The Scoop
In the years since Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest exposed the vast network of influence the disgraced financier developed across politics, business, and media, many people connected to Epstein have pleaded ignorance to the extent of his past wrongdoing.
Now, new emails have revealed how some notable figures were well aware of Epstein’s sensitivity around his criminal past. Some ignored it. One tried to use it as an icebreaker.
After NBC News revealed in 2019 that John Steele, the founder and publisher of award-winning science magazine Nautilus, had taken $25,000 from Epstein, Steele said he would give the funds to a charity for at-risk teens.
But only a few years earlier, Steele referenced Epstein’s criminal past as he sought to build a relationship with the convicted sex offender.
On Dec. 14, 2017 Steele wrote to Epstein: “Jeffrey, As someone who is no stranger to controversy… I thought you might appreciate how I spent my day yesterday.” Steele attached a link to an Undark Magazine story about Nautilus freelancers demanding $50,000 in unpaid commissions. “Issue 22 is being printed as we speak and will be mailed out before the holiday.”
Nautilus was founded in 2012, billing itself as a “different kind of science magazine,” and quickly earned a reputation for high-flying science journalism that wove together scientific inquiry with philosophy and literature. Contributors included Robert Sapolsky and Steven Pinker. Nautilus quickly earned critical acclaim, becoming the first publication to win two National Magazine Awards in its first year of eligibility.
It was also perennially broke, which is what Steele was hoping Epstein could solve. Having burned through millions in grant money and facing an annual deficit of close to a million dollars, Steele pitched the disgraced financier on the viability of different funding models for the magazine from July 2017 to June 2018. He repeatedly sought donations and investments, including an ask for as much as $1.2 million. Steele visited Epstein at his Upper East Side town house in 2017, and assiduously cultivated the millionaire across a year of correspondence.
Following his first unsuccessful cold pitch to Epstein’s foundation in 2014, Steele found firmer traction after former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, a Nautilus backer, introduced him via email to Epstein in 2017.
“I know people who circulate among the powerful, among the wealthy and among the brilliant,” Summers wrote. “Jeffrey does all three to a unique extent.”
Less than a week later, the two lunched at Epstein’s Manhattan town house, and Steele followed up — though Epstein declined to invest upon reviewing Nautilus’ financial statements.
“you are on a worthwhile mission,” Epstein wrote after the meeting. “well done and brillaintly curated . not sure there is a today audience”
“Considering the tumult in media world, I do understand your questions, dare I say skepticism,” Steele wrote back. “But that was only one door available for Nautilus to support and promote the deeper issues of science and its connection to culture and society that I know are important to you… I would look forward to exploring some of those other doors with you.”
For the next year, a pattern took hold: Steele repeatedly reached out with niceties, shared the latest Nautilus articles and financial updates, was rebuffed by Epstein, and pivoted to a different topic in a bid to sustain the conversation.
Epstein would occasionally lose his patience.
“1 . your page views are EXTREMELY low,” Epstein wrote several days after their first meeting. “simplest of you tube [sic] uploads for pranks alone total 100 s of thousands.”
“2. not sure of your target audience. . at all.”
Often, Steele offered his high-science social currency as collateral. “Have you ever talked to [MIT physicist] Marc Kastner at the Science Philanthropy Alliance?”
“no, but I D love to coordinate with anyone you find unique,” Epstein responded.
A few days after their first meeting, Steele sent Epstein an email he received from the British astrophysicist and Nautilus contributor Lord Martin Rees. “Though he is often referred to as Dr. Doom....he really is one of the kindest people you can meet,” Steele wrote.
Steele reached out again shortly after Hurricane Irma crashed into the US Virgin Islands in September 2017. “The pictures I see from the islands [l]ook devastating. how did your place make out?”
“Thx. Not well,” Epstein wrote back.
“I do hope I can take the liberty to continue to pick you brain,” Steele wrote on Nov. 12. “Would have loved to have involved and helping navigate towards the future.”
“it seems it is publishing = a dying form. , kids dont like to read anymore,” Epstein wrote back to Steele.
Finally, on Nov. 28, Epstein relented and gave $25,000. But that seemed to mark the end of their correspondence in the released files. Though Steele wrote to Epstein another four times in the first half of 2018, Epstein apparently did not reply.
Know More
Initially founded in 2012 with a $5 million dollar grant from the John Templeton Foundation, Nautilus incinerated cash, sparing no expense in its pursuit of bringing resplendent literary science to the reading public. The magazine published original illustrations by Ralph Steadman, profiled free-solo climber Alex Honnold and published his now-famous fMRI results, and landed Cormac McCarthy’s first nonfiction work, “The Kekulé Problem,” an essay exploring the unconscious mind and the origins of language.
During the period of Steele and Epstein’s most frequent correspondence, Nautilus was losing $800,000 annually, according to tax filings, and routinely stiffing editorial staffers and freelancers on checks for completed work.
Throughout those lean years, Steele continued to encourage his staffers to solicit new work, often touting the inevitability of a merger with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences or some other scheme to bring Nautilus into the black.
Fragment Media, which acquired Nautilus in 2019 and has put it on firmer financial footing, could not confirm that Steele’s proposed donation to an at-risk teens charity ever occurred.
“All this happened before Fragment was involved. However, it is my understanding that John’s contact with Epstein was minimal at a time when Epstein was donating very broadly in the science community and far less was known about his crimes,” Nicholas White, CEO of Fragment, told Semafor. “It should go without saying that we find Epstein’s crimes monstrous and are ashamed to be associated with him in any way whatsoever.”
Summers continues to own a “small” stake in Nautilus, according to White, who described his involvement as “entirely passive,” adding that he had only spoken to Summers once “years ago.”
Steele and Summers did not respond to requests for comment.
Notable
- Epstein, as Dan Vergano has reported for Scientific American, was a generous figure in science publishing.
- Steele’s particular courtship of Epstein was also emblematic of a specific social culture at the time, inseparable from the broader context of New York science publishing. Big brains would mingle with money and power, often convened at salon-like gatherings thrown by powerful literary agents like John Brockman, who represented figures like Pinker. Although undoubtedly wide-ranging, these conversations had a way usually returning, by pathways familiar to any viewer of the Joe Rogan Experience, to genetics and the nature of human consciousness. (“It’s Time to Make Human-Chimp Hybrids,” reads the headline of one 2018 Nautilus article that Steele sent to pique Epstein’s interest. “The humanzee is both scientifically possible and morally defensible.“)