US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman announces charges against Jeffrey Epstein, who donated millions to Harvard (right).

Jeffrey Epstein, the Wall Street financier who on Monday was indicted for running a sex trafficking ring and abusing underage girls as young as 14, was a major science donor who gave millions of dollars to leading scientists and top universities.

Beneficiaries of Epstein’s scientific largesse included Harvard and MIT, according to press releases and records including filings by Epstein’s charitable foundations to the Internal Revenue Service, reviewed by BuzzFeed News. Though Epstein was publicity-shy, his charitable foundations described him as a “science philanthropist,” and between 2012 and 2014 issued press releases highlighting his support of top scientists, some of whom he counted as personal friends.

Some institutes and researchers — including MIT, the celebrity physicist Lawrence Krauss, and the Melanoma Research Alliance — continued to take Epstein’s money long after the controversial 2008 plea deal that saw him serve just 13 months in a Florida jail, let out during the day to continue his work investing the fortunes of his billionaire clients.

Now, at least one organization, the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, is considering whether to give away the money it received from Epstein after 2008.

Epstein’s interest in science began years ago — a gushing 2002 profile in New York magazine claimed he was spending $20 million a year on his “covey of scientists,” giving them freedom to explore any avenue of research. Luminaries including the late Gerald Edelman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the structure of antibodies and was backed by Epstein to study the nature of consciousness, praised the financier for his sharp mind.



Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak, the magazine wrote, talked to Epstein on a weekly basis and was flown to his homes to give impromptu lectures. “Jeffrey has the mind of a physicist. It’s like talking to a colleague in your field,” Nowak told New York magazine. “He has changed my life. Because of his support, I feel I can do anything I want.”

But tracking the full extent of Epstein’s funding for science is hard. Though private foundations are supposed to reveal the beneficiaries of their grants in annual documents filed with the IRS, those from Epstein’s known foundations, based in the US Virgin Islands, do not give a complete record of his donations.

For example, one of Epstein’s foundations, Enhanced Education, made $250,000 in payments to the Origins Project, headed by Lawrence Krauss at Arizona State University, between December 2010 and April 2017, according to records obtained by BuzzFeed News under a public records request. But Enhanced Education seems to have filed only once with the IRS, for 2002.

Krauss, who agreed to retire from ASU last year after BuzzFeed News revealed his history of sexual harassment, publicly defended Epstein in 2011, telling the Daily Beast: “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”

“I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey,” Krauss added. “I feel raised by it.”