by Staff Reporter | Feb 13, 2026 | Education, News
By Staff Reporter |
New email records reveal the University of Arizona (U of A) misled the public about a donation from Jeffrey Epstein.
Email records first reported on by FOIAzona proved Epstein’s donation was not “anonymous” as U of A’s vice president for communications at the time, Chris Sigurdson, claimed. U of A’s associate vice president of external communications at the time, Pam Scott, also claimed that the university had no knowledge because Epstein was not listed on the board of directors with the charity through which he donated, Gratitude America.
“At the time the donation was made by Gratitude America Ltd., Jeffrey Epstein was not listed on the board of directors and the university was unaware of his involvement,” she said. “We have no plans to repay this contribution.”
However, records reveal Epstein’s name was postmarked on the mailing documents containing the donation check bearing his charity’s name. The donation was made out to the University of Arizona Foundation.
Epstein’s $50,000 donation was made at the request of one U of A professor, Stuart Hameroff.
Hameroff’s team also helped Epstein’s team on where to send the donation. The university, through that professor’s program, gave Epstein’s charity public recognition for the donation.
In March 2017, Hameroff asked Epstein to fund an annual conference he put on through the interdisciplinary entity he founded over 30 years ago, the Center for Consciousness Studies. These conferences have occurred since 1994.
One of the center’s latest major donations was $2 million from a retired Google software developer. These funds align with the purpose of the funds put forth by Epstein: engineering consciousness. (The latest Epstein files release revealed Epstein sought, among his other endeavors into transhumanism, to create a behavioral engineering institute at Stanford University).
Hameroff is a leader with the U of A sciences: he cofounded and chairs the Center for Consciousness Studies, cochairs the Science of Consciousness, and serves as professor emeritus of the Departments of Anesthesiology and Psychology.
Hameroff didn’t need to provide Epstein with details before the financier pledged a minimum sponsorship of $50,000.
“Who are the speakers and what is the cost?” wrote Epstein. “I’m in for at least $50,000, before knowing anything.”
Epstein’s trust in Hameroff likely stemmed from the personal relationship the pair shared. The Epstein library presently returns multiple records mentioning Hameroff from 2016 through 2018.
Hameroff stayed at one of Epstein’s apartments in New York for multiple days leading up to Halloween in 2016, arranged by Gino Yu, associate professor and director of game development at Hong Kong Polytechnic Institute. Yu referred to Epstein as his “benefactor,” per Hameroff.
Hameroff called the night “memorable” in an email after the fact.
“We appreciate you staying up late with an early flight. We were tired too, but it was a memorable night,” wrote Hameroff.
Yu also wanted James Tagg, an inventor and engineer with Penrose Institute, to attend the October 2016 meeting with Epstein and Hameroff. It’s unclear if Tagg attended. However, Hameroff did later ask Epstein to provide seed money for another project, the Penrose Institute, in May 2017 during discussions of the Center for Consciousness Studies conference.
Other recently released Epstein records revealed that an investment banker and fellow Epstein affiliate, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, directed Epstein to review another consciousness program advised by Hameroff, the Shanghai Science of Consciousness Program. That email exchange took place in February 2017. It appears that program was a reference to a canceled attempt to hold the Center for Consciousness Studies conference in Shanghai, per emails.
“Attached is the Shanghai Science of Consciousness program (Stuart Hameroff put together; I advised),” said Kuhn.
Epstein, via his charity Gratitude America, was featured as a sponsor that “made the conference a reality” per program documents. Emails affirmed this promotion, as well as offers to pay for a hotel room for Epstein’s attendance at the conference.
Another U of A faculty member and famed political activist, Noam Chomsky, was a friend of Epstein as well. Chomsky was included in Epstein’s “little black book.”
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by Staff Reporter | Nov 19, 2025 | News
By Staff Reporter |
A former professor from Arizona State University (ASU) and renowned atheist physicist was peppered throughout the latest drop of Epstein files.
Former ASU professor Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, exchanged over 60 emails with Jeffrey Epstein. Among these emails were conversations between Krauss and Epstein strategizing Krauss’s response to sexual misconduct allegations.
In December 2017, Krauss asked Epstein how to deal with questions from BuzzFeed News about the allegations.
Epstein advised Krauss to provide a defense to the allegations in a “short concise cover letter” to be published in its entirety, possibly with an attachment to Krauss’s website that would offer more details of his defense.
After BuzzFeed News published its investigative report on Krauss in February 2018, Krauss offered Epstein a play-by-play of the initial fallout. Krauss expressed hope that a greater news story would emerge to provide cover for him, such as an indictment of President Donald Trump.
“I wonder if I will ever really recover,” said Krauss. “I wish they would indict Trump or something right now.”
Epstein told Krauss to discredit his accusers by depicting them as irrational and opportunistic, and Krauss the rational renowned scientist.
“Concentrate on your point-by-point refutation,” said Epstein. “[An] article on women agreeing on seeing flyer saucers does not make the claim real. Break the charges into ludicrous, ogling, jokes, etc. Nancy [sic] language in her tweets. Stirred up emotion.”
Krauss, who now lives in Canada, retired from ASU in 2019 after the university found merit in the sexual misconduct claims against him. Krauss was accused of grabbing a woman’s chest two years prior at an event.
In an October 2018 post announcing his retirement, Krauss claimed innocence of the charges.
“To be clear, I have never harassed or assaulted anyone and have most certainly not exhibited gender discrimination in my professional dealings at the university or elsewhere,” said Krauss.
His defense did not persuade certain other leaders within the scientific community. Krauss was removed from the board of “Scientific American” over the allegations.
In years prior, Krauss sought to distance association between himself and Epstein.
In a 2014 photo from an annual conference by his initiative at ASU, the Origins Project, Krauss can be seen smiling between Epstein and Harvard professor Steven Pinker. After Epstein’s arrest for child sex trafficking and suicide, Krauss claimed to social media skeptics that Epstein was just another donor that he’d happened to take a photo with, among others.
“Epstein was a Presidentially-approved donor to ASU Foundation, [and] his educational foundation was acknowledged at a named table,” said Krauss in an X comment in 2020. “I had photos taken standing by each table. Pinker & other scientists were randomly assigned to tables.”
However, Krauss knew Epstein more personally than he let on according to the trove of newly released Epstein files, in addition to his well-documented involvement with Epstein and prior statements to the media.
In 2011, Krauss defended Epstein following his imprisonment for 2008 charges of prostitution and prostitution with a minor. Epstein pleaded guilty to the charges; his plea deal of 13 months in prison with work-release later became controversial, as it protected him from federal charges with greater punishments.
“If anything, the unfortunate period he suffered has caused him to really think about what he wants to do with his money and his time, and support knowledge,” said Krauss in a statement to The Daily Beast. “Jeffrey has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”
Krauss stated, also, that his relationship with Epstein enhanced his life.
“I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it,” said Krauss.
The Origins Project was an initiative headed by Krauss at ASU that sought to answer where life and the universe originated. Krauss joined ASU and launched the initiative several months after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008.
Krauss holds atheistic views and has proclaimed himself an “antitheist”: one who opposes all theistic religions.
ASU transitioned the Origins Project into the Interplanetary Initiative following Krauss’s departure. Unlike Krauss’s program, the succeeding program focuses on building mankind’s future in space.
Two years prior to joining ASU, Krauss organized a gravity-themed conference funded by one of Epstein’s foundations. That conference attended by the world’s leading physicists took place in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Notably, the conference had dinner on “Epstein’s Island.”
AZ Free News is your #1 source for Arizona news and politics. You can send us news tips using this link.
by Staff Reporter | Nov 16, 2025 | News
By Staff Reporter |
Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego has refused to delete an unverified theory about the relationship between child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and President Donald Trump.
Gallego claimed Trump and Epstein spent Thanksgiving together in 2017, citing an email exchange from Epstein. The Democratic Party deleted their post propagating this claim, which Gallego quoted in a post on X.
“The ‘Trump was secretly helping the cops take down Epstein’ theory kinda falls apart when you know he may have spent Thanksgiving with him. As President. After Epstein was already convicted,” said Gallego.
Over a decade before 2017 Thanksgiving, however, Trump had banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. Multiple sources have reported this timeline in years past to reporters and in a book published in 2020.
In 2008, Epstein was convicted of two state felony charges in Florida: soliciting prostitution, and soliciting prostitution with a minor. Epstein entered a plea deal of a 13-month jail sentence with work release and requirement to register as a sex offender.
Trump has repeatedly claimed to have had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes until the federal charges emerged in 2019. The president also claimed at the time that he hadn’t spoken to Epstein in about 15 years.
It wasn’t until late 2018, a year after the Thanksgiving in question occurred, that investigative reporting from the Miami Herald publicized details of the 2008 plea deal. That following summer, federal prosecutors hit Epstein with the child sex trafficking charges that would ultimately conclude with his apparent suicide in prison a month later.
Unlike Gallego, the Democratic Party deleted their post on X in which they claimed Trump spent Thanksgiving with Epstein in 2017. Included in the post was a picture of an email exchange between Epstein and the founder of a major modeling agency, Faith Kates.
“Documents show Donald Trump spent Thanksgiving with Jeffrey Epstein in 2017,” said the Democrats in their deleted X post. “At the time, Trump was already president, and Epstein was already a convicted sex offender.”
Trump spent Thanksgiving at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach with family in 2017. A book published in 2020, “The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency,” included accounts from several Mar-a-Lago club members that Trump banned Epstein from the club years before the holiday, sometime before the 2008 pleading.
The Thanksgiving 2017 email was part of the 20,000-document dump from House Republicans on Wednesday, just hours before the House passed an agreement to end the government shutdown with six Democratic votes.
In another email from January 2019, approximately six months before federal prosecutors closed in and about two months after the investigative report dropped, Epstein claimed in an email to Michael Wolff, an author-journalist and longtime confidant of his, that Trump had knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking.
“Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member [at Mar-a-Lago] ever,” said Epstein. “Of course [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
Ghislaine Maxwell was the British socialite convicted of child sex trafficking for Epstein in 2021.
Maxwell trafficked one of her victims, Virginia Giuffre, from her job as a teenage Mar-a-Lago spa attendant. Giuffre was 16 when she was trafficked.
Throughout her book “Nobody’s Girl,” public statements, and sworn testimonies, Giuffre has offered consistent, repeated defenses of Trump’s innocence and non-involvement with Epstein’s trafficking.
Giuffre’s statements also challenge the reliability of Epstein’s perspective and claims about Trump in his emails. In another email released within the 20,000 documents this week, Epstein claimed Trump and Giuffre “spent hours” together at his home. However, Giuffre said in her book that she only met Trump several times briefly in public places, such as Mar-a-Lago before she was trafficked and at a Halloween party.
Giuffre is unable to offer further clarity on these developments in the Epstein files, as she committed suicide in April. Her book was published posthumously in October.
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