Epstein befriended a slew of scientists. New records contain ‘orgy’ allegation against one

The late scientist Stephen Hawking made a name for himself through his exploration of the physics of black holes, but it is his connection to the holder of one of the world’s most notorious black books — the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — that has him in the news again.

A just-unsealed 2015 email from Epstein to his former girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, suggests Hawking was involved in the culture of sex abuse that thrived on Epstein’s private island. The email was included in discovery in connection with a defamation lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, against Maxwell, for calling Giuffre a liar.

The email says that Giuffre, who would be instrumental in bringing down Epstein’s sex-trafficking empire, alleged that Hawking, while an island visitor, had participated in an “underage orgy.”

In the email, Epstein instructed Maxwell to offer a reward to anyone who could help disprove Giuffre’s allegation.

READ MORE: First look at Jeffrey Epstein ‘John Doe’ files: Clinton, Copperfield, Trump and more

There is no other evidence in the court document, released along with thousands of pages of records in response to a Miami Herald lawsuit, that supports this claim.

A widely published photo does show Hawking, who died in 2018, participating in a gathering at Epstein’s private compound in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2006.

The financier’s connection with a world-renowned scientist wasn’t unusual.

READ MORE: Judge denies Miami Herald request to release complete list of ‘J. Does’

He had over the years cultivated personal relationships with a galaxy of the world’s most prominent — mostly male — scientists. A college dropout, Epstein also funded leading research centers, donating around $9 million to Harvard and $800,000 to MIT’s Media Lab. Even after he pleaded guilty in Palm Beach County in 2008 to soliciting sex from an underage girl and reported to the local jail for a year’s incarceration, Epstein continued to facilitate donations totaling at least $7.5 million for the lab — a relationship the institution reportedly attempted to conceal.

Epstein also separately funneled $1.2 million into investment funds under the control of then-MIT Media Lab Director, Joi Ito. Ito resigned from his position in 2019 after the New Yorker revealed his connections with Epstein.

Those in the scientific field who associated with Epstein have at times been caught up in salacious, if unproven, allegations. For instance, Giuffre told the court in a deposition in her defamation suit that Maxwell had directed her to have sex with AI pioneer and MIT professor Marvin Minsky on Epstein’s island. Minsky died in 2016.

But other scientists who associated with Epstein were not named in the formerly sealed records and have not been tied to any of the sexual abuse of young women attributed to the multimillionaire.

Mathematician and geneticist Eric Lander, President Joe Biden’s pick to be his science advisor in 2021, is one prominent figure who met with Epstein. He did so twice, including once in 2012 in the office of Martin Nowak, a Harvard mathematical biologist, four years after Epstein pleaded guilty, BuzzFeed News reported in 2019.

Roughly a year after his confirmation, Lander resigned over an unrelated matter: 14 government staffers accused him of bullying and demeaning his subordinates, prompting a White House investigation. He has gone back to his professorships at MIT and Harvard.

The New York Times reported that others in the scientific world with ties to Epstein included Kip Thorne, physicist and consultant on Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”; neurologist and author Oliver Sacks; Nobel Prize winning physicists Frank Wilczek and Murray Gell-Mann and Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist.

Epstein made these connections through his friendship with literary agent John Brockman, whose clients include a constellation of world-renowned scientists.

The Miami Herald’s original “Perversion of Justice” series:

• How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime

• Cops worked to put serial sex abuser in prison. Prosecutors worked to cut him a break

• Even from jail, sex abuser manipulated the system. His victims were kept in the dark

• Sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein was surrounded by powerful people. Here’s a sampling

• For years, Jeffrey Epstein abused teen girls, police say. A timeline of his case

That Epstein continued to find an open door at elite academic institutions even after he was convicted of the sex charge in 2008 puts in stark relief the insatiable need for new funding at these universities — and the potential peril it brings.

“The current controversial donor environment on display at Harvard and elsewhere illustrates the hard choices confronting college and university leaders in fundraising; they will be privately and publicly measured by their moral compass,” said Anthony Alfieri, an ethics professor at the University of Miami’s law school.

Epstein was deeply interested in transhumanism, a modern-day version of eugenics, the now discredited study of improving the human race through engineered breeding. The Nazis had used eugenics to justify their genocide and ethnic cleansing of Jews, Romani, the disabled and other minority communities in Europe in their efforts to “purify” the Aryan race.

Epstein hosted a conference, attended by scientists, including Hawking and Thorne, in the Virgin Islands in 2006 ostensibly about gravity but he was more interested in talking about perfecting the human genome that could “result in superior humans,” the New York Times reported in 2019.

He wanted to seed the human race with his DNA.

The Times reported that on multiple occasions since the 2000s, Epstein discussed his ambition to inseminate women with his sperm in his vast New Mexico ranch, one of several Epstein homes, including a Palm Beach estate. Jaron Lanier, the founder of virtual reality, who had attended one of Epstein’s New York dinner parties, told the the Times that he believed Epstein was using the events, where many invitees were attractive women possessing impressive academic credentials, to screen candidates to bear his children.

“Anecdotal evidence suggests that donors at both large and small institutions are increasingly seeking to influence not only the form and substance of academic research, but also the recruitment and retention of faculty to conduct that research,” Alfieri said.

“This growing trend puts the integrity and veracity of academic research at risk.”

Epstein, who had a black book of famous contacts, allegedly abused scores of young women and girls at his various homes, including at his Palm Beach estate. His staff kept track of the women and girls, summoning as many as three a day. He was arrested in 2019 after the Herald published Perversion of Justice, a series of articles that focused on the women he abused. A month after his arrest, he was found hanged in his New York City prison cell. His death was deemed a suicide.

Maxwell was subsequently charged with sex trafficking, convicted and sentenced to 20 years in the federal penal system.