A troubling remark made by a Jeffrey Epstein associate about Stephen Hawking has surfaced after a photo emerged showing the physicist alongside two women in bikinis.
The image was included in a recent release of Epstein-related documents and shows Hawking holding a cocktail while sitting with two women.
After the picture circulated, Hawking’s family addressed the claims and said they have identified the women shown in the photograph.
They told The Mirror: “Professor Hawking made some of the greatest contributions to physics in the 20th century while at the same time being the longest-known survivor of motor neurone disease, a debilitating condition which left him reliant on a ventilator, voice synthesiser, wheelchair and round-the-clock medical care.
“Any insinuation of inappropriate conduct on his part is wrong and far-fetched in the extreme.”
According to the MailOnline, a longtime acquaintance of Epstein made a disturbing comment, suggesting Epstein would deserve the “the Nobel Prize for medical science” if Hawking had engaged in sex with underage girls on Epstein’s island.
The exchange appeared in a 2015 email thread. In the message to Andrew Farkas, Epstein wrote: “I kid you not the local papers are suggesting that Steven Hawking had sex with underage girls on island.”
Farkas, an US-based banker then replied: “If it were true you’d received the Nobel Prize for medical science.”
Hawking’s name reportedly appears multiple times in the document dump, and he traveled to the US Virgin Islands with other scientists in March 2006 for the “Energy of Empty Space That Isn’t Zero” conference, which was funded by Epstein.
His name also appeared in a separate email from 2015 sent to Epstein by his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
In that email, Maxwell suggested there could be a financial incentive for anyone who could refute an allegation involving Hawking.
“You can issue a reward to any of virginias friends acquaionts [sic] family that come forward and help prove her allegations are false,” the email stated. “The strongest is the clinton dinner, and the new version in the virgin isalnds that stven hawking partica-ted in an underage orgy.”
It’s also worth stressing that a person being named in the Epstein files does not, by itself, prove criminal conduct or wrongdoing.
If you’ve been affected by any of the issues in this article, you can contact The National Sexual Assault Hotline on 800.656.HOPE (4673), available 24/7. Or you can chat online via online.rainn.org.