Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and had zero email or any other contact with him … which is more (less) than some of my colleagues can say.
The bulk of the correspondence involves Epstein wanting to arrange a meeting with me and Seth Lloyd back in 2010, via an intermediary named Charles Harper, about funding a research project on “Cryptography in Nature.”
Searching my inbox, it turns out that this Charles Harper did contact me in May 2010, and I then met him at S&S Deli in Cambridge (plausible, although I have zero recollections of this meeting—only of the deli). Harper then sent me a detailed followup email about his proposed Cryptography in Nature project, naming Jeffrey Epstein for the first time as the project’s funder, and adding: “perhaps you will know Jeffrey and his background and situation.”
For whatever reason, I forwarded this email to my parents, brother, and then-fiancee Dana. My brother then found and shared a news article about Epstein’s prostitution conviction, adding to a different article that I had found and shared. (At that time, like many others, I’d probably vaguely heard of Epstein, but he didn’t have 0.1% the infamy that he has now.) Then my mom wrote the following: “be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here! Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you at least.”
It appears from emails that Charles Harper tried again later that summer to arrange a meeting between me and Epstein, but that I took my mom’s advice and largely blew him off, and no such meeting ever happened. Amazingly, I then forgot entirely that any of this had occurred until last night. By way of explanation, some business/finance dude trying to interest me in half-baked ideas involving quantum, AI, cryptography, etc., often dangling the prospect of funding for my students and postdocs, shows up in my life like every month. Most of their world-changing initiatives go nowhere for one reason or another. There really wasn’t much reason to think further about this, until Epstein had become history’s most notorious sex criminal, which (again) wouldn’t happen until years later, after I’d forgotten.
It gets better, though. In the Epstein Files, one also finds a November 2010 letter from Charles Harper to Epstein about organizing a conference on the same Cryptography in Nature topic, which includes the following idea about me:
Scott Aaronson was born on May 21st, 1981. He will be 30 in 2011. The conference could follow a theme of: “hurry to think together with Scott Aaronson while he is still in his 20s and not yet a pitiful over-the-hill geezer in his 30s.” This offers another nice opportunity for celebration.
I see no indication that any such conference ever happened; in any case, I didn’t get invited to one!
On my Facebook, some friends are joking that “it tracks that someone into teenage girls might think Scott Aaronson was a hot property in his nubile 20s, who would get old and boring in his 30s”—and that maybe Epstein was less sexist about such matters than everyone assumes. I replied that I wished I could say the proposition that I’d gradually get slower and more senile through the 2010s and 2020s was entirely false.
But the best comment was that I’ve been incredibly lucky to have such an astute family. If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.