| Who | Theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario; known for work on loop quantum gravity. ⚠ His role there is public biography and is not established by any document in the release |
| Did Epstein fund him? | No document in the release records a payment, grant, gift, invoice, wire, cheque or pledge to Lee Smolin or to the Perimeter Institute. Every money-instrument probe returns zero against his name while the identical probe fires for other scientists1 |
| What Epstein claimed | Epstein’s own promotional literature repeatedly listed him among scientists his foundation said it had “supported”. That is Epstein’s assertion about himself, and it appears in the same document class this desk has already shown overstated its Harvard giving roughly fourfold2 |
| The question nobody answered | In April 2014 a publicist placing a feature article about Epstein asked him directly which scientists he had recently donated to, and named Smolin. The release contains no reply3 |
| Correspondence | About sixteen threads between 2009 and 2013, most of them short. He wrote to Epstein during Epstein’s incarceration and again two months after his release4 |
| Travel | No travel recorded. No flight record, no passenger manifest, no Gulfstream. ⚠ He was invited to a December 2011 conference on St John, and the page has a section on it; no document records him going5 |
| What Epstein did with his name | In April 2009, from inside his sentence, Epstein offered a bank executive a menu of named scientists a young relative could meet, Smolin among them. Nothing indicates Smolin knew6 |
Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. He appears in the released Epstein files as a correspondent: about sixteen threads between 2009 and 2013, mostly short, several of them substantive about physics.
He is also one of the names Jeffrey Epstein used when Epstein wanted to sound like a patron of science, and that is the reason this page exists. The claim that Epstein funded him is made repeatedly in the release, and it is made entirely by Epstein.
This page leads with the question, because the release does not answer it. No document in the release records Epstein paying, granting or giving anything to Lee Smolin. ⚠ That is a statement about this record, not a finding about his finances, and the difference matters for a living private individual against whom nothing is alleged.
The funding question
No document in the release records Epstein paying, granting, giving or pledging anything to Lee Smolin or to the Perimeter Institute.
That is a negative, so it is worth saying how it was tested. Every money-instrument probe was run against his name and against six other scientists in the same file, so that a zero could be distinguished from a broken query:1
| Probe | Smolin | Krauss | Nowak | Minsky |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| name with “Pay to the order of” | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| name with “Wire Transfer” | 0 | 11 | 6 | 1 |
| name with “Deutsche Bank” | 0 | 7 | 0 | 7 |
The controls fire, and one of them is a real funding instrument: the same probe template reaches a Leon Black Family Foundation letter of December 2014 headed “Re: $2,000,000 Irrevocable Pledge to the ASU Origins Project”, addressed to a named scientist. So an instrument of exactly the kind being looked for does exist in this corpus, and these searches do find it. They find nothing for Smolin.
The haystack is populated rather than empty: “Pay to the order of” appears on 2,130 pages, “Wire Transfer” on 4,470, “Deutsche Bank” on 64,414. The negative is a negative against a searched and populated record, not against silence. Seven optical-character variants of the surname were checked so that the zero is not an extraction artefact, and the only one that hits anything reaches a scheduling note.
His institution is equally absent. “Perimeter Institute” appears on 116 pages and on none of them beside a payment instrument; the single hit pairing it with the words grant, donation, gift, pledge or contribution is a physics preprint’s acknowledgements section, crediting NSERC, the Province of Ontario and the Foundational Questions Institute.1
What Epstein said, which is a different thing
Epstein’s promotional copy says otherwise, across fourteen pages and ten identifiers. The typical sentence runs:
The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation has supported many leading scientists including Stephen Hawkings, Martin Nowak, Gregory Benford, Lee Smolin, Seth Lloyd, Lawrence Krauss … Marvin Minsky
This is Epstein’s assertion about himself, drafted for websites, biographies and applications, and it must never become “Epstein funded him” in anyone else’s voice.2
There is a specific reason to distrust it, and it is on the record of this wiki already. One of the ten documents making the claim is the Enhanced Education foundation’s letter to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services of 9 June 2015. That letter describes the Harvard giving as “a $35 million gift”. Harvard’s own 2020 audit records $6.5 million establishing the programme and $9,179,000 in total across 22 gifts. The largest figure the foundation ever claimed is roughly four times the recipient’s own accounting. The sentence naming Smolin sits in that letter, beside that number.2
A further cluster of documents repeating the claim turns out to be printouts of the Wikipedia article on Epstein, which carried it downstream. Four documents, one claim, one origin.
The question that was put to Epstein, and never answered
On 16 April 2014 someone e-mailed Epstein and Tyler Shears under the subject “article topics”, asking:
what scientists and their projects have you recently donated to?
and listing three candidates beneath it, as questions:
J. Craig Venter? his institute?
M. Minsky?
Lee Smolin?
There is no reply anywhere in the release. The phrase “Re article topics” returns zero pages corpus-wide, and the production stamps immediately either side of the sheet are an unrelated scheduling note and a thread about a home projector.3
Who asked matters, and the sender’s name is blacked out on the sheet. The capacity is established by the surrounding file rather than by the signature: Shears was a media contractor invoiced to Epstein through Richard Kahn’s firm, and the same barred sender writes elsewhere, “attached is the feature article for ntl. Georgraphic. I highlighted the spots with Jeffrey’s name.”3
So the list is a publicist’s guess-list, drawn up while placing a promotional magazine feature about Epstein, asking Epstein to supply the names of scientists he had funded. It is evidence about Epstein’s reputation management. It is not evidence about Lee Smolin, and the fact that his name occurred to a publicist is not a fact about his finances.
One recollection, uncorroborated, and it points the other way
On 8 January 2014 Antony Valentini, then a physics professor at Clemson, wrote to Epstein soliciting funding and said:
In 2001 Lee Smolin supported me for a year using funds from your previous Jesse Philipps foundation.
Tier: credible allegation, uncorroborated. The speaker has direct knowledge, being the person who says he received the money, but he is recalling something thirteen years old inside a request for more, and the sentence immediately before it reads “I have been turned down by NSF and am seeking alternatives.” No ledger, grant letter or foundation record for it exists anywhere in the release: the phrase “Jesse Philipps” returns exactly one page in the whole corpus, and it is this one.7
⚠ Note what it describes even if true. It has Smolin disbursing money to a third party, not receiving it.
One offer in kind, with no evidence it happened
On 30 September 2009 Epstein instructed staff:
lets schedule marc hauser. seth lloyd , lee smolin, to spend a day or two —stay in apt , get car.
No document shows the offer made, accepted or taken up.8
And no travel at all
He is not in the travel record, and again the zero was tested against live controls on the same keys. His name with “Little St”: zero. With “Zorro”: zero. With flight, passenger, manifest or Gulfstream: two hits, both physics prose about something being “manifest in the spacetime coordinates”.
⚠ A separate probe needs reporting separately, because an earlier version of this page ran the
two together. His name with the word island returns 8, not zero, and all eight were read:
Wikipedia printouts, biography copy, and the e-mails about the December 2011 conference described
below. It is on that island probe that the comparators are 321 for Martin Nowak, 223 for
Lawrence Krauss and 104 for Marvin Minsky. The point survives the correction and is narrower
than it was: he is invited and discussed; he is not carried.5
What the record does show: four years of letters
Strip out the promotional copy and the funding question and a real correspondence remains. It is not large, and the page says so plainly below, but it is continuous and it covers Epstein’s conviction.
He was on the list of people given Epstein’s jail address. An undated sheet headed “List of People Who Need JE’s Address!” carries the entry “Lee Smolin- done”.9
He wrote to Epstein during the incarceration. On 29 April 2009, with Epstein in the Palm Beach County stockade, Smolin wrote under the subject “economics”, inviting him to a Perimeter Institute meeting on the financial crisis, “where you will be missed”. On 13 May he wrote again: “wonderful to talk, as always”, attaching his own written summary of the conference.10
He wrote again two months after the release. On 26 September 2009:
I hear that you are out and living there at home. Hope all is well, would love to see you and catch up at some point.
The rest is physics and scheduling. On 7 July 2010 he sent a long substantive letter to Lesley Groff, copied to Epstein, arguing about doubly special relativity and Sabine Hossenfelder’s objection to it, with two preprints attached. ⚠ It is a reply to a circular Groff had sent to ten scientists a fortnight earlier, not a private letter to Epstein, and its length is a measure of his interest in the physics rather than in the correspondent. In November 2010 he opens “An email yesterday reminds me I have been too much out of touch,” and Epstein replies “You’re always welcome in ny.” In January 2011 he sends a paper, and Epstein forwards it onward to Jes Staley. In February 2011 he is on John Brockman’s New York dinner list, alongside Epstein and a name the sheet prints as “Gmax Maxwell”, and writes “Ill be in nyc this afternoon prior to John’s dinner in case you have a [b]it of time free” In March 2013 he declines a date and adds a message for Lawrence Krauss:
Please give Lawrence my regards, I know he is there for the debate at the planetarium that was supposed to be with David Albert. In case it comes up tell Lawrence he should have insisted on debating David, David is wickedly smart and knows physics well and it would have been a worthy debate.
Epstein used his name as an inducement
This is the strongest document in the file, and it is not about Smolin’s conduct at all.
On 27 April 2009, from inside his sentence, Epstein wrote to Jes Staley of JPMorgan. A young relative of Staley’s, Epstein offered, could
meet have dinner lunch a weekend with any of the following seth lloyd mit quantum computing.. murray gell-man , santa-fe institute quarks„ brian greene columbia -string theory„ leonard susskind „ strings theory, lawrence [k]rause„ origins institute phoenix arizona.. lee smolin perimiter institute, loop quantum gravity , she can see the large hadron collider in switzerland. private tour.
Staley forwarded it a minute later, adding a name of his own: “This is from uncle Jeffery. Add Lisa Randell at Harvard. Jes.”6
Epstein was offering a list of named scientists as something he could supply. Documented fact, and it is a fact about Epstein. Nothing in the document indicates that Smolin knew of it, consented to it, or ever met anyone as a result, and this page asserts none of those things. The young woman is named in the message and is not named here; she is not a victim in this record and the page has no need of her name.
The island conference he was invited to and then was not on
In October 2011 Epstein’s circle organised a two-day conference on St John in the Virgin Islands, with a lunch meeting on Epstein’s island, for December. Smolin was invited.
- 14 October 2011: Cecile de Jongh asks Groff for contact details for eight people, Smolin among them.
- 18 October 2011: Smolin replies to de Jongh: “We have a family trip tentatively scheduled then but I may be able to move it. Could you meanwhile tell me more about what the subject of the meeting is and who else is coming? Also please tell Jeffrey he is always welcome to visit here.”
- 20 October 2011: participant lists still name him.
- ⚠ 27 October 2011: the list of nine hotel rooms to be booked does not name him.
No document in the release records his acceptance, his withdrawal or his attendance.13
Question, not allegation: he was invited, he was actively considering it, and a week later he was off the booking list, with nothing explaining the change. The absence is sharpened by what the release does contain for others: Martin Nowak’s acceptance is in the file (“very happy to attend”) and so is Krauss’s. Smolin’s answer, either way, is not.
⚠ Later sheets that appear to keep him on the list after 27 October are quotations of the 14 October list, not fresh ones, which is a trap this desk checked rather than assumed.13
How big this record actually is
About sixteen threads, running 2009 to 2013. That is the honest figure and the page will not print a bigger one. ⚠ The unit matters more than the number: a raw search reaches several hundred pages and about 70 of those are message headers, which is why no page count appears anywhere on this page.
A raw search on his surname reaches several hundred pages, and every one of the mechanisms that
inflates it has been identified: a duplicated e-mail quoted across ten separate JPMorgan filings;
a ten-page New York Review of Books review of Smolin’s own book, which is about him and not
about Epstein; forensic address-book dumps; printouts of the Wikipedia article on Epstein; and an
accountancy firm’s web address that happens to be smolin.com, which would have answered the
funding question backwards had anyone counted it.4
A page that printed the raw number would be describing the release’s redundancy, not a relationship.
What this page will not say
Three things were in the brief for this page and are not in it, each because the document says something other than what a summary of it suggested.
It will not quote a sentence about illness. A 5 March 2010 e-mail was read as beginning “Sorry to be late replying, [I] was sick” and would have put a statement about a living private individual’s own health on this page. At the page image the character before “was sick” is a solid producer redaction bar covering a name, not the word “I”, and the next sentence reads “He is better now.” The person who was ill is somebody else, behind a bar. The sentence is not used here in any form.14
It will not build anything on “the situation remains the same.” On the same sheet that phrase resolves to a caregiving obligation at home and workload at his institute. Quoting the phrase without its resolution would invite a reader to supply a darker meaning than the sheet supports, and printing the resolution would publish a private family circumstance. The page says only that Epstein asked on 28 February 2010 whether there was “any luck on visiting?”, that Smolin replied on 5 March that he had been unable to come and would, and no more.14
It will not develop a 2002 courier charge. A FedEx shipping line on an Epstein account records a package sent from Epstein’s New York office to Smolin care of a third party in December 2002. The two copies of the sheet disagree about the day of the month, which is the twin behaviour this desk expects when the same document was scanned twice and read by two different optical character passes. It is a charge to Epstein, not a payment to Smolin, and it routes through a private address. Recorded here and taken no further.15
Related
- Lawrence Krauss, the scientist Smolin sends regards to, and a comparator throughout this page’s funding probes
- Martin Nowak, whose acceptance of the 2011 island invitation is in the release where Smolin’s answer is not
- Marvin Minsky, named beside Smolin on the publicist’s guess-list
- Enhanced Education, the foundation whose USCIS letter both names Smolin and overstates the Harvard giving
- Jes Staley, recipient of the 2009 menu of scientists
- Cecile de Jongh, organiser of the December 2011 conference
- Tyler Shears, the media contractor on the 2014 article thread
- John Brockman, host of the February 2011 dinner
- Lisa Randall, added to the 2009 menu by Staley
Notes
Footnotes
-
FTS5 document counts, whole corpus, each probe run against six comparator scientists so that a zero is distinguishable from a broken query.
X AND "Pay to the order of": Smolin 0, and 0 for Minsky, Krauss, Nowak, Edelman, Thorne and Seth Lloyd alike, so that probe discriminates nothing and is reported only for completeness.X AND "Wire Transfer": Smolin 0, Minsky 1, Krauss 11, Nowak 6, Edelman 1, Thorne 3, Seth Lloyd 1.X AND "Deutsche Bank": Smolin 0, Minsky 7, Krauss 7, Edelman 3, Thorne 2.X AND "general ledger": Smolin 0, Minsky 1. Positive control, and it is a genuine funding instrument:Krauss AND "Wire Transfer"reaches EFTA02705193 p.1 and EFTA02383868 p.1, a Leon Black Family Foundation letter of December 2014 headed “Re: $2,000,000 Irrevocable Pledge to the ASU Origins Project”. Corpus-wide class counts showing the haystack is populated: “Pay to the order of” 2,130 pages, “Wire Transfer” 4,470, “Deutsche Bank” 64,414,JPMorgan OR "JP Morgan"92,030, “general ledger” 141, “Accounts Payable” 819. OCR variants of the surname, so the zero is not an extraction artefact:Smohn0,Smolm0,Smolln1,Srnolin0,Smoiin0,Smolir0,Smalin0; the singleSmollnhit is EFTA00901936 p.1, a scheduling note, not money. Institution:"Perimeter Institute"116 pages;AND "Pay to the order of"0;AND "Wire Transfer"0;AND (grant OR donation OR gift OR pledge OR contribution)1, being EFTA01114598 p.11, a physics preprint’s acknowledgements crediting NSERC, the Province of Ontario and the Foundational Questions Institute. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 -
The claim appears on 14 pages under 10 identifiers: EFTA00587235, EFTA00588871, EFTA01108090 (a WordPress biography draft), EFTA00682094, EFTA00711844, EFTA01030163, EFTA02631305, EFTA01112208 and EFTA01193034; a tenth is a
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_*copy of jeffreyepstein.org site copy, which this desk cannot render and does not rely on. The spelling “Hawkings” is the documents’ own. The inflation precedent is established on this wiki, not asserted here: see Enhanced Education for the 9 June 2015 O-1 letter to USCIS, which isEFTA01193034above, and for Harvard’s own 2020 audit figures of $6.5 million establishing the programme and $9,179,000 across 22 gifts against the letter’s “$35 million gift”. A further four documents carrying the claim (EFTA01296860, EFTA01297066, EFTA01297125, EFTA01298658, all p.3) are printouts of the Wikipedia article on Epstein and are one claim travelling downstream, not four sources. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 -
EFTA01927279 p.1, one sheet, read at the image at 400 dpi. Sent Wednesday 16 April 2014, 7:06:26 PM, subject “article topics”, to Jeffrey Epstein and Tyler Shears. ⚠ The
From:value is a genuine solid producer bar at the image, as are the sign-off name, the signature-block name line and the two contact labels beneath it; the sender is not identifiable from this sheet and no contact value is available to transcribe. Absence of a reply:"Re article topics"returns 0 pages corpus-wide;"recently donated"returns 4, being this sheet and three unrelated; the production stamps either side of it are a scheduling note about a George Church call and a thread about a home projector. The sender’s capacity is established from the surrounding file rather than from the signature: Tyler Shears appears on 741 pages as a media contractor invoiced to Epstein through Richard Kahn and HBRK Associates, and EFTA01937769 p.1 records Kahn telling Epstein that Shears’s December 2013 to January 2014 invoice of $13,411.04 was declined, against prior invoices of $50,632.89 billed and $37,221.85 paid. The same barred sender writes EFTA01935186 and EFTA01936913: “attached is the feature article for ntl. Georgraphic. I highlighted the spots with Jeffrey’s name.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 -
The evidence set collapses from several hundred surname hits to about sixteen threads, and the collapse is itself the finding. Five distinct inflation mechanisms account for it: (1) one Epstein e-mail quoted verbatim across ten separate JPMorgan filings; (2) a ten-page New York Review of Books review of Smolin’s own book, which is about his physics and mentions Epstein not at all; (3) forensic address-book and contact-list dumps, which carry a name without carrying a contact; and (4) an accountancy firm whose web address is
smolin.com, wholly unrelated, which would have answered the funding question backwards had it been counted. ⚠ The document unit must be named before any number is given, which is why no raw figure appears in the body of this page. A count of pages measures the release’s redundancy; a count of threads measures a relationship, and only the second is worth printing. ↩ ↩2 -
FTS5 document counts with live comparators on the identical keys.
Smolin AND ("Little St")0;AND Zorro0;AND (flight OR passenger OR manifest OR Gulfstream)2, both being physics prose using “manifest” as a verb.Smolin AND islandreturns 8, and all eight were read: Wikipedia printouts, WordPress biography copy, and the conference e-mails. Comparators:Nowak AND island321,Krauss AND island223,Krauss AND "Virgin Islands"71,Minsky AND island104. ↩ ↩2 -
Antony Valentini to Jeffrey Epstein, Wednesday 8 January 2014, 21:44:03 +0000, subject “Fwd: Funding for hidden variables in quantum mechanics?”. EFTA00981180 p.1, run length 2 pages. Read from capital to full stop, and the sentence preceding it was read before quoting: “I have been turned down by NSF and am seeking alternatives.” Corroboration: none.
"Jesse Philipps"returns exactly one page in the entire corpus, and it is this one; there is no ledger, grant letter or foundation record for it anywhere in the release. Reported at the credible-allegation tier and not upgraded. ↩ -
Jeffrey Epstein to Story Cowles, Wednesday 30 September 2009. EFTA00740112 p.1 and its copy EFTA00884522 p.1. Spelling and punctuation as printed. No document in the release shows the offer conveyed, accepted or taken up, and this page makes no claim that it was. ↩
-
“List of People Who Need JE’s Address!”, undated, EFTA00306074 p.1, read at the image. The entry reads “Lee Smolin- done”. The address in question is Epstein’s during his Palm Beach County sentence; the address itself is not reproduced here. The sheet is undated but its content places it in the July 2008 to July 2009 period. ↩
-
Smolin to Epstein, 29 April 2009, subject “economics”, EFTA00774428 p.1, inviting him to a Perimeter Institute meeting on the economic crisis, “where you will be missed”. Smolin to Epstein, 13 May 2009, subject “PI meeting”, EFTA00774837 p.1: “wonderful to talk, as always”, attaching a document named
reflections from econ conference.docx. ⚠ Both fall inside Epstein’s sentence, which ran from July 2008 to his release on 22 July 2009; that framing is external to the release and is stated as such. ↩ -
Smolin to Epstein, 26 September 2009. EFTA02437473 p.1. Quoted whole. ↩
-
Smolin to Epstein, Monday 18 March 2013, 12:41:34 AM. EFTA01899229 p.1, one sheet, read at the image at 350 dpi; there is no redaction anywhere on this sheet. ⚠ A defect in this desk’s own working note is recorded here because it nearly reached the page: the passage was flagged as a closing cut mid-name, “Please give La[…]”. It is not the closing. The cut word is “Lawrence”, two further sentences follow, and the actual closing is “How are you doing? / Take care, / Lee”. “Lawrence” is Lawrence Krauss, identified on the same sheet by Epstein’s quoted message of Saturday 16 March 2013, 7:19 AM: “did you fix your schedule yet? lawrence krause will be in ny on the 20”. The
From:prints “Lee Smolin” with no address field and no bar, that is, absent rather than barred. The other correspondence in this section: EFTA02414120 p.1 (7 July 2010, to Groff copied to Epstein, two preprints attached); EFTA02417984 and EFTA02417974 (1 to 2 November 2010); EFTA00901817 and EFTA00901936 (11 to 13 January 2011, including Epstein forwarding the paper onward); EFTA01799443 p.1 (Brockman’s dinner list of 9 February 2011) and EFTA02536406 p.1 (16 February 2011); EFTA01904120 and EFTA01903219 (February 2013, the Time Reborn book launch). ↩ -
The sequence, with every sheet pinned. 14 October 2011, de Jongh to Groff requesting contact details for eight people including Smolin: EFTA02182019 and EFTA00423854 p.2. 18 October 2011, Smolin to de Jongh: EFTA02011369 p.1. 18 to 20 October 2011, participant lists still naming him, and the event described as “Two days (Sat/Sun) of conference on St. John on the future of computing with a lunch meeting on Jeffrey’s is[land]”: EFTA00638206 and EFTA02022150. 27 October 2011, the list of nine rooms to be booked, which does not name him: EFTA01854708 p.1. Comparators establishing that acceptances do survive in the release: EFTA02023229 (Nowak, “very happy to attend”) and EFTA02036071 (Krauss). ⚠ A sheet of 16 November 2011, EFTA00423854, appears to name him after the booking list and does not count: verified at page 2, it is quoting the 14 October list rather than issuing a fresh one. Smolin’s own words about the family trip are quoted only as far as they bear on the invitation; the trip is not described further and nothing about his family is developed here. ↩ ↩2
-
EFTA01780130 p.1, one sheet, read at the image at 350 dpi; production stamp is unique and there is no twin. ⚠⚠ This footnote records a near-miss, because the desk’s own working note contained the error. The note rendered the opening as “Sorry to be late replying, [I] was sick when [y]our message came”, with the bracketed “I” supplied as a conjecture. At the image the character before “was sick” is a solid black producer bar covering a name, and the following sentence reads “He is better now.” The redacted party is therefore a third person, not Smolin. Publishing the conjectural reading would have asserted, of a living private individual, a statement about his own health that the sheet does not make, and would have done it by treating a redaction bar as a letter. The sentence is not quoted on this page in any form. On the same sheet, “The situation remains the same” resolves in the following clause to a caregiving obligation at home and workload at the Perimeter Institute; that resolution is not printed here and the phrase is not used without it. The
From:prints “Lee Smolin” with the address value barred; theTo:prints “Jeffrey Epstein” with no bar and no address; a second bar closes the line “feel free to phone when its convenient for you,▮”. Epstein’s question of 28 February 2010 and Smolin’s reply of 5 March 2010 exist in this sheet and roughly fifteen copies. A separate sheet, EFTA01991152 p.1, is recorded here for a different reason: its database text ends at the subject line, and at the image there is one further line the extraction dropped entirely, “Dear Lesley,”, below which the sheet is blank. Anyone working from the searchable text alone would not know a salutation exists. ItsTo:is barred and itsFrom:prints “Lee Smolin”, so he is writing, not being written to; the subject “Re: Jeffrey Epstein cancellation” is, on the evidence of five other sheets, a stock line used by Epstein’s assistant when cancelling Epstein’s own appointments. ⚠ That last point is an inference from a subject-line convention, not from this sheet, which says nothing about what was cancelled, and it is stated here at the question tier and used nowhere in the body. ↩ ↩2 -
EFTA00218105 p.9 and its optical-character twin EFTA01258966 p.9: a FedEx shipping-charge line on an Epstein account, for a package from Epstein’s New York office addressed to “LEE SMOLIN C/O DAVID SM[O]LIN”, delivered December 2002. ⚠ The two copies disagree on the day of the month, one reading “Dec 28” and the other “Dec 08”; neither day is asserted here, and the disagreement is the expected behaviour of two independent optical-character passes over the same sheet. The consignee address is a private one and is not reproduced. It is a charge to Epstein’s account, not a payment to Smolin, and it is recorded on this page only so that a later reader does not rediscover it and mistake it for one. ↩