Under-the-radar Epstein email smashes friends' claims they didn't know of crimes: report

With all the revelations coming out of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files, one seemingly innocuous email has slipped under the radar, Anand Giridharadas wrote for The Ink on Thursday — and it paints an incredibly damning picture of the people around Epstein, casting doubt on their near-unanimous denials they were aware of the systematic abuse of children going on in their midst.

"In some cases, the Epstein files undercut this defense," he wrote. "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.'"

However, there's one email in particular that has largely escaped public notice, he argued, and it involves Joscha Bach, a German AI researcher who in 2013 was struggling with cost of living after moving from Berlin to Boston to take up a fellowship at MIT — and came to lean on Epstein for everything.

When Bach needed money, the department turned to Epstein, who began flooding the MIT Media Lab with money to subsidize him. Then things snowballed, wrote Giridharadas: "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."

All of which leads to the email in question — in 2019, after the billionaire financier was arrested on sex trafficking charges and the extent of the horrific crimes that took place on his island and at his "parties," long rumored in bits and pieces, began to spill out into the open in earnest.

"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!'" he wrote.

"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." Instead, Bach told Epstein, "Our funds are currently down to $11,000."

Bach also made abundantly clear in the email thread that he knew what Epstein was accused of — and bluntly laid out something rarely discussed: why people around him, who knew what was going on, put it out of their minds.

"Once people get to know you in person and are interested in you, they tend to either compartmentalize the topic (as a somehow difficult to accept aspect of an important friend), or treat it as somehow interestingly dark and edgy," he wrote. "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."

And he also bluntly laid out the often-unspoken motivation Epstein had for everything he did: his desire for dominance over women. "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," he wrote.

"It is not the most salacious email I’ve seen, nor the one with the most boldface names," Giridharadas wrote. "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."