{shortcode-88837402305b7004ada4209e9fcd88f1a47755bb}
Updated September 30, 2025, at 11:32 a.m.
Several Harvard professors — including former Social Science divisional dean Stephen M. Kosslyn, education professor Howard E. Gardner, and former Harvard Medical School professor Mark Tramo — maintained contact with convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein after he was first indicted in 2006 for soliciting prostitution.
Epstein planned gatherings and discussed funding for Harvard research with the professors, who offered the now-deceased felon words of encouragement after the first indictment was filed, according to a collection of more than 18,000 emails from Epstein’s inbox obtained by Bloomberg News.
Between Epstein’s indictment in 2006 and subsequent guilty plea to soliciting prostitution with a minor in 2008, Kosslyn sent Epstein emails arranging dinner with other scholars, and with Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz — Epstein’s close friend and attorney.
Gardner sent Epstein a list of book recommendations and promised to follow up with “advice about offsprings.” Two months after Epstein negotiated a guilty plea to two state charges, Gardner advised him to “take a deep breath” and “take one day at a time.”
Epstein’s ties with Harvard are well established. He gave at least $9.1 million to fund University programs and faculty-led research projects in the 1990s and early 2000s, and he formed
personal ties with many Harvard scholars. The signatures of both current mathematics professor Martin A. Nowak and Henry A. Rosovsky, the former Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean and two-time acting Harvard president, appear in Epstein’s infamous 2003 birthday book.
A University spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Kosslyn, whose signature also appears in the book, chaired Harvard’s Psychology department from 2005 to 2008, and served as Social Science Dean from 2008 to 2010. According to Bloomberg, he discussed accepting the deanship with Epstein via email, writing again a month later that he wanted to visit Epstein.
“unfortunately jail starts monday,” Epstein wrote back, according to Bloomberg. (The Crimson did not directly review any of the emails.)
Kosslyn’s research received $200,000 from Epstein between 1998 and 2002. He also wrote a letter of recommendation advocating for Epstein to be named a visiting fellow in the Psychology department during the 2005-06 school year, despite Epstein’s lack of the relevant academic credentials. Kosslyn is currently president of an AI education company and did not respond to a request for comment.
Gardner is still a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and wrote in a statement to The Crimson that Epstein had funded some of his research in the 1990s and early 2000s.
“Once he had been arrested, I made it clear to him that I could no longer accept any funding but, as a friend and beneficiary of his philanthropy, I tried to be supportive,” Gardner wrote. “Of course, no one I knew (which included dozens of Harvard faculty) had any idea of the nature and extent of Epstein’s crimes, which only became clear in the following years.”
Bloomberg reported that Kosslyn also communicated with HMS genetics professors George M. Church and Gary B. Ruvkun, who won a Nobel Prize in 2024, about encouraging Epstein to fund a research project on “pleasure signals in the brain.”
“i shall again try to drive home the point about the pleasure genome initiative,” Ruvkun wrote in a February 2006 email to Kosslyn. “let me know if this subject is too strange for our patron.”
After the correspondence was forwarded to Epstein, Epstein wrote to his assistant that “the patron has no boundaries.” According to Bloomberg, it’s unclear whether Epstein ever donated to such a project.
A few weeks before his indictment, Epstein wrote in an email about his plans to fund the Harvard Personal Genome Project, run by Church. An itemized budget found in his email also showed plans to spend $1 million on the project, according to Bloomberg.
Ruvkun and Church are both still genetics professors at HMS. Neither responded to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Mass General Brigham wrote in an email that Ruvkun “attended a large group dinner with academic colleagues to discuss potential research projects in the spring of 2006, prior to any public accusations being made.”
“Dr. Ruvkun had no further contact with him following the event, did not pursue any of the research areas discussed, nor received any financial support for his work,” the MGB spokesperson wrote.
Epstein’s inbox also contained an exchange with Paul Weiss partner and HLS graduate Mitchell D. Webber from 2006, when Webber was working as a research assistant for Dershowitz, Epstein’s lawyer.
Webber, who took notes for Dershowitz during meetings with Epstein’s legal team, wrote Epstein in June 2006 to address a question concerning the legality of transporting a minor for sex.
“I’m sorry I was a little confused about what you were asking on the phone,” Webber wrote. “I se what you were asking now. The question is: what would happen if one were to transport a minor for sex — or transport oneself with the intent to have sex with a minor — into a state in which the age of consent is below eighteen (assuming the minor is above the age of consent in the given state)? And your intuition was right. The answer is that there is no violation of law.”
Epstein then responded to Webber’s email asking to research sex tourism laws next.
Webber declined to comment on the email exchange.
Though this particular exchange does not include emails from Dershowitz, several separate emails from the HLS professor emeritus were reported by Bloomberg. In one, he vowed “as one of his close friends” that Epstein never participated in sex with minors.
In another, Dershowitz pledged, “When the full story finally comes out, the world will learn what we already know—that Jeffrey is a good person who does many good things.”
In response to a request for comment, Dershowitz cited his legal representation of Epstein.
“I was his lawyer,” Dershowitz wrote in an email. “It was my legal duty to advocate for him.”
When news broke in 2007 that Epstein would plead guilty to soliciting prostitution, Tramo — who left Harvard in 2009 and currently teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles — wrote to offer a message of solidarity.
“Please remind him that boys from The Bronx (even if they end up at Harvard) have long memories, know all about cops, and stay true to their friends through thick and thin (no less peccadilloes),” Tramo wrote.
In an emailed statement to The Crimson, Tramo wrote that he was first introduced to Epstein in the late 1990s by then-Harvard Provost Harvey Fineberg, who had asked Tramo to sit with Epstein — then a board member of the University’s Mind Brain & Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. Fineberg did not respond to a request for comment Monday evening.
“I, like several of my Harvard and MIT colleagues at the time, had no knowledge of his horrible crimes! I never asked or read about what had happened in 2006-7,” Tramo wrote. “I had been duped to believe he had committed some minor offense and that he was being harassed by police.”
“I never visited Epstein’s island, never flew on his planes, and never saw him with young girls,” Tramo wrote. “At the 21 Club dinner, he was accompanied by a 30-ish year-old woman. I had no idea he was a pervert!”
Epstein died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.
Correction: September 30, 2025
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Howard E. Gardner’s 2007 emails telling Jeffrey E. Epstein to “take a deep breath” and “take one day at a time” came two months after Epstein pled guilty to state charges. In fact, Epstein negotiated a plea deal at that time, but did not plead guilty until 2008.
—Staff writer Wyeth Renwick can be reached at wyeth.renwick@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @wzrenwick.
—Staff writer Nirja J. Trivedi can be reached at nirja.trivedi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @nirjatriv.
—Staff writer Annabel M. Yu can be reached at annabel.yu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @annabelmyu.
