Former Rutgers University professor and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, who has previously discussed his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, received major funding from the disgraced financier and they once together enjoyed a “wonderful lunch” with a “bevy of beauties,” according to documents recently released by the Department of Justice.
“that was a wonderful lunch, a REAL pleasure; many thanks indeed quite apart from the bevy of beauties and the prickly Nobel Prize winner who could only say that his work concerned ‘smell,’” he wrote in an email dated Jan. 28, 2012. “it was great seeing you in such good form and shape i look forward to seeing you again in the not too distant future.”
They linked up via LinkedIn shortly thereafter. On July 30, 2013, Epstein received an email from the networking platform, alerting him that Trivers had accepted his request to connect. It was among the latest batch of emails dumped by the DOJ, offering additional insight into their relationship, which persisted even after Epstein pleaded guilty for procuring a child for prostitution in 2008. Their correspondence continued regularly all the way up until 2018, the documents show,
The following year, Epstein was arrested and found dead weeks later inside his cell at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he’d been awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.
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Rutgers University. (Shutterstock)
Trivers was suspended without pay from Rutgers University back in 2014, after he admitted to students that he knew nothing about the “Human Aggression” class he’d been assigned to teach.
“what is your status with rutgers.?” Epstein wrote in an email dated February 14 of the same year. “not that i give a s–t.”
In another email from April 2015, Trivers revealed to Epstein that he would be signing “a nondisclosure agreement as well as a non-defamation one—can not tell anyone the details of the buyout nor make any negative statements about Rutgers.” Emails from around the same time reveal Epstein wrote a $30,000 check to Triver’s foundation, a copy of which was included in the DOJ’s recent document dump.
He also thanked Epstein for his help, adding: “i am sick of talking about them as it is.”
Months later, Epstein referenced Trivers’ Rutgers woes in an email exchange with Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor Noam Chomsky.
“i am his major funder,” he wrote. “he got thrown out of rutgers for good this time.”
Trivers in 2015 confirmed to Reuters that he received about $40,000 from Epstein “to study the relationship between knee symmetry and sprinting ability.” In the same interview, he praised the disgraced financier as “a person of integrity,” who served his time. In Epstein’s defense, he said the young women appear much older than they did in the past.
“By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said.
In a more recent email exchange, Trivers lamented to Epstein about the notable increase in sexual misconduct allegations against powerful men.
“the basic problem is simple—i am going against a strong national trend—well-known man after well-known man is being brought low for alleged his misbehaviour toward women—in some case well-deserved prison time (Cosby and perhaps Weinstein) in many other cases, simply being run out of institutions—exactly my fate,” Trivers wrote in the 2018 email. “furthermore in he say/she say confrontations the evidence has shifted—in University settings at least—from ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ to a ‘preponderance of evidence’ to ‘more positive than negative.’”
According to his website, Trivers serves as president of the Biosocial Research Foundation, based in Millstone.
