When the Epstein files were released earlier this year, Scott Aaronson was surprised to find his own name in them.
"This was something that I'd completely forgotten about," says Aaronson, "until I saw that I'm in the Epstein files like, 26 times."
Aaronson, a computer scientist, never met or associated with Jeffrey Epstein. He was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 when a proxy for Epstein reached out to him about potentially funding a research project.
At the time, Aaronson had never heard of Jeffrey Epstein, and he forwarded the query to a person he knew to be a good judge of character: his mom. "My mom sent an email that said, 'Be careful of getting sucked into this slime machine,'" recounts Aaronson.
"You don't care that much about money," she reminded him. "They can't buy you."
Epstein had no scientific training, but he positioned himself as a patron of the discipline and sought to cultivate scientists and researchers, going so far as to fund an exclusive 2006 conference on physics. Aaronson studies quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Epstein, he recalls, proposed funding a research project related to cryptography and nature.
Aaronson turned the offer down. He has at least one colleague who did get caught up with Epstein.
Philanthropy as "a significant form of power"
By some estimates, philanthropy provides at least 20 percent of funding for science research at U.S. institutions. With little government oversight of this revenue stream, it's easy to imagine how someone like Jeffrey Epstein could use philanthropy to rehabilitate their reputation, say those who work inside this system.
"One of the really massive failings with philanthropy is that because it has so little transparency, it doesn't generate the scrutiny that it deserves as a significant form of power in a society," says Rob Reich, a professor at Stanford University who studies the impact of philanthropy on democracy.
There is no universal reporting system for these gifts, and legal requirements around disclosures are limited. That leaves vetting up to institutions and individuals. But reputational risk is not necessarily the first thing that people think about when they receive interest in funding their work, says Jeffrey Flier, who was dean of Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016.
"Before the Epstein affair almost nobody would be thinking about that," says Flier, who estimates 20 percent of his job was fundraising while at Harvard. Though he never associated with Epstein, he says he's not surprised that some scientists engaged with a potential donor who praised their work and dangled money.
"The main reaction they're gonna have — understandably, given human nature and everything else — is, 'Wow, that's amazing, that would be great. I love that.'"
Many scientists are under pressure to fund their own work, often with a mix of federal grants and private donations.
Roger Ali, speaking on behalf of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, points out that universities regularly publish donor names and donor policies as well as deploy extensive reputational vetting for donors in order to make sure the donor's interest aligns with that of the university. "There is that lens that you use to ensure that accepting a gift in an ethical way and that it doesn't put undue risk to the organization," says Ali.
But big universities, says Jeffrey Flier, often save their scrutiny for the biggest donors that present the most risk.
" Various people in the legal offices and at the highest levels of governance will say — Okay, what do we know about this person? Is there any reason we wouldn't want to have our school named for this person?"
While Epstein did give millions of dollars to scientists, universities, and scientific organizations over many years, his donations were frequently in relatively small amounts.
Limited research and transparency around donors
Some universities made commitments to increased transparency around donors after Epstein's crimes came to light.
But Reich says philanthropy is still regularly used by people with means to cultivate their reputations. "Epstein just seems egregious because there's no political or social constituency for pedophiles," says Reich. "No one's about to stick up for him."
Reich points to the Sackler family, the former owners of Purdue Pharma, whose marketing of the opioid painkiller OxyContin helped fuel the opioid crisis. The family donated heavily to universities and scientific institutions.
Reich says there's one thing that would mitigate the use of the system to obfuscate bad behavior — requiring private universities to disclose exactly who is giving money and how much. " There should be public transparency about the person or the foundation, the amount and what the donor restrictions or intent were," says Reich.
Roger Ali — from the Association of Fundraising Professionals — says while he has seen a "heightened awareness," around the importance of accountability, he has not seen significant structural changes in philanthropy in the post-Epstein era.
Reich acknowledges there's no form of untainted money. He says there could be circumstances in which a donor committed a crime, served time, and offered a donation as a kind of atonement. Those deliberations, he says, should be public.
"Universities should shoulder the responsibility of making transparent their own donor policies so that a richer public discussion can happen about this," says Reich, "and we can find our way to some reasonable set of norms."
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