The scientists

Lawrence Krauss organized “Confronting Gravity,” funded by Epstein’s foundation, with about twenty physicists including Stephen Hawking, David Gross, Frank Wilczek, Gerard ’t Hooft, Kip Thorne, Alan Guth and Jim Peebles. Hawking took a submarine ride and the group picnicked on Little St. James. Epstein would later list it among his top achievements. [1]

Guth and Peebles told NPR they barely saw Epstein. Other attendees and later reporting recalled young women around him; Krauss has said the women around Hawking were his nurses. That spring Palm Beach police were building their criminal case against him. Nothing in the record says any physicist at the conference knew. [1]

In 2012 a person whose name is redacted told Epstein they were “rehashing” an article on the gravity conference; a press release followed without mentioning it was six years old. Emails reviewed by CNN show the same effort with press releases about Martin Nowak’s Harvard work, meant to push other results about Epstein down search engines. The physicist Peter Woit told NPR that after 2006 a large part of Epstein’s activity was “reputation laundering.” [1][2]

Harvard’s own 2020 review found he gave $9.1 million before his conviction, nothing after, but kept an office and keycard at Nowak’s program and visited more than 40 times between 2010 and 2018. Nowak was sanctioned in 2021, reinstated in 2023, and put on leave in 2026 after the new files. Epstein also funded Edge.org, the salon run by literary agent John Brockman, which put him in rooms with leading scientists. The MIT side of the story is in the MIT Media Lab; Harvard’s top tier in Larry Summers and Harvard. [1][2][3]

In July 2014 Epstein emailed George Church, the Harvard genetics pioneer, with “a great idea”; Church replied with a ten-stage, $10 million investment plan. Epstein picked the name Georgarage, and his lawyer Darren Indyke registered the company in Delaware. Emails discuss using it to invest in companies including eGenesis, which Church co-founded; eGenesis says it never received money from Georgarage or Epstein. Church did not respond to CNN. [1]

Krauss, who had been Epstein’s friend for nearly fifteen years, sought his advice in 2018 on how to respond to sexual-misconduct allegations at Arizona State; he retired in 2019 and denies wrongdoing. In February 2026 Yale barred the computer scientist David Gelernter from teaching while it reviewed a 2011 email recommending a student to Epstein as a “v small good-looking blonde,” and the Nobel laureate Richard Axel stepped down as co-director of Columbia’s brain institute. [2][3][4]

Giuffre testified that she was directed to have sex with the AI pioneer Marvin Minsky, who died in 2016 and was never charged; see the men Giuffre named. [1]