The most overlooked Epstein email
What did Epstein’s friends actually know about him? In chapter four of our series, an answer in a rare truth bomb from one of Epstein‘s kept scholars/"mind concierges"
This is the fourth chapter of The Ink’s series The Epstein Class — our investigation into the inner workings of Jeffrey Epstein’s world and the operating system of power today. For more:
The first chapter: Epstein’s network of bystanders, on courage in an age of networks
The second chapter: Never eat with women, on how Epstein’s circle avoided what it feared most
The third chapter: Rich Brain, on the mundanities that preoccupy the ultrawealthy
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By Anand Giridharadas
For friends and associates and collaborators of Jeffrey Epstein, the go-to plea has been the “slice of life” defense. I knew him only as the Wall Street Guy, not the Rape Island Guy. I knew him only as a party boor, not a child trafficker. I knew him only as a donor, not a convicted pedophile...
In some cases, the Epstein files undercut this defense. Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard president, tried to minimize what he knew, but he is found in the files emailing Epstein about press reports about his crimes. The longevity expert Peter Attia may have denied visiting Epstein’s island or ranch, but in one email he bro-coos to Epstein that “the biggest problem with becoming friends with you” is that “the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”
In the main, though, the hodgepodge, context-free nature of the Epstein files is frustratingly helpful to the “slice of life” petitioners. This guy only talks to Epstein about philanthropy. This guy only talks to him about changing his reputation online. Another guy only talks to him about cognitive science. It is not exactly straightforward to assemble all these threads to weave a tapestry of the complicity not merely of individuals but of a whole network.
Then, four months into reading through the files, I found an email that stunned me.
It is not the most salacious email I’ve seen, nor the one with the most boldface names. But it’s the only one in which Epstein, who in that same thread professed an inability to decipher how others saw him, seemed to be interested in just that: both the conventional wisdom in the ether, and what people really knew. And, for once, someone in his network did what no one around Epstein ever did: told him the truth.
This may be the single-most-overlooked email in the whole trove. When I have Googled phrases from it, only one link comes up — a lonely Reddit thread. But here is testimony to the thing so many in the network prefer to deny existed: a common sense of who Epstein was and what he had done and how and why, a 1,500-word, 360-degree assessment of his character, his criminality, his manipulations, his gifts, his network cultivation — written by someone who wasn’t especially close to him, but seemed to believe that this is how others saw him, this is what many people knew about him.
Long before the “affordability crisis” was a top-tier issue in American politics, Joscha Bach was having one of his own.
In late October 2013, emails show Bach, a German cognitive scientist and AI researcher (and philosopher), contemplating a move from Berlin to Boston, to take a fellowship at the MIT Media Lab. There was an issue, though: Joi Ito, then the head of the Media Lab, had offered Bach just $60,000 a year. “We are a family of four,” Bach wrote, “with a need to rebuild a household, send a kid into daycare and even visit the relatives sometimes. I imagine that survival in Boston will be hard on 60K; it would not be easy for a family even in Berlin.” The family’s “burn rate,” Bach wrote, using a startup term for family life, was €5,000 a month (about $82,000 a year then), and Boston was pricier than Berlin. How was Bach going to make it all work?
Epstein.
Ito wrote to Bach, telling him that “Jeffrey said that he’ll figure out a way to cover the difference outside of the MIT relationship. Can you talk to him directly about that?”
Bach did just that, telling Epstein that $100,000 a year was necessary “to keep the family fed.” Epstein responded, “no problem.”
According to the law firm Goodwin Procter, which compiled an extensive report on Epstein’s relationship with MIT, new Epstein donations began to flow to MIT the very next month. These $300,000 in gifts “were made to support research by Joscha Bach,” the report said, taking care to note that the “Media Lab hired Bach in large part because Epstein subsidized the cost.”
In the coming years, Bach would grow so comfortable as the beneficiary of a convicted sex offender that he would simply email his desired Lufthansa or JetBlue flights to Epstein’s office or travel agent when he wanted to take a family trip to Germany or speak at a conference somewhere. Others might have shuddered at the idea of Epstein having any connection to their children, but Bach got in the habit of forwarding school tuition bills to Epstein, who ostensibly paid them. He even began to forward his rent bills of $6,500 a month.
What was Epstein getting out of this deal? Seemingly, what he sought from many big thinkers: adjacency to the intellectual edge, the ability to send rando musings and get speedy responses, access to a kind of mind concierge to go with the credit card concierges, hotel concierges, and spa concierges he was used to pinging. Epstein thought of thinkers the way people now think of ChatGPT: as a high-quality source against which to bounce low-quality prompts.
In a recent statement on his Substack, Bach described Epstein’s use of intellectuals:
Epstein was not a scientist himself, and regarded the consensus mechanism of peer-reviewed science with skepticism. Instead, he generated his own models of the world, and bounced them against the best minds he could find….
During some of my time in Cambridge, Epstein sent frequently short, dyslexic emails with random thoughts in my direction. I tried to probe and understand his world view, which was highly unusual and often darker and more radical than anyone else I’ve ever talked to.
“have not heard from you . what are you up to . new thoughts?” Thus began an email from Epstein to Bach in October 2017. (Well, “began” is not the right word, because that is the whole message.)
No academic could get away with writing this way to a respected colleague. But for the thinkers indentured by Epstein into service as mind concierges, the customer was always right, and every query should be answered, swiftly and at length.
At the moment I am writing an article to explain the likely relationship between conscious attention and credit assignment, i.e. to figure out which parts in our control architecture contributed to success or failure in a learning task…
Actually, I refuse to keep typing whatever this is, but this was how it went between them — and between Epstein and other thinkers. Epstein would burp a little question that was more of a comment, and his obedient servant (in this case, Bach) would write a long reply performing smartness in just the way rich guys like Epstein liked it done:
a lot of people are coherentists instead of foundationalists….
I wonder if it is possible to simulate the adversarial evolution of emotional expression in a game theoretic setting….
While the hope construct can be used to model rational investments, it often does not approximate the actual distribution of expectations….
Personally, I would donate to MIT to be removed from emails like these.
Sometimes in the Bach-Epstein emails, there is a glide from intellectual peacocking to money that reminds one of the bargain at work here. “PS: Our account is emptied,” Bach writes. “Could you please pitch in?”
In February 2019, with Epstein increasingly a household name thanks to the explosive reporting of Julie Brown in The Miami Herald the previous year, Bach wrote to his academic sugar daddy with concern — for Epstein: “I hope you are well, and the current turmoils don’t provide worries to you!”
There is no mention of the survivors, nor questions about the sweetheart deal exposed by Brown that let Epstein slip out of real accountability for his crimes, nor any sense of betrayal over new revelations in the reporting that Bach had not known about.
Why, even now, does Bach not feel moved to speak up? If you jump a paragraph or two down, there is a possible answer: “Our funds are currently down to 11000…” The philosopher is a seeker of truth, in theory. In practice, telling the truth can cost you.
It may seem striking enough that the Miami Herald revelations, which exploded around the world, did not end Bach’s relationship with Epstein. But there is evidence, in Bach’s own words, that the Herald findings were hardly the first he had heard of Epstein’s ways and transgressions. And on one occasion, he played all of this back to Epstein with a frankness otherwise largely absent from the ocean of released files.
It began with a stray musing on email. On July 2, 2017, Bach wrote to Epstein that he
would be curious to learn how you think that other people perceive you, and how much they can glimpse behind your curtain.
Bach explained his interest in the question as a function of his own growing journey toward seeing himself from the outside in:
In the last three years, I have developed a lot more self-awareness, not least thanks to you. (It does not mean that I now perfectly understand how others see me, but that I notice that my self model and the perspective of others, and the more importantly, my model of how others model me, have serious discrepancies.)
This kind of invitation to self-awareness from Epstein was unusual. Frankly, asking Epstein to do anything was unusual. How often does the concierge ask something of you? But here was an opening.
Epstein responded with some blather about not caring about how people see him, which segued into a story about Epstein making a move on a college student:
I dont spend much time thinking about how people perceive me. I try to maintain my own compass. I dont admit an age or power difference in my intereactions . In the past if i did things in order to satisfy someones perceptions ( within bounds) . I often ended with an unintended result. ex. I recently met very smart college student . very cute. . I told her I would help her getting grants. she was insulted . and when pressed said she couldnt be bought.
Then, strangely, there was an invitation. Epstein, seemingly referring to social limitations he shared with Bach, asked his supplicant/friend to assess him:
Joscha. .both you and I have lived the consequences of not being aware of others motivations. Perceptions etc. So I am happy to explore your views. I rarely get insulted. so if you would like to give me some of yours , feel free. -- your funding is intact:). No matter what
And this is what occasioned a rare dose of real talk, in an email longer than the Declaration of Independence. At the top:
I can only extrapolate over the things I get to hear and rationalize over the distribution, and I am not actively trying to solicit opinions about you.
If you remove the performative smart-speak, Bach is prefacing with something important: What he is about to say is based on what others were saying. He wasn’t looking for it. He wasn’t privy to lots of private information. It was just floating in the air; as a mortal, he breathed some in.
Bach now makes clear that he knew that Epstein was a sex offender, but Bach offers that the problem might lie elsewhere, in the culture that judges sex offenders:
The first sentence of your Wikipedia entry introduces you as a sex offender, which due to contemporary America’s fascinating difficulty of dealing with all things sex related establishes a strong prior on you being a pariah. It is also pretty much the only thing that people outside of your circles know you for.
The prevailing assumption about Epstein, Bach continues, is that “you combine the apparently suspicious trait of being wealthy with the apparently horrible trait of being too much interested in too young girls.”
Now Bach explains, with more self-awareness than most Epstein associates, how those in Epstein’s orbit rationalize their ties:
Once people get to know you in person and are interested in you, they tend to either compartementalize the topic (as a somehow difficult to accept aspect of an important friend), or treat it as somehow interestingly dark and edgy. It seemed to never have been met with outright approval, and very rarely not been an issue at all, even when it is balanced against your sharp, original and interesting mind.
Then Bach, still the dependent that he is, throws in more softeners. The college student who rejected Epstein’s help is hypocritical, because “[w]hile she might be happy to accept any amount of nepotism from a female benefactor as laudable mentorship and empowering feminism, accepting your support would have meant to join into the corruption of the darkest imaginable notions of patriarchy.” Bach even goes so far as to utter a talking point that has become a favorite of Epstein defenders: that he is not a pedophile pedophile so much as an “almost adult” pedophile, since the girls were basically adults, right — 16, 17, come on, right? These defenders even have a special word for it, one Bach now leans on:
If people are able to think outside of moralistic terms, they may simply mark you down as an ephebophile but are bound to notice a few quirks.
No pedophile to see here, folks, just a garden-variety ephebophile! A man drawn not to children but to practically geriatric teens.
Back in diagnostic mode, Bach asks: Why did Epstein, so savvy about risk, take such giant ones?
A power trip? What does that recklessness mean for your relationships to others? Or is it simply due to having grown up in a different time and culture, and having not noticed how the culture has changed?
And why did Epstein so flagrantly flaunt his relationships with young women and girls? Bach mentions the physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram refusing to meet with Epstein because he’d gained awareness of the sort of company Epstein kept. And here Bach gets to something even more profound, burrowing into the heart of patriarchal thought and practice in Epstein’s circle: Epstein wanted to be around women and girls, but didn’t actually like them. What he liked was to dominate them:
your relationships to young women appear not to be on equal footing but dominant-submissive, with little apparent regard for hurt feelings. While you are brutally honest and direct with men, too, you don’t come across as reveling in the power difference when interacting with men, or making an example of their intellectual and personal limitations in front of others.
It is as if you are attracted to women (as long as they are not too womanly), but you don’t like them very much. While individual women gain your respect, it seems to be much harder for them than for men, and it is as if they are inherently less trustworthy.
What follows is a strange twisting of reality that offers a useful insight into this Ivory Tower annex of the manosphere. Bach suggests to Epstein that he tends to “mismodel” women as “intrinsically dangerous,” but then Bach makes an aside that takes the breath away: “Obviously, you are at much greater risk of exploitation by women than me, of course. In many women I wake somewhat motherly instincts.” While others might have emphasized the risk Epstein posed to women, Bach here was speaking of the risk women posed to Epstein. Perhaps because sometimes women summon the nerve to press charges for rape.
Now Bach seemingly pivots to advice, sketching out “probably the only plausible path to possible redemption in the eyes of the circles of the US intelligentsia.”
The easiest explanation for your unusual choice of partners and the nature of your public relationships to them is obviously childhood abuse. If most of these people suspected that you suffered something unspeakable at the hands of an adult female caregiver, and it just took you decades to work through it (understanding that someone likely abused her, so she turned against you etc.), they would be able to feel that they understand you, and many more would feel acceptance. Some people might even realize that you paid a much higher price than your purported victims.
It is unclear here if Bach is simply speculating about narratives that would work or is referring to a story Epstein told him. In either case, the strategy is clear: make women the real perpetrators, and Epstein the real victim.
Bach continues:
while such a story could probably be planted, I cannot imagine what that would mean for you and your relationship to yourself.
Bach concludes with a 30,000-foot-view summary of his patron’s life and reputation and ways of interacting with people:
What people see of you is that you are effective, reliable, ruthless, provocative, twisted, sometimes utterly crass, unconventional, likely not vain, and completely unafraid. You incentivize the people in our shared circle extremely well for cooperation, by being generous, loyal, curious, intellectually interesting and benevolent. But to regain your place as a socially accepted cultural force you cannot present an image as an unrepentant and unevolving connoisseur of immature girls.
Bach deserves credit for this candor. Few in the Epstein circle had the courage to call Epstein “an unrepentant and unevolving connoisseur of immature girls.” Yet, curiously, a few months ago, when Bach released his statement on his Substack, the narrative of their relationship read like this:
While Epstein’s public reputation was forever destroyed, many people whose judgement I trusted assured me that he had reformed himself and was committed to staying on the good side of the law. I have not met a single person from his network of academics who was aware of any instance of him breaking the law after his conviction, or who witnessed or condoned any illegal or questionable activity by Epstein.
I am not as brilliant or credentialed as Joscha Bach, so maybe there are levels of understanding I don’t have that would bridge this gap. I reached out to him, asking to hear his perspective. I told him I read his statement and “was struck by the idea that we don’t always understand context from these documents. I would like to give you the chance to speak with us directly, so that it’s not looking from afar, but giving you the chance you deserve to answer questions.”
He responded by thanking me for my “friendly message,” before pivoting to an assessment of the work I do, seeming to find it beneath his dignity: “I am generally not interested in partisan culture war topics or in judging people from near or afar, which seems to be the main area of your reporting.” (This is a common move in the Epstein Class: casting criticism or even scrutiny as belonging to a world of tribalism and conflict, a world that the high sages and masters of the universe endeavor to transcend.) But he asked me to send questions, which I did. I haven’t heard back.
One of my questions was: “You describe how people around Epstein compartmentalized or rationalized their relationship with him. In what ways did you yourself participate in that pattern? If a young researcher today were in your exact position — financially supported by a wealthy figure known to have abused young women — what would you advise them to do differently than you did?” I hope he will consider answering in the public interest.
In his Substack statement, Bach did write about the survivors — well, to be more precise, he wrote that “I understand why targets of this sort of media maelstrom do not always survive, and need a long time to heal.” This is the only use of any word beginning with “surviv-” that appears in his statement; the survivor that he was writing about appears to be himself.
The experience of standing in the middle of this storm is traumatic. It is hard to feel my body. At times, I find it nearly impossible to breathe….
At the same time, my family and friends need me to go on, and my work is too important to give up on it. It has just gotten harder for a while.
I feel pain and despair, but I don’t feel any anger. Not at myself, because I know that I tried to do the right thing. I am not angry at the people who hound me, because this is just how public discourse works today.
In his honest appraisal of Epstein, Bach said one other thing that stuck with me. For all his own, just-stated concerns about Epstein, this was far from a breakup letter:
On a personal level: I cannot say how grateful I am for your unwavering support. I have gone through a pretty bad year (nothing like what happened to you, of course). If there is ever anything I can do to help you, please let me know.
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Such an interesting piece about how even the most intellectual and academically recognized of humans can observe evil and support it for their own benefit. Thank you.
Terrific take down of hypocritical academic "experts."
I like your style, Anand: "Personally, I would donate to MIT to be removed from emails like these."
Thanks for taking on such a disgusting and depressing topic.