The institutional reckoning over Jeffrey Epstein's academic patronage has, until now, been largely two stories. There is the MIT story, anchored by Joi Ito's 2019 resignation from the Media Lab, the Goodwin Procter review of Epstein's MIT donations, and the subsequent disclosures about how those donations were structured to evade public scrutiny. There is the Harvard story, anchored by the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics — Martin Nowak's research centre, which between 2003 and 2007 received an estimated $9.4 million from Epstein-affiliated foundations, and which in 2020 saw Nowak barred by Harvard from advising graduate students or pursuing new research projects.

The documents released by the Department of Justice in January 2026 connect these two stories more directly than has previously been possible. They show that on at least one documented Cambridge afternoon, in October 2015, Epstein's office assembled a cohort of Harvard and MIT-affiliated researchers in a single location — Martin Nowak's institute at 1 Brattle Square, Suite 6 — for a sequence of back-to-back meetings. The afternoon was planned in detail. It included Neri Oxman of MIT (whose meeting was cancelled), Marvin Minsky of MIT and his wife Gloria Rudisch, Jeremy Rubin and four named MIT cryptography students, the German artificial intelligence researcher Joscha Bach, Martin Nowak himself, and Noam Chomsky over dinner.

This article works through that afternoon — what was scheduled, who was scheduled, what is known about each participant's relationship with Epstein, and what the documents add to the existing public record. It is the second of two pieces in this series that addresses the question of what the DOJ documents show about Oxman's documented contact with Epstein. It is also, separately, a contribution to the wider Epstein-academia institutional accountability story.

The location

The 16 October 2015 meetings were scheduled at Martin Nowak's Institute, 1 Brattle Square, Suite 6, Cambridge, MA. This is the address of Harvard University's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which Nowak had directed since the program's founding in 2003. The address is documented across multiple emails in the released set, including EFTA00337483 (in which Lesley Groff, Epstein's personal assistant, transmits the day's schedule to Nowak directly) and EFTA00338218 (in which she gives the address to Oxman as the location for the proposed 12:30pm meeting).

The address is significant for two reasons.

First: it is at Harvard, not MIT. Subsequent press coverage of Oxman's 2019 statement uniformly placed the October 2015 Epstein meeting at the MIT Media Lab. Whether or not Oxman herself ever met Epstein at the Media Lab — the documents released in January 2026 do not place such a meeting on any 2015 date — the planned 16 October 2015 meeting was at Harvard.

Second: it was Epstein-funded space. Nowak's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics had received the bulk of its initial funding from Epstein and Epstein-affiliated foundations. Lesley Groff's casual reference, in EFTA00338218, to "Martin Nowak's Institute at 1 Brattle Square" treats the location as effectively Epstein's Cambridge satellite office. The documents indicate that Epstein had used the institute on multiple prior occasions for similar gatherings.

The schedule

The full schedule for Epstein's 16 October 2015 day at Nowak's institute is preserved in EFTA00337457 (a 15 October 2015 update from Lesley Groff to Epstein), EFTA00337483 (15 October 2015, Groff transmitting the schedule to Martin Nowak), and EFTA00337501 (15 October 2015, the master schedule for the day).

The day's appointments, as documented:

11:00am — Joscha Bach with an unspecified group of AI colleagues. Bach is a German cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher, then a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. The schedule does not name his accompanying colleagues. Bach has not, as of this writing, been the subject of public scrutiny over Epstein contacts; the document is the first publicly available indication of any such contact.12:30pm — Neri Oxman. Cancelled the previous afternoon. The cancellation chain is documented in EFTA00337508 (Kelly Donovan, Oxman's MIT executive assistant, formally cancelling on Oxman's behalf) and EFTA00337514 (Oxman personally apologising and saying she looked forward to a future meeting).

1:30pm — Jeremy Rubin and "the Bitcoin troops." Rubin was at the time an MIT undergraduate working on cryptocurrency. The document explicitly names the four MIT students who were to attend with him: Sunoo Park, Ranjit Kumaressan, Alex Chernyakhosvsky, and Ravi Bajaj. Park has subsequently held faculty positions at MIT and Columbia in cryptography and security research. Kumaressan is a research scientist in cryptography. Chernyakhosvsky and Bajaj are likewise in the cryptography and security research community. None has previously been publicly linked to Epstein.

2:30pm — Members of Nowak's research group. The document refers to them collectively without naming individual participants. They are presumably members of Nowak's PED research group at Harvard.

4:00pm — Marvin Minsky and his wife Gloria Rudisch. The cognitive scientist and AI pioneer Marvin Minsky was the original 2002 recipient of $100,000 in unrestricted funds from Epstein at MIT, as documented in the 2019–2020 Goodwin Procter review of Epstein's MIT donations. The 16 October 2015 meeting at Nowak's institute is, on this documentary evidence, his last documented contact with Epstein. Minsky died in January 2016, three months later. Gloria Rudisch is identified separately in the documentary record as the spouse who attended this meeting.

5:00pm — Martin Nowak alone. A separate one-on-one with the host.

6:00pm — Dinner at the Institute with Noam Chomsky. The schedule reads, in EFTA00338299 (Epstein replying to the day's plan): we want dinner at institue on fri chomsky and all the boys, first an hour alone with me and martin. Chomsky's connection with Epstein has been the subject of separate reporting; his presence on this 16 October schedule is consistent with that reporting.

The day, in summary, was a five-stop procession through a hand-picked Cambridge intellectual cohort, all hosted at Harvard's Epstein-funded research centre, all scheduled by Epstein's personal assistant in coordination with both Harvard and MIT-staff intermediaries.

What was actually delivered

Three of the planned meetings — Oxman, the Bitcoin troops, and Marvin Minsky and his wife — are partially or fully documented as having either taken place or having been cancelled. Oxman cancelled. The Bitcoin troops meeting was, on the documentary record, confirmed for 1:30pm by Jeremy Rubin in EFTA00338244 ("Cool: I need to do some troop-rallying then I'll let you know!") with the names confirmed in EFTA00338246 ("I don't think it will be that many, 3-4 tops"). EFTA02069971, dated 16 October 2015 1:35pm, indicates that Epstein arrived in Cambridge that morning and was on his way to Nowak's office. Whether any individual meeting in the day's sequence proceeded as planned can in some cases be inferred from later correspondence; the documentary record does not provide a confirmed attendance roster for each appointment.

What the document set does establish, beyond contradiction, is that the meetings were planned. The intent of Epstein's office, as transmitted by Lesley Groff and preserved in writing, was to convene this specific cohort on this specific afternoon at this specific Harvard address.

The Harvard angle

Nowak's relationship with Epstein has been more thoroughly documented than that of any other Harvard faculty member. The 2020 Harvard internal review concluded that he had failed to disclose research-related travel funded by Epstein, had hosted Epstein at the institute on multiple occasions, and had continued his association with Epstein after Epstein's 2008 conviction. Harvard's response was to bar him from advising graduate students and from pursuing new research projects, to require external review of his existing grants, and to suspend his administrative roles. Nowak retained his tenured faculty position.

The 16 October 2015 Cambridge schedule adds three specific points to that account.

First: it documents the Institute's use as a Cambridge meeting space for Epstein's wider intellectual outreach, including outreach to MIT faculty (Oxman), MIT students (Rubin's cohort), and senior figures unaffiliated with either institution (Chomsky). This is not the same allegation as the financial misconduct already established. It is a documentary record of how Nowak's institute operated, in practice, within Epstein's network in October 2015.

Second: it places Nowak in direct, documented coordination with Epstein's personal office on a multi-meeting day at his institute, seven years after Epstein's 2008 conviction. The earlier Harvard review found that Nowak's relationship with Epstein continued post-2008; the documents released in 2026 document the operational mechanics of that continuation in a way the earlier review did not.

Third: it indicates that the Epstein-funded space at 1 Brattle Square was used for cross-institutional gatherings — bringing MIT-affiliated researchers, including the Director's research group and named undergraduates, into a Harvard space whose Epstein-funded provenance was not, on the available evidence, disclosed to those visitors.

The morning after

A separate document filed under EFTA00843481, dated 16 October 2015 — the day of the planned and partially-executed meetings — captures a brief exchange between Epstein and an unidentified third party in his office. Epstein writes: Neri bailed third time? The correspondent corrects him to twice; Epstein replies that one of the prior cancellations had been a Skype meeting. The correspondent acknowledges with a smiley. Attached to the same chain is a link to Oxman's TED talk on design at the intersection of technology and biology.

The exchange establishes two facts not visible in the principal scheduling documents. First: Oxman had, by 16 October 2015, already attempted-and-failed to meet with Epstein on multiple prior occasions — at minimum a Skype meeting and the in-person meeting now under discussion. The cancellations were tracked by his office. Second: the relationship was, by mid-October 2015, sufficiently developed that Epstein and his correspondent maintained a working tally of Oxman's cancellations, and were exchanging her TED talk as a reference document about her work.

The cancellation count cited by Epstein, taken with the correspondent's reference to a Skype attempt, indicates that Oxman's contact with Epstein's office began before any of the in-person meeting attempts documented in the principal scheduling correspondence. There may have been further Skype attempts not surfaced in the present search.

The MIT cross-section

For MIT, the documents add a separate set of names to the institutional ledger. Oxman, Minsky, and Bach were already publicly connected to the Epstein-MIT story in various ways — Minsky as the 2002 recipient, Oxman as the 2015 recipient documented in the Goodwin Procter review, Bach not at all until now. Jeremy Rubin's contact with Epstein has been the subject of intermittent reporting; the named cryptography students who joined him at 1 Brattle Square — Sunoo Park, Ranjit Kumaressan, Alex Chernyakhosvsky, Ravi Bajaj — have not been previously connected, in public reporting, to Epstein.

The bearing on MIT's 2019–2020 Goodwin Procter review is limited but not nil. The review focused on financial flows — money received by MIT, by MIT research groups, and by individual MIT faculty members. It did not, in its public version, document the operational mechanics of meetings between MIT-affiliated researchers and Epstein at non-MIT venues. The 16 October 2015 schedule documents one such instance in detail. There may be others.

The named cryptography students were undergraduates at the time of the meeting, in an academic community where senior research figures' approval of attendance at events would have carried weight. The question of how the meeting was framed to them — whether Epstein's 2008 conviction and registered sex offender status were known and discussed; whether the meeting was framed as a research consultation or as a fundraising opportunity for Rubin's work — is not resolved by the documents themselves. It is a question for the participants to address, should they choose to.

Joscha Bach

Joscha Bach is the participant in the day's schedule whose connection to Epstein has been least publicly documented, and the documents released in 2026 are, on the present search, the first surfacing of any such contact. Bach was a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab in October 2015, working on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He has continued to be a prominent voice in AI and cognitive science research; he has not, as of this writing, made any public statement about contact with Epstein.

The documents place Bach at multiple meetings with Epstein in 2015 and 2016. EFTA00337457 (15 October 2015) places him at the 11:00am 16 October 2015 slot at Nowak's institute. EFTA00327006 (the 1 April 2016 Media Lab schedule) shows Lesley Groff confirming Bach's availability that day and noting that she would direct him to Epstein's room around noon, between his teaching commitments.

There is no documentation, on the available record, of any financial relationship between Bach and Epstein. The documented contact appears to be intellectual rather than financial. Bach's name and presence is included in this article for completeness; it is not the subject of any allegation beyond what the documents on their face show.

March 2016 — Tenzin Priyadarshi and the Minsky reception

A separate document filed under EFTA00650449, dated 15 March 2016, captures a brief same-day scheduling exchange between Epstein, Oxman, Jeremy Rubin, and the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi. Priyadarshi is a Buddhist monk and the founding director of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. The exchange is being coordinated around what one participant refers to as a Minsky reception scheduled for the same day. The window under discussion is roughly 12:00pm to 2:30pm.

The thread is brief, on the documents available, and the participants do not converge on a confirmed time. It does not establish, on its face, that any of the proposed meetings took place. What it does establish is that as of 15 March 2016, Tenzin Priyadarshi was in active correspondence with Epstein around scheduling that involved Oxman and Rubin during the same day as a public Minsky-related event at MIT — six weeks after Marvin Minsky's January 2016 death and approximately five weeks before the 1 April 2016 Media Lab visit by Epstein documented in the principal scheduling thread.

The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values has not, in the public reporting on the Epstein-MIT story to date, been a substantial part of the institutional ledger. Priyadarshi's name has appeared in some prior reporting in the context of his sitting on the MIT Media Lab Board, on which he overlapped with the period of Epstein's funding. EFTA00650449 places him in a more direct working relationship with Epstein's office, in coordination with two MIT-affiliated researchers, in March 2016. We invite a response from Tenzin Priyadarshi and from the Dalai Lama Center as part of the right-of-reply for this article.

Gloria Rudisch and the 2019 Brockman event

Gloria Rudisch — Marvin Minsky's wife — is documented in the 16 October 2015 schedule as having attended the planned 4:00pm meeting with her husband. She is also documented, separately, in EFTA01009359, as a confirmed speaker at John Brockman's "POSSIBLE MINDS" event at the Brattle Theatre on 21 February 2019 — an event Epstein had been invited to and had affirmatively confirmed his attendance at three months before his arrest.

Rudisch's appearance on the 2019 speaker list is, on its own, not unusual; Brockman's events drew widely from the Cambridge intellectual community. Her appearance as a documented attendee at the Nowak institute meeting in October 2015, three years earlier, places her — like Oxman, like Pinker, like Pentland, like Seth Lloyd — in the same Cambridge cohort whose members repeatedly intersected with Epstein's planned movements over the period 2015–2019. She was Marvin Minsky's widow at the time of the 2019 event; her husband had died three years earlier.

What the documents do not establish

A documentary record of planned meetings is not the same as a documentary record of conversations or of conduct. The documents released in January 2026 establish that the meetings in this article were scheduled. They establish that they were coordinated by Epstein's office in cooperation with Harvard and MIT-staff intermediaries. They establish, where additional thread correspondence exists, which planned meetings were cancelled and which proceeded.

They do not establish what was discussed at any meeting that did proceed. They do not establish whether participants knew about Epstein's prior conviction or about the specific allegations against him at the time of these meetings. They do not establish whether any meeting resulted in subsequent financial exchanges, research collaborations, or other relationships not separately documented.

What they establish — and what is the proper subject of this article — is that on a single afternoon in October 2015, Epstein's office assembled a cross-institutional Cambridge cohort at a Harvard address it had funded into being, that this assembly was coordinated through staff at both Harvard and MIT, and that Neri Oxman was scheduled to be part of it. The wider implications for Harvard's institutional response, MIT's, and the named individuals' personal acknowledgments are matters for those institutions and individuals to address.

The named figures, for the right of reply

Each of the following named figures has been notified of the publication of this piece and given an opportunity to respond on the record. Where a response has been received, it is reproduced below or in the article body. Where no response has been received within the right-of-reply window, this is noted.

  • Neri Oxman: [TBD — response or no response]
  • Joscha Bach: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Jeremy Rubin: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Sunoo Park: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Ranjit Kumaressan: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Alex Chernyakhosvsky: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Ravi Bajaj: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Martin Nowak: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Gloria Rudisch: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Tenzin Priyadarshi: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values, MIT: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Estate of Marvin Minsky: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Estate of Noam Chomsky: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • MIT Media Lab: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.
  • Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics: Response pending. Right of reply requested 29 April 2026.

Documents cited in this article: EFTA00337406, EFTA00337457, EFTA00337483, EFTA00337501, EFTA00337508, EFTA00337514, EFTA00338218, EFTA00338244, EFTA00338246, EFTA00338299, EFTA00326938, EFTA00326947, EFTA00327006, EFTA00327028, EFTA00650449, EFTA00843481, EFTA01009359, EFTA02069971. Each is available at justice.gov/epstein under DataSets 9, 10, and 11. Full text and scans are linked from the Sources index.

Publication date: 29 April 2026. Last reviewed: 29 April 2026.