The time I didn’t meet Jeffrey Epstein
Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and had zero email or any other contact with him … which is more (less) than some of my colleagues can say.
The bulk of the correspondence involves Epstein wanting to arrange a meeting with me and Seth Lloyd back in 2010, via an intermediary named Charles Harper, about funding a research project on “Cryptography in Nature.”
Searching my inbox, it turns out that this Charles Harper did contact me in May 2010, and I then met him at S&S Deli in Cambridge (plausible, although I have zero recollections of this meeting—only of the deli). Harper then sent me a detailed followup email about his proposed Cryptography in Nature project, naming Jeffrey Epstein for the first time as the project’s funder, and adding: “perhaps you will know Jeffrey and his background and situation.”
For whatever reason, I forwarded this email to my parents, brother, and then-fiancee Dana. My brother then found and shared a news article about Epstein’s prostitution conviction, adding to a different article that I had found and shared. (At that time, like many others, I’d probably vaguely heard of Epstein, but he didn’t have 0.1% the infamy that he has now.) Then my mom wrote the following: “be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here! Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least.”
It appears from emails that Charles Harper tried again later that summer to arrange a meeting between me and Epstein, but that I took my mom’s advice and largely blew him off, and no such meeting ever happened. Amazingly, I then forgot entirely that any of this had occurred until last night. By way of explanation, some business/finance dude trying to interest me in half-baked ideas involving quantum, AI, cryptography, etc., often dangling the prospect of funding for my students and postdocs, shows up in my life like every month. Most of their world-changing initiatives go nowhere for one reason or another. There really wasn’t much reason to think further about this, until Epstein had become history’s most notorious sex criminal, which (again) wouldn’t happen until years later, after I’d forgotten.
It gets better, though. In the Epstein Files, one also finds a November 2010 letter from Charles Harper to Epstein about organizing a conference on the same Cryptography in Nature topic, which includes the following idea about me:
Scott Aaronson was born on May 21st, 1981. He will be 30 in 2011. The conference could follow a theme of: “hurry to think together with Scott Aaronson while he is still in his 20s and not yet a pitiful over-the-hill geezer in his 30s.” This offers another nice opportunity for celebration.
I see no indication that any such conference ever happened; in any case, I didn’t get invited to one!
On my Facebook, some friends are joking that “it tracks that someone into teenage girls might think Scott Aaronson was a hot property in his nubile 20s, who would get old and boring in his 30s”—and that maybe Epstein was less sexist about such matters than everyone assumes. I replied that I wished I could say the proposition that I’d gradually get slower and more senile through the 2010s and 2020s was entirely false.
But the best comment was that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have such an astute family. If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.
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Comment #1 February 1st, 2026 at 4:42 pm
You think Bill Gates or Larry Summers would have listened to your Mom’s advice?
Comment #2 February 1st, 2026 at 5:18 pm
Peter #1: If she was their mom, maybe they would!
Comment #3 February 1st, 2026 at 5:29 pm
LOL
Comment #4 February 1st, 2026 at 6:12 pm
Your life really is like a Seinfeld episode sometimes!
Comment #5 February 1st, 2026 at 7:37 pm
Daniel J #4: I must have missed the Seinfeld episode that was especially like this! 😀
Comment #6 February 2nd, 2026 at 5:15 am
ironic that in 2019 you said “I doubt he has any clue who I am either—even if he did once claim to be “intrigued” by quantum information.” Meanwhile there is a whole thread between the two of them about how young and hot you are.
To be fair, you say here that you largely blew them off after one meeting but according to their correspondence (EFTA01814570) you offered to meet with “them” (us) on July 2, 2010 which I read to mean Charles AND Epstein, this was after your initial meeting in May.
Comment #7 February 2nd, 2026 at 7:01 am
plunk #6: Yes, thanks, that comment confirms just how little impression this episode made on me. If I’d had even a vague recollection, I surely would’ve written this post back in 2019!
As best as I can reconstruct, in July 2010 I would’ve been willing to see Charles Harper again only because Seth Lloyd would apparently be there. The possible presence of Epstein would’ve been a minus, not a plus. In any case the meeting never happened, and (searching my inbox) I made zero attempt to follow up.
Comment #8 February 2nd, 2026 at 9:38 am
It is hard to avoid following general news rather than doing some real work. The plot twists of history constantly make one say “you can’t write this stuff”.
Be honest: who foresaw a “Scott Aaronson and Jeffrey Epstein” episode on the schedule?
Comment #9 February 2nd, 2026 at 11:06 am
“For whatever reason, I forwarded this email to my parents, brother, and then-fiancee Dana”.
I’ve read a few of the file emails and I’ve noticed that people who seem to have escaped bad situations with Epstein were people who were close to their family and their family sensed something “off” about Epstein. It shows the importance of keeping your family in the loop with what is going on in your life, they could have good intuition and keep you out of trouble.
Comment #10 February 2nd, 2026 at 12:43 pm
Wow, what a great Mom to give advice like this, or even at this kind of a level. Nothing against my Mom, but she wouldn’t have been helpful in this context at all.
Comment #11 February 3rd, 2026 at 10:23 am
I had a further thought. Back in 2019, when Epstein became a central topic of conversation following his arrest and then death, and lots of my scientific colleagues were telling stories about their contacts or near-contacts with him, it struck me that there were zero stories about any scientist—liberal or conservative, male or female, morally naive or morally astute—saying, “no, of course I want nothing to do with you, because you’re friggin’ Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous mass rapist!”
So I concluded that, if anyone now imagines that they would’ve responded that way, it’s almost certainly pure hindsight bias. Indeed, even after Epstein’s first conviction, a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.
Instead, there were basically two categories of response:
(1) the scientists who got involved to one degree or another, often letting themselves get charmed by Epstein and treating him as a friend (or at any rate, continuing to seek his money).
(2) the scientists who kept their distance, but not for the exact reasons we’d want them to in hindsight—rather, mostly because of a vague “ick” feeling, annoyance over Epstein’s intellectual unseriousness, other priorities and letting the matter drop.
What I’d completely forgotten, at the time, was that I myself was in this second category.
Comment #12 February 3rd, 2026 at 7:49 pm
Scott #11: I think you might be understating the difference between the two camps. Even as a young student, I could tell there were two types of famous senior theoretical physicist. The first cared about research; they did actual calculations, worked with their students, and kept up with new developments. The second have checked out, and spend their time building clout. They’d be flying around for fancy parties, cozying up to journalists, and repeating smooth narratives while forgetting all the technical details.
It’s very easy to tell the difference. The first group wrote blog posts and the second group wrote shallow popsci bestsellers. The first group would talk about ideas at the coffee machine and the second would talk about the important people they’ve met.
I greatly admired the first group. And the second group was much smaller, but I seemed to keep running into them. Seth Lloyd spent half his lecture time bragging about himself. Lisa Randall didn’t care a bit about her students or physics at large. Lawrence Krauss and Brian Greene sold out auditoriums over and over, delivering the same metaphysical speculation every time. Even Stephen Hawking liked to monopolize space at Cambridge with his endless documentary crews, and his stunts for media attention. I could go on.
When I was 20, I told myself I wasn’t qualified to judge this behavior, even if it seemed damaging to science. Don’t senior people deserve to enjoy tenure? Aren’t they all brilliant beyond my comprehension? But now it turns out my instincts were right: there is a difference. Everybody I remember in the second group hung out with Epstein, and nobody in the first group did! So I don’t think you ever were in danger, since you’re a prototypical member of the first group.
Ironically, because the second group focused on building influence, they are generally immune to cancellation. Instead, during the woke era, you’d most often see random members of the first group get cancelled for silly things like wearing the wrong T-shirt or saying the wrong word.
Comment #13 February 3rd, 2026 at 9:46 pm
Mitchell #12: I’d dispute several points in what you wrote:
1) I can personally testify that Seth Lloyd has lots of phenomenal technical results. (And yes, he also likes to pontificate, and no we don’t always agree, which is fine!)
2) Hawking, of course, published results in the 60s and 70s that have set much of the technical agenda for cosmology and quantum gravity ever since.
3) Lots of scientists do technical work when they’re younger, then shift toward pontificating and philosophizing and popularizing when they’re older.
4) And this seems fine—at least if you agree that writing popular books, exciting kids about science, etc are worthwhile activities that someone should do! If so, it seems like an excellent thing for leading scientists to transition to as they get older and start losing their technical edge.
5) Krauss is a popularizer and was a close friend of Epstein, and he was all but cancelled. He was not immune. Seth Lloyd also suffered major consequences at MIT, because of his associations with Epstein. He wasn’t immune from cancellation either.
6) If things had been slightly different — for example, if Seth Lloyd had vouched for him to me, or if my mom hadn’t warned me away — there’s an excellent chance I would’ve met Epstein in 2010. If I had, it would’ve been embarrassing for me today, but by itself it would not have made me complicit in his crimes.
Comment #14 February 4th, 2026 at 7:37 am
Scott #11: You kept your distance for a very good reason: You asked people from your private circle (who you know and trust) about their opinion!
Even so many random strangers on the internet would hold the same opinion, they don’t know how to tell you that opinion in a way that you can accept it. The special thing about your mom’s advice was not just the advince itself, but the way she framed it in a way that made it attractive for you to accept it.
Comment #15 February 4th, 2026 at 11:24 pm
Sorry that you’ve had to experience this. I would certainly not enjoy trying to recall vague details of ancient exchanges that happen to have become part of major international news stories. Especially now we are so far over the hill.
Comment #16 February 5th, 2026 at 5:13 am
As if you didn’t remember until now. lmao
Comment #17 February 5th, 2026 at 11:02 am
Scott #16: Not only did I forget, I forgot so thoroughly as to feel vaguely offended in 2019 that Epstein had apparently overlooked me completely, in his many tours of Harvard and MIT to recruit all the coolest scientists and intellectuals into his network. I wanted him to have asked so that I could’ve said no, and I didn’t remember that that had basically happened! 😀
Comment #18 February 5th, 2026 at 11:12 am
When will the Scott Aaronson/Taylor Swift emails drop?
Comment #19 February 5th, 2026 at 11:53 am
OhMyGoodness #18: Sorry, there’s nothing juicy in those emails. They’re mostly just Taylor pestering me about whether a quantum computer could help solve the optimization problem of which color of sparkly leotard would maximize her income. (But don’t tell my daughter that I blew her off.)
Comment #20 February 5th, 2026 at 11:57 am
Re: Scott’s point about Jeffrey Epstein and scientists rejecting his money. I seem to remember from the coverage that several scientists actually had to work their Epstein grants around initial objections from MIT’s grant office in order to bank them. This because Epstein had been marked as not qualified to make donations, although they seemed to be flexible on this point enough once grantees pushed back. The point here is there was some institutional friction in obtaining money from a convicted sex offender. I like to imagine this dissuaded some people, and makes the others (who explicitly worked around these objections) quite a bit more culpable.
I say this not because Scott did any of these things. But just because I think it helps to give some criteria for distinguishing folks who just took some money from a random rich guy, vs. people who had to be at least a little bit aware that he was problematic.
Comment #21 February 5th, 2026 at 12:16 pm
Scott #18
Very funny. My daughters will be scandalized.
Comment #22 February 5th, 2026 at 1:26 pm
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you Can’t Fool Mom.”
Comment #23 February 5th, 2026 at 2:10 pm
Matthew Green #20: I don’t know what happened between the grant recipients and their universities. Seth Lloyd’s position, fwiw, was that he dutifully cleared everything with the MIT administration, and then they threw him under the bus, rather than accepting responsibility for their own failure to vet a donor.
Comment #24 February 6th, 2026 at 4:53 am
“Seth Lloyd spent half his lecture time bragging about himself. Lisa Randall didn’t care a bit about her students or physics at large. Lawrence Krauss and Brian Greene sold out auditoriums over and over, delivering the same metaphysical speculation every time. Even Stephen Hawking liked to monopolize space at Cambridge with his endless documentary crews, and his stunts for media attention. I could go on.”
Here we have people of the highest calibre being smeared for no good reason, via bad faith guilt by association. Let’s keep in mind what the smearers choose to obfuscate: that none of these people are pedophiles or knew that Epstein was.
Comment #25 February 6th, 2026 at 6:02 am
Pretty sure Bill Gates knew what a good mom would have said after his first trip to the island.
Comment #26 February 6th, 2026 at 11:32 am
Lloyd visited Epstein in prison after his 2008 conviction, so he was certainly aware of the conviction. The nature of the conviction wasn’t prostitution, but procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting an underage girl (the victim was 14 years old.) The emails between Lloyd and Epstein in 2012 indicate that Epstein was sending small donations as a test to see if MIT would accept them (email text: “im going to give you two 50k tranches to see if the line jingles.”) Lloyd had plenty of information to make a judgement about this person, plenty of information to know that the gifts would be controversial, and still seems to have chosen to take the donations.
I think it’s good that you researched the donor and decided not to proceed. I think it would even understandable (if bad judgement) if, as a busy faculty member, you might not to do research on a potential donor. However I think once you verifiably do have these facts, accepting the funds begins to be a problem.
Comment #27 February 6th, 2026 at 11:47 am
Chase Saunders #25: There’s no record that Bill Gates was ever on the island. (What exactly he did do in relation to Epstein is of course another question. Beyond what’s been reported, I don’t know and neither do you.)
Comment #28 February 6th, 2026 at 12:01 pm
Also egads, after researching my previous comment, and to reply to your comment “a short jail stint in one’s past for ‘soliciting prostitution’ simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.”
I can’t see why you wouldn’t at least Google for the details. The top two results would be a Reuters article and his Wikipedia entry.
Here’s what the Reuters article from 2008 [1] said: “Lawyers for Epstein could not be reached for comment. But his guilty plea is the latest twist in a case stemming from a lengthy probe by Palm Beach police that the reputed billionaire paid several girls under 18 in return for naked massages at his Palm Beach home that sometimes involved alleged sexual assaults.”
Here’s what Wikipedia said in October 2008 [2], among many other things: “In May 2006, Palm Beach police filed a probable cause affidavit saying that Epstein should be charged with four counts of unlawful sex with minors and one molestation count. In a police interview, one of the girls related that she repeatedly had lesbian sex with Epstein’s friend Nadia Marcinkova in his presence; she stated he ‘had purchased her from her family in Yugoslavia. Epstein bragged he brought her into the United States to be his Yugoslavian sex slave.'”
Typing a guy’s name into Google doesn’t really feel like “research.” Unless you chose to do no vetting at all, you’d have these facts at your disposal. Liberal sensibilities have little to do with it.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us/ny-financier-pleads-guilty-in-florida-sex-scandal-idUSN30434373/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeffrey_Epstein&oldid=243046136
Comment #29 February 6th, 2026 at 12:43 pm
It’s almost certain than Epstein was some kind of Mossad operative. Scott, does this change your optics of the whole situation? Like, you’re generally pro-Israel, but does that extend to supporting actions like setting honeypots to get kompromat on politicians and in this way extend Israel’s influence inside the US? You may find the means disgusting, but what about the end?
Comment #30 February 6th, 2026 at 1:40 pm
MK #29: I’ve seen no serious evidence—zero—that Epstein was a Mossad operative or any other kind of intelligence operative. The only master that we know he served was the one in his pants. He was also famously, astonishingly apolitical in who he befriended, from Bill Clinton to Trump to Ehud Barak to Mohammad bin Salman to the anti-Israel radical Chomsky.
It’s been fascinating and depressing to see how, after his death, the legend of this one rich, well-connected pervert grew to absorb all the insane fantasies people previously held about how the world works—basically becoming the next all-purpose conspiracy theory after QAnon.
Comment #31 February 6th, 2026 at 6:48 pm
Indeed, Epstein had to remind his dear friend Ehud Barak that he didn’t work for Mossad.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02612203.pdf
Comment #32 February 7th, 2026 at 7:02 am
Scott – you should try searching for yourself on Moltbook as well – you’re in there…
(btw I am not Mitchell #12)
Comment #33 February 7th, 2026 at 1:34 pm
Mothers are heroes with superpowers.. deepest thanks to them.
Comment #34 February 8th, 2026 at 9:03 pm
It is appalling that all legal and moral standards were thrown to the winds and this insane “release the Epstein files” legislation was passed. All in the name of virtue signalling (Republicans) and a delusional hope that it might harm Trump (Democrats).
Bill Gates in particular has a great civil case against the DOJ and/or the sponsors of the Epstein bill, for violating what were his rights under the norms that were inviolable until the fateful intersection of Trump Derangement with the Epstein Moral Panic. As interesting as the contents of his emails to Epstein may be, the release of those emails is an outrage. As is the release of emails involving Scott Aaronson and many other innocent bystanders.
Comment #35 February 9th, 2026 at 2:28 pm
When you encounter news like “X is in Epstein files”, and X is someone you very much dislike, is your first thought = “- I have little doubt that guy is a rapist!”, or ” – Hold on, that doesn’t prove anything whatsoever”.
Comment #36 February 16th, 2026 at 9:54 pm
There’s a web site that puts all the Epstein emails into a Gmail simulator called, wait for it, “Jmail”, so you can search for yourself or whatever else in the mails. I am not sure whether I should laugh at this or be disturbed but here it is:
https://jmail.world/search?q=aaronson
Comment #37 February 16th, 2026 at 10:09 pm
Jmail #36: Yes, those are the very same emails I already discussed in this post—the ones that document how Jeffrey Epstein apparently wanted to meet me but never did. I agree that the interface is much better than the DOJ website’s.
Comment #38 February 19th, 2026 at 9:17 pm
Just to be clear, “I don’t know whether to laugh or be disturbed by this” refers to the existence of the Jmail interface and that somebody made the effort to construct such a thing. The specific emails with your surname in them are another in the endless chain of Epstein nothingburgers, and that IS disturbing, in that 99.99 percent of this material should never have been released, for the reasons that DOJ originally gave for not releasing — it can drag innocent or presumed-innocent people into the net with zero evidence of wrongdoing on their part.