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The Jeffrey Epstein story is often told as the intersection of two obsessions: sexual abuse and money. The recently released emails certainly contain significant evidence of both. But after more than two decades as a professor at Harvard, Cornell, and Cambridge, I am most struck by the limitation of that frame – in part because it fails to explain why academics show up so consistently in these files.
Certainly, money played a role in Epstein’s university connections. A rich man using donations and access to burnish his ego and legitimacy is a well-worn script, from Andrew Carnegie’s libraries more than a century ago to Bill Gates’s more recent global health philanthropy. As a college drop-out, Epstein clearly craved “respect” from high-profile academics. Universities, meanwhile, are perpetually fundraising and institutions that rely on donations often avoid asking hard questions about where the money came from. As the Bard College president, Leon Botstein, put it when defending his Epstein connections: “Among the very rich is a higher percentage of unpleasant and not very attractive people.” Institutions sometimes learn to stop asking hard questions about where the money came from.
Some professors also seemed drawn to the louche lifestyle. Duke’s Dan Ariely, for example, asks Epstein for contact information for a “redhead” who had been with him. The Yale computer science professor David Gelernter describes someone he apparently recommended for a job as a “v small goodlooking blonde”. Stanford’s Nathan Wolfe invited Epstein to dinner with “a couple of hottie interns”. The connection to universities populated by young women was no doubt another draw for Epstein. (Ariely, Gelernter and Wolfe have all denied wrongdoing.)
But the emails suggest something deeper than greed or libido. Epstein’s malevolent genius was understanding personal and professional vulnerabilities – and then offering a bundle of bespoke and non-monetary rewards, such as access to companies and deals for the investors in his network, inside scoops for journalists, and private banking relationships for executives. Molly Jong-Fast has said that Epstein built his influence by “acting as a kind of superconcierge”.
Most academics spend their careers inside the ivory tower – a world set apart from everyday commerce and politics, organized around research and teaching, with its own norms, hierarchies and insulated debates. That separation brings freedom, but it also breeds a unique hunger for status that travels outside the campus gates. Even the most successful professors are usually not powerful in the way power is understood in the “real world”. Their prestige exists only in narrow circles and is mostly legible only to other specialists.
While universities love to celebrate “impact”, they often starve the conditions that produce it. The result is a constant craving for recognition that feels immediate and personal. Epstein supplied this attention, plus connections with elites in finance, entertainment, technology and government. He made scholars feel like celebrities for the one thing they are trained to prize, but for which they are frequently denigrated in America: their minds.
Even at the top, academic life is full of quiet humiliations that wear people down: anonymous reviewers, rejected grants, students who care more about social media than classwork, committee work, institutional politics that drains more than just time. You can see this in how university departments obsess over minor expenses. Senior professors are boxed in by per diem caps, and required to furnish receipts for minor purchases; there are pre-approval forms and bureaucratic rules that turn routine travel into petty bargaining. You can hold an endowed chair and still waste time arguing with an administrator about whether the hotel cost was “reasonable”.
Epstein understood the psychological power of bypassing that grind. One email arranging a visit for the Harvard professor Martin Nowak includes an offer of “use of an available apartment … as well as the Jaguar”. He understood the social capital he would receive in return for providing shortcuts around the constant and myriad indignities of life in academia.
But Epstein’s power over academics was not a strange exception. The uncomfortable conclusion is that he had a rare ability to pinpoint what people needed or wanted and exploit it. His private plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express” , sits at the center of many of his controversies, but as the journalist Michael Wolff, whose email exchanges with Epstein have been widely reported, has suggested, using it was less about travel than about creating a hard class boundary between those who can fly private and those who can’t. The status is what is important. He summarizes Epstein’s perspective: “Nobody turns down an invitation to fly private.”
To understand how Epstein accumulated the wealth and influence that enabled his predation of young women and children, we have to look beyond sex and money. For the Epstein class, what’s truly valued is what money can’t buy directly: deference, access and moral permission.
Universities and academics like me need to face a hard truth about our own desires. The job is supposed to be about ideas, teaching and public knowledge. Epstein offered something else: prestige without peer review, and attention without consequence. Too many people – even those who were not involved directly in exploitation – took the deal because it was easy to do and because it felt good.
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Christopher Marquis is the Sinyi professor of management at the University of Cambridge and author of The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs
