A couple more letters emerge out of the files, these all involve John Brockman. Brockman was the king of scientific publishing; I believe he was the agent for all of Richard Dawkins’ books, and he was the agent for my one book, he was Lawrence Krauss’s agent, etc.\. If you wanted to publish a science book, you had to make the pilgrimage to New York and kiss the feet of John Brockman, who would then negotiate with the publishers to get you a good deal. He had a lot of clout, clout that was invisible to most people.

So when a “rather nasty young woman” criticized Richard Dawkins, he went crying to John Brockman.

> From: Richard Dawkins < [ A
> Date: July 4, 2011 5:42:43 PM EDT
> To: John Brockman < [
> Subject: Lawrence
>
> John
–
> 1. I hope you recovered well from your operation.
>
> 2. There is a rather nasty young woman called Rebecca Watson, who seems to be running some
kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.
>
> http://skepchick.org/2011/04/lawrence-krauss-defends-a-sex-offender-embarrasses-scientists- everywhere/
>
> There are people on her blog talking about organising a walkout when Lawrence speaks at TAM in Las Vegas. I remember that you told me something of the circumstances of Jeffrey’s arrest, and that his case is not as black as painted. Might you possibly remind of it.
>
> Thanks (and greetings from Jackson Hole, Wyoming)
> Richard

Apparently, Brockman had been making up excuses for Epstein to his clients, and then those clients were echoing those excuses to justify their own ugly behavior. I have no idea what Dawkins thought Brockman could do to help. It was just an incestuous little clique.

This next one is very much inside baseball. I was on Scienceblogs, along with a lot of other very good people, which was founded by Adam Bly, who was also connected to Brockman. Bly got a lot of money from somewhere, I don’t know where, enough to launch a blog networks and a print magazine, but this email suggests to me that one of his sources was Jeffrey Epstein. Now I feel tainted.

The “PR crisis” he’s talking about was PepsiGate. We were all scientists and journalists at ScienceBlogs, except that Bly had suddenly brought a new blog into the network, a great big corporate advertisement for Pepsi disguised as a science blog. It’s true, it was a crisis: several people people yeeted right out of the network, citing ethical issues, and even more of us were yelling at Bly that this was wrong, you can’t do that, it’s blurring the boundary between objective science and shilling for a corporation. It was really, really ugly, and Bly just seemed oblivious to our concerns. (Note also: those of you who remember this event know that it’s also where another blog, ERV, went histrionically pro-Pepsi and lurched into the manosphere. It was a weird time.)

Bly was consulting a convicted pedophile during the whole episode. I suspect said pedophile had provided some degree of seed money for the science magazine, Seed.

To: Jeffrey Epstein[jeevacation@gmail com]
From: Adam Bly
Sent: Thur 7/812010 3:18:24 AM
Subject: Thurs.
I’m dealing with a PR crisis at ScienceBlogs (relating to a customer, PepsiCo) and haven’t left my office all day. I don’t know what tomorrow will look like Yet so wanted to give you a heads up in case I’m unable to leave the office again tomorrow.

I have copies of every issue of Seed stored in my house. I guess I won’t feel bad about throwing out the clutter at last.