Yale University has removed a prominent computer science professor from teaching duties while it investigates his conduct after Justice Department documents revealed a six-year correspondence between him and Jeffrey Epstein.
In an October 2011 message—sent years after Epstein’s guilty plea in a case involving a minor—David Gelernter told the financier he had an “editoress” to suggest for a position, identifying the candidate, then a senior at Yale, as a “v small good-looking blonde.”
“I have a perfect editoress in mind: Yale sr, worked at Vogue last summer, runs her own campus mag, art major, completely connected, v small goodlooking blonde,” Gelernter wrote.
Yale said in a statement that Gelernter, 70, would not teach while the university reviews the matter. “The university does not condone the action taken by the professor or his described manner of providing recommendations for his students,” the statement said. “The professor’s conduct is under review. Until the review is completed, the professor will not teach his class.”
Students enrolled in Gelernter’s course were notified Tuesday that he would not be teaching.
The Daily Beast has contacted Gelernter and Yale University for comment.
Gelernter has been on Yale’s faculty since 1982 and is known for his work in parallel computation and for helping develop the Linda programming system. He also drew national attention in 1993 when he was severely injured by a mail bomb sent by “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski.
Gelernter defended the message last week in an email to Jeffrey Brock, dean of Yale’s School of Engineering & Applied Science, according to the Yale Daily News, which reported that Gelernter also forwarded the message to the student newspaper.
He wrote that Epstein was “obsessed with girls”—“like every other unmarried billionaire in Manhattan; in fact, like every other heterosex male”—and said he was keeping “the potential boss’s habits in mind.”
“So long as I said nothing that dishonored her in any conceivable way, I’d have told him more or less what he wanted,” Gelernter added. “She was smart, charming & gorgeous. Ought I to have suppressed that info? Never!”
He added: “I’m very glad I wrote the note.”
In a message to students Tuesday, first reported by Hearst Connecticut Media Group and later obtained by the Associated Press, Gelernte again defended his communications with Epstein.
He said he was recommending the student for a summer job with Epstein’s private bank at her request and that neither he nor the student knew at the time that Epstein was a convicted sex offender.
“The university’s Smoking Gun is a personal, private email, dug out of the dump of Epstein files,” Gelernter wrote. “(If someone handed you a stack of other people’s private correspondence, would you dive in and read them? Of course not. Gentlemen and ladies don’t read each other’s mail. Courtesy 101.)”
Despite Gelernter’s claims of ignorance, a May 2011 email exchange shows Epstein reminding him that he had already served jail time.
In the messages, Gelernter describes walking along the Seine and observing “French girls dressed & behaving like actual females everywhere,” while Epstein adds, “the smell of nutella crepe mixing with the cheap perfume of the streetwalker.”
Gelernter responds, noting that any Paris group of spring girls is perfumed “just not as vividly as the golden-hearted whores,” and recommends his short story “A Year to Learn the Language,” about a virginal American in Paris. Epstein replies, “now read —. don’t look , don’t think don’t //// ive already been incarcerated.”
Yale’s suspension of the professor follows a controversy at Harvard nearly three months ago, when former university president Larry Summers stepped back from public duties after emails linking him to Epstein were made public.
The messages reportedly showed Summers seeking Epstein’s advice about a romantic relationship with a woman he described as a mentee, according to the Harvard Crimson. Summers, 71, also a former U.S. Treasury secretary, took a leave from teaching and stepped aside as director of Harvard’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.
Epstein served jail time in Florida in 2008 and 2009 after pleading guilty to state charges involving a minor. He died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting federal trial in New York on charges that he sexually abused dozens of girls.
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