Harvard Still Employs Professor Whose Emails With Epstein Mentioned Spies And Torture

Even as the class of 2030 prepares to arrive to the Harvard campus in two weeks, it’s not yet clear how much longer Martin Nowak — who cryptically discussed a “captured spy” and “torture” with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein in an unearthed 2014 email — will remain on the university’s payroll.

Epstein deeply enmeshed himself with Nowak’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED) just off of leafy Harvard Yard. Epstein maintained an office there, describing it as “my istittue [sic] at harvard” in an email released last fall.

It’s back to school season, but many questions about Epstein’s relationship to the Ivy League remain unanswered. Some of the individuals who lent Harvard’s prestige to the sex trafficker — eager to launder his reputation and remain ensconced in elite circles — maintain their positions.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation that Nowak remains on administrative leave, but did not respond when asked about the status of a formal inquiry launched nearly six months ago.

Harvard shuttered the PED in 2021, shifting its research to the Mathematics Department, then reinstated Nowak’s advising and research privileges in 2023, per the Harvard Crimson. In February, Harvard placed Nowak on administrative leave following the legally compelled release of three million records about the Epstein controversy by the Department of Justice, including the 2014 exchange.

In a statement posted to his website, Nowak said the email referred to a video game.

“On social media, there is confusion over an email exchange that was released with the Epstein files. … Some have missed that ‘Our spy was captured after completing her mission’ is a line from a computer game called Civilization II, a game I played many years ago,” he said. “When you get this response in the game, then what you wanted to do had worked out. It is a moment of success. Strangely, this silly line stuck with me. I sometimes think about it, after having solved a small mathematical problem. This led to the email.”

Nowak said he does not know why Epstein responded about “torture.”

“I have no idea what triggered Epstein’s response. The email exchange did not refer to an actual spy, nobody got captured, nobody was on a mission, and nobody was tortured,” he continued.

Nowak has not been charged with any crime. The professor did not reply to a request for comment about his relationship to Epstein and the status of the formal inquiry.

‘Your Program At Harvard’

Some of Epstein’s contacts described the PED as his lab.

Science writer Robert Kuhn referred to “Evolutionary Dynamics – your program at Harvard,” in a December 2017 email to Epstein, apparently referring to the PED, as the two brainstormed topics for a television show on scientific topics.

Other documents shed light on Epstein’s motives for boosting Nowak’s lab. Though beneficiaries of Epstein’s scientific grants like Nowak have described him as a curious intellectual, the convicted pedophile clearly leveraged his association with Nowak and other scientists to improve his SEO.

In 2010, Epstein was still working to bury headlines about his 2008 sweetheart non-prosecution deal, since its shockingly lax terms were first unsealed in September 2009, and at least 18 young women still had civil suits against him.

So Epstein paid an aide to launch two websites highlighting his role as scientific benefactor for an exclusive circle of luminaries at science’s frontier. He sought to bury headlines about his pedophilia with the bespoke blogs: www.jeffreyepsteinscience.com and www.jeffreyepstein.org.

The websites prominently featured Epstein’s support for Nowak.

Epstein’s website claimed he supported the PED to the tune of $30 million in funding by 2010, though the university disputes that figure, placing it at $6.5 million. Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard, helped Epstein establish the lab in 2003 alongside Harvard mathematician Benedict Gross, according to the PED website at that time.

Summers announced his retirement in February after emails revealed years of frequent, personal emails with Epstein.

In 2014, a Epstein’s publicist persuaded the lab to add a page dedicated to him on its webpage, hosted on the search engine-optimizing harvard.edu domain, according to a 2020 fact finding report that Harvard commissioned after Epstein’s 2019 death.

“It would be very helpful in terms of Google results if his name were attached to a Harvard.edu url,” Epstein’s publicist told Nowak’s lab, per the 2020 report.

Nowak agreed.

Indeed, Epstein leveraged the Ivy League to launder his reputation up until his August 2019 death.

“Press brutality. Wow. Will need to cure cancer. To move this down the page,” Epstein wrote in a 2018 text exchange about funding for another Cambridge scientist, MIT researcher John De La Parra, now at The Rockefeller Foundation.

It’s clear from the new documents that the 2020 report Harvard commissioned is incomplete. For instance, Harvard’s report estimates that Epstein’s last visit to campus occurred in October 2018, while the new documents contain evidence of a November 2018 visit.

Harvard launched a new investigation on Nov. 19, 2025.

Six days later, Harvard added J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management CEO Mary Erdoes to the governing board of its endowment, the Harvard Crimson reported.

Erdoes was in constant contact with Epstein while he was one of JP Morgan’s wealthiest clients, according to a Nov. 19 Senate memo. She played a key role in ensuring Epstein remained a client, pushing back on compliance officers who raised concerns about signs of money laundering, according to the New York Times.

Epstein’s transactions should have raised concerns about sex trafficking too, namely $3 million in direct payments to women or girls, including accounts in Russia, Belarus, Turkmenistan, Latvia and Lithuania, according to a Senate investigation released earlier this month.