt to sell the information backfired; the FBI got wind of his effort to sell evidence behind their backs, resulting in a stiff eighteen-month sentence. In December 2014, Rodriguez died, allegedly of mesothelioma.13 Within a month the black book, which had been Rodriguez’s “insurance policy” while he was alive, was published.

  Ultimately, however, the press did not use the publication of the black book, and the subsequent publication of the private flight logs from Epstein’s private jets, as a blueprint to blow the whole sordid story into the open. “Gawker got a lot of hits. They published his flight manifest too. But ultimately I was stunned that no one in the mainstream media was willing to touch the subject matter,” the reporter Nick Bryant, who had the amazing scoop, said in 2019.14