Updated: Epstein was invited to suspended prof’s Acton home, documents show

Soon after Harvard professor Martin Nowak bought a home in Acton in 2017, he asked Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant if her boss would pay him a visit.

Nearly a decade later, Nowak is on leave from his Harvard job as new details emerge about his professional and personal ties to the sex offender. 

“I totally regret ever having met him,” Nowak told The Acton Bridge when asked in a phone conversation earlier this month about his relationship with Epstein. “I think he manipulated many people.”

Harvard Director of Media Relations and Communications Jason Newton confirmed Thursday that Nowak was placed on leave pending further investigation by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 

Epstein shelled out $6.5 million to launch Nowak’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard in 2003, according to a previous university investigation. Epstein was convicted in 2008 on a charge of soliciting prostitution from a person under age 18. Emails show he and Nowak stayed in touch until shortly before Epstein’s jailhouse death in 2019. 

Prosecutors and victims have alleged a web of sexual abuse with Epstein at the center. Last year, the Justice Department started releasing millions of new documents related to the case. 

Nowak has not been publicly accused of sexual misconduct and told The Bridge, “I have never harmed a living soul.” 

He said Epstein never accepted the invitation to his Acton home. 

While Epstein boosted Nowak professionally, emails show a personal side to their relationship. One particular exchange has turned heads online — although Nowak insists it has an innocuous explanation.

Harvard sanctioned Nowak in 2021 following earlier Epstein revelations but later lifted that punishment. The Harvard Crimson and Boston Globe reported Nowak’s suspension on Wednesday. 

‘Martin’s institute’

Nowak arrived at Harvard in 2003 after spending time at the University of Vienna, Oxford, and Princeton. His program “maintained an office for Epstein’s use,” Harvard investigators found. 

The same 2020 report said Epstein helped Nowak get at least $7.5 million in donations after Harvard’s president decided the university “should not accept gifts from Epstein.” 

Nowak wasn’t the only Boston-area academic in Epstein’s orbit. Day schedules prepared by Epstein staffers show Epstein often held court at “Martin’s institute” on the Harvard campus.

In 2011, as reporters from Newsweek probed his wrongdoing, Epstein emailed Nowak and another associate and said the press “will want to talk to you both.” 

The Newsweek story, Epstein said, was asking why so many people “seem to ignore — their words — my crime.”

Nowak asked Epstein to talk over the phone. 

A trust document created shortly before Epstein died sought to bequeath $5 million to Nowak, although the document misspelled his name.

A medical examiner ruled Epstein’s death a suicide.

‘Misguided pride’

Nowak said he justified his ongoing association with Epstein “by looking around me at the sophisticated academic leaders who felt comfortable doing likewise.” 

In a Friday email, Nowak said he “was urged to cultivate Mr. Epstein to continue his financial support of academic endeavors.” 

 “I am deeply disappointed in the awe I felt for [Epstein’s] impressive connections and wealth, and in the misguided pride I felt that someone of these attributes would befriend me and support my work,” he said.

Nowak said he was told Epstein’s 2008 conviction was for “soliciting a prostitute.” 

A spiritual advisor told Nowak it was his “duty as a Christian to visit a person who is in prison,” he said, “and that I have a moral obligation to forgive someone who has served a prison sentence.”

2017 invitation

A prior Bridge review found Epstein made at least 20 trips through Hanscom Field, often on his way to Harvard.

Nowak bought a house near the Acton-Carlisle line in summer 2017, town real estate records show. He emailed Epstein’s assistant, Lesley Groff, a few weeks later and asked whether Epstein was “still planning on visiting me in Acton.”

“my new house is close to the airport where he usually lands,” Nowak wrote. 

Nowak also owns a home in Lincoln.

A sampling of emails shows other meetups in the works at various times. 

• In 2009, Nowak and a Princeton professor planned to visit Epstein for five days at an unspecified location. Groff told Nowak he could use one of Epstein’s apartments.
• “Martin Nowak is asking if he can go to your island March 1,” Groff told Epstein in 2014. It’s unclear whether that trip happened. 
• In 2015, Groff told Nowak that Epstein “would like to have dinner at the Institute” with “all the boys” but wanted an hour alone with him first. 
• That same year, Epstein invited Nowak to his island, but Nowak backed out due to a medical appointment, emails show. 

‘Our spy’

Besides logistics, messages show Epstein and Nowak discussing people they knew. In one email, Nowak said he was meeting someone soon and he was “nervous like a schoolboy.” 

“did you ever bring her to harvard? do i know her?” he asked Epstein. 

Nowak said he was making a joke with the “schoolboy” comment. The woman he was meeting in that case was “around 40” years old, he said. They met for dinner at a restaurant and, having both lost parents recently, mostly talked about the mourning process, he said. 

Although Epstein introduced him to people, Nowak said he never had a “relationship” with these connections. 

In 2014, Nowak emailed Epstein: “our spy was captured after completing her mission.” 

“did you torture her,” Epstein typed back without a question mark.

Nowak claimed his message alluded to the video game Civilization II, which he played “a few times many years ago.” 

“When you get this response in the game, then what you had wanted to do had worked out,” he told The Bridge. “It is a moment of success.” 

The line stuck with Nowak, he said, and he would sometimes repeat it to himself after solving a mathematical problem. 

Epstein’s response “made no sense at all,” Nowak said. 

“Obviously, there was no spy,” he said. “Nobody got captured, nobody was on a mission, and nobody was tortured.”

Other mentions

The Justice Department’s Epstein files include a real estate pamphlet for the home Nowak eventually bought. 

In 2015, Nowak emailed Epstein about a Carlisle property near the Acton line. He said it abuts the Estabrook Woods, wetlands, and Carlisle conservation land. “Nothing can be developed around it,” he said. 

In 2017, he sent Epstein a link to a Lowell Road house listing. “for you?” Nowak asked.

“As far I know, he never bought a property in [Massachusetts],” Nowak wrote in an email to The Bridge.

Nowak said he only “began to realize the full extent” of Epstein’s crimes in 2019 and told The Bridge, “I completely detest what he has done.”

“I am a deeply religious person,” he said. “Any human activity that harms another person is abhorrent to me.”

Acton appears a few other times in newly released Epstein files.

One Google Calendar notification in Groff’s inbox mentions booking the Residence Inn on Baker Avenue “for June 29/30” 2019. The notification doesn’t say whether Epstein was due to attend, and it’s not certain whether anyone in his circle actually spent that night in town. 

Investigators were closing in when that email went out, and by July 6, 2019, law enforcement had arrested Epstein. 

By the morning of August 10, 2019, he was dead.