In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned to gather for an exclusive retreat at a luxury farm in the woods of Connecticut. The guests had been hand-picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman, who frequently hosted similar salons for luminaries in science, technology and media.
The problem? Brockman had included two women on the list, and his staunch supporter and biggest funder wanted them out.
“John, the old conferences did not care about diversity. I suggest you not either,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in response to an email about the programming. “The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry.”
In reply, Brockman justified the women’s inclusion, and says they’d been a part of a related book about AI, which needed to be inclusive to sell. “Today, it’s impossible to get a publisher to buy such a book with essays by 25 men and no women,” he wrote.
Brockman concludes the email by citing #MeToo and mentioning the news of another scientist, whose book he had tried to publish, coming under fire for sexual harassment allegations. He wonders whether it might be best for optics if the disgraced financier — the biggest financial backer to Brockman’s nonprofit Edge Foundation — didn’t attend after all.
“Me-Too is not going away; it’s growing, it’s all-pervasive and we’re now in a McCarthy-ism moment on steroids.”
Brockman did not respond to a request for comment.
The 2018 exchange, which was revealed as part of a trove of files released by the Department of Justice, illuminates Epstein’s deep interest and entrenchment in the scientific community. He was well connected to scientists at top universities who continued to associate with him after a 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. But the files also underscore how he used his power and money in ways that kept women out of places where they might succeed.
“I think we all had a sense that the system wasn’t super fair, right?” said Nicole Baran, an assistant professor of biology and a member of 500 Scientists, a grassroots organization that started in 2016 to combat racism and misogyny in STEM — or science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “Seeing some of these emails — and peering behind the curtains of the rooms that we were never invited into, I think has really laid bare, I don’t know, just truly how broken and corrupt the system is.”
The emails are a reminder to women like Baran that the profession, at its highest levels, still operates under the gaze of men. And in a field where funding is scarce — and climbing the career ladder is often only possible through a combination of luck, mentorship and networking — the files reveal the ways sexism and misogyny still hold women back.
For the boys in the club, the arrangement worked to their benefit. Epstein donated millions of dollars to their research, hosted them at networking dinners at his home, invited them to visit his island or his ranch in Santa Fe, and connected them to potential funders to further their work.
As a result, these men were able to establish their own well-funded labs to pursue their work, land lucrative book deals and make connections to other prominent men, particularly those in Silicon Valley who were working on technological advancements like AI.
But as the emails reveal, these same men did not see women as intellectual equals.
Take Roger Schank, an AI researcher and theorist who died in 2023. He suggested in one email that “intelligence comes about in part from real focus” and that it is rare for a woman to not be “first and foremost focused on what others are thinking and feeling about her.”
“Hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you or why you don’t own a kelly bag,” he wrote. To which Epstein responded: “It’s the tail of distribution , no really smart women – none.”
(Epstein’s emails and those of his correspondents often contained typos; The 19th is reproducing the text as it appears in the files released by the Justice Department.)
Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, who emailed with Epstein hundreds of times, made a joke in one email about how “half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”
The email was sent in 2017, more than a decade after Summers came under fire for a speech he gave at a conference for women and underrepresented groups in STEM, where he suggested that there weren’t as many women smart enough to be in these professions due to higher variability in men’s intelligence. During his time as president he was also scrutinized for the lack of women in tenured positions. The Guardian reported that under his reign the share of tenured positions offered to women fell from 36 percent to 13 percent.
In another exchange, Epstein and Jeremy Rubin, a bitcoin developer and MIT researcher, went back and forth over whether there are any games that women are actually better at than men. It would be “interesting to attempt to make an intellectually stimulating game where women outperform men,” Rubin wrote in 2016. “Unless women are inherently inferior to the maximally talented man at all tasks ;).”
For women like Lauren Aulet, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, the files revealed conversations that were more brash than she expected. “I think what was most shocking was simply how blatant and explicit the misogyny was.”
“We have this narrative that explicit misogyny is something from the ’50s and ’60s, and what we have now is like implicit bias and microaggressions,” she said, adding: “I think this made clear that explicit misogyny is still out there in science and in academia, it’s just perhaps behind closed doors.”
Importantly, she says, the ways in which women are talked about, and also excluded from the connections these men had, have professional repercussions
“Women scientists aren’t necessarily the people that come to mind for certain men when they’re thinking about who they’re inviting to dinner or who they’re inviting to a conference,” she said.
Not having that visibility can matter when it comes to achievements like being offered a tenured position — the height of stability in academia. “Often the tenure board will reach out for letters of recommendation from other people at other institutions in the field. Certainly, the more you’re known broadly, the better it is for your career in terms of tenure.”
Other scientists, like Alison Twelvetree, a neurobiologist based in the United Kingdom, said she was not as surprised by the contents of the emails. “You just feel that it’s happening, even if you’re not privy to the exact contents of the conversations.”
In her career, she said she’s often been the only woman in the room. “You become very aware of the — I mean a very British way of putting this — blokey banter that you’re not a part of and you kind of feel that exclusion.”
For Twelvetree, the emails also showed how these scientists would let things slide in their interactions with Epstein. “A lot of men who get to the top, they’re cowards,” she said. “So even if they’re aware that they’re not supposed to condone the way people are speaking, or they shouldn’t be that way in those environments, they will condone it,” she said. “It’s that sort of cowardice to [not] be an active bystander and not call it out. It’s still the majority.”
She sees a connection between the ways women are talked about in the files and the response to a recent push to strip Elon Musk of his fellow title at the Royal Society, the U.K.’s premier scientific institution, after his AI tool, Grok, was given the capability to undress women and girls.
So far, the head of the institute has said the only reasons to strip fellows of their titles is if they’ve conducted scientific misconduct, things like falsifying data, Twelvetree said. “[Elon’s] used the products of science to make his personal AI assistant Grock a mass engine of misogyny and white supremacy. I don’t understand how that isn’t scientific misconduct.”
In January, X, formerly known as Twitter, announced it had limited image generation to paid users and added additional safety guardrails. However, reporting has shown Grok can still generate explicit images despite these changes.
For her, it’s just another example of men not being allies to women. “It’s these people at the top just sort of being pretty casual about stuff they should be standing up to,” she said.
Outside of quipping about women’s intelligence, some of the emails show men talking about young women in their profession in ways that are degrading. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University who corresponded with Epstein many times, recommending an undergrad student for a possible job, describing her to Epstein as a “v small good-looking blonde.” Yale has since placed Gelernter on leave, while they review his conduct.
In another series of exchanges, Epstein and Summers discuss a woman whom Summers said he was mentoring, but who he implied he wanted to sleep with. He has since clarified the woman was not a student to the Harvard Crimson. In November, he told the student newspaper, that he was deeply ashamed of his actions and takes full responsibility “for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.” He has stepped down from public positions including at the Center for American Progress and on the board of OpenAI.
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The interactions revealed in the files are “very dehumanizing” for women, Baran said. “I think especially when you think about like, these are men who had colleagues [and] mentees that were women,” she said. “And I think what was so clear is the way in which women in particular were just not spoken about as people with equal intellectual capacity and power.”
The revelations also made her question some of the work produced by some of the men scientists connected to Epstein, including researchers she teaches in her own classes. “It’s really hard to separate the science that these people created from the theories that are considered sort of foundational,” she said. “Especially in this area of psychology and evolution in particular, where I’m finding it just really hard to disentangle [from their] behavior in their personal life that seems so egregious and horrific.”
As an assistant professor of biology, it’s made her think of the young women she sees going into the sciences today. “Will their ideas be taken seriously?” she wonders. “Will their creativity, brilliance or ingenuity be taken seriously? Or will it be dismissed or ignored?”