Auckland professor associated with Jeffrey Epstein

2026-02-01 - 02:18

A University of Auckland professor met disgraced sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for breakfast, and later discussed the fee that Epstein offered to pay him to write about Nabokov’s novel Lolita. Professor Brian Boyd features in the US Justice Department’s latest tranche of emails in its investigation into Epstein. The two men met twice in 2012, in the US, when one of the companies Epstein owned had paid for Boyd’s accommodation in Boston. Epstein came to see a talk Boyd gave on Nabokov. Boyd, 73, an expert on Nabokov and the author of an acclaimed biography of the author, gave his first interview about his association with Epstein when ReadingRoom called him on Sunday. He did not realise his correspondence had come to light in the new tranche—but admitted he was waiting for his association to come to light. I asked, “Has there been a sense you’ve been waiting for this kind of inquiry?” “I did wonder whether it might come up,” he said. I asked, “What did you think about that? Have you been worried?” He replied, “I’m not because I know I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just glad not to have been caught in a sticky web, you know, by being financially associated with him.” But correspondence reveals there was serious discussion about a financial association. In an email Boyd sent to Epstein in September 2012, he wrote, “You suggested a while back we should work out the details of the money transfer. Can we go back over things, first? When you asked me how long I would need to write the book on Lolita that’s the top of my wish list, I said a year. You asked me how much money would that take. Being naturally antigrabbity, I said $50K... You promptly said that’s not enough and counterproposed $75K.” Boyd then suggests the fee should be higher than that. “To do the book in a year I’d really need to take a full year of unpaid leave and be free of all university obligations here. So that’s just for you to reflect on; I’m very appreciative of what you’ve already offered, and that should indeed allow me to buy out of all my undergraduate teaching.” He then gave Epstein his bank account details (helpfully including the Swift code) in New Zealand. But the fee was never paid, and Boyd said there was no further correspondence or discussion with Epstein. “It came to nothing,” he said in our interview. “I never chased it up. I found out that he had been charged in Florida and I certainly wasn’t interested in pursuing it once I found that there was that icky background.” I asked about his breakfast with Epstein. “He was an interesting, lively guy, you know, obviously quite a schmoozer, interested in having as many famous or high achieving people into his web. He said to me, ‘What book would you like most to write?’ “And I said I wanted to write a book on Lolita and I still do. And his ears pricked up and he said why? And I said, well, because I think it’s got a lot of hidden depth that nobody has plumbed yet, similar to the depths I thought I’d plumbed in relationship to [other Nabokov novels] Pale Fire and Ada. ‘ And so he said, ‘I’d like to fund you.'” In another email in the US Justice Department tranche, Boyd writes to Epstein about another meeting: “Great to meet you [and] your bevy of beauties.” I told Boyd about this email, and pointed out, “You wrote the unfortunate choice of words ‘bevy of beauties’. What did you mean by that?” He said, “It was very peculiar. There was this group of very, very bright, very pretty group of girls, almost as if they were stamped by a doll making machine. I suppose they were in their early 20s, although they looked younger than. I think they were all young graduates who just happened to look young. Maybe four or five, six of them, at this restaurant.” I said, “What do you think of that particular meeting, now what we know about this appalling person? Do you think there was anything dubious or depraved about this ‘bevy’, as you unfortunately put it?” Boyd said, “No, not at all. I mean, it seemed a bit like Hugh Hefner, but they were just his staff, arranging everything.” I asked, “When you look back on your meetings with him, was there a patina evil about him?” He said, “It wasn’t evident to me. I was impressed by Steven Pinker, whom I know, who saw through Epstein’s intellectual charlatanism, almost immediately when he first spoke to him. Epstein was trying to get Pinker to join his web of famous associates. But Pinker’s got a very, very sharp, critical mind, and just realised that he was actually pretending to be rather more intelligent than he actually was.” I asked, “Did you see through him?” “No, I’m afraid I didn’t,” he said. “I wish I had, but I wasn’t perceptive enough.” A previous tranche of Justice Department emails included images of Epstein inking passages from Lolita on the bodies of young women. Epstein called his private plane The Lolita Express. I asked Boyd, “Was Epstein’s interest in the book literary or was it just sordid?” “I think it was both,” he said. “I mean, he generally did know his Nabokov pretty well but certainly was a sordid interest as well.” Lolita was published in 1957. It’s a masterpiece which has occupied a zone of moral complication ever since, with its brilliant prose, its dazzling comedy, its story of a professor who seduces a 12-year-old girl. I said to Boyd, “This work of art was about a paedophile–it’s always going to be an explosive book.” He replied, “I start off my chapter on Lolita in the biography by saying. ‘Lolita will never cease to shock.’ I think I say in the first sentence. But it’s a very moral book.” We talked about the novel for a while, but I brought the interview back to the new literature of the email tranche, and asked, “How do you feel now that you had this relationship with Epstein? Do you feel sort of..unclean or whatever? Do you regret it ?” “I’m very relieved that I never took up the money,” he said. “It would have tainted whatever I wrote on Lolita.” “What do you think of Epstein?” “He has an extraordinary ability, clearly, to pull the wool over many people’s eyes.” He thought back to a flatmate who was working on a PhD thesis, “The retreat from moral values in contemporary poetry”, who hid the fact he had committed a number of crimes: “He was a smooth psychopath. And, you know, these people are so smooth and such excellent manipulators that it’s easy to fall for them for a brief time.” I said, “That’s a very pleasing phrase, ‘smooth psychopath’. Do you think it applies to Epstein?” “Yeah, I think so,” he said. Boyd’s answers, and his general demeanour during the interview, could not be described as defensive and neither were they especially concerned. His attitude is that he is perfectly blameless. I said, “This email which you sent to him discussing the terms of the fee–does that in itself, do you think, serve to taint you?” “No, not at all,” he said. “I mean, somebody was offering me a sum of money to write my next book. And to give me a time off teaching to write it. And this was just a private individual who seemed to be happy to spread his largesse around. And the fact that it was going to be a book on Lolita had nothing to do with who he was. It’s still the book that I want to do next. I get ideas that wake me up in the middle of the night about it and I have to note them down because things are, you know, forming together in my mind in ways that are very like the breakthroughs I had on Ada and Pale Fire. And it’s tremendously exciting....And so this was somebody offering to allow me to do hat book. I would naturally jump at that. “I’ve got six other books that I’m working on, too, that I desperately want to get to, and, I’d be happy to have private patrons for books if they were morally squeaky clean and financially wealthy enough.” I said, “You seem largely sort of unworried about this tranche and its contents.” He said, “There’s nothing for me to worry about. I had a breakfast with somebody who turned out to be a criminal. I didn’t know that he was a major criminal at that stage.” I said, “Well, people will now make an association between you and Jeffrey Epstein.” “People are idiots,” he said. “You know, on the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, somebody spray-painted graffiti saying ‘paedophile’ or something like that. But the book [Lolita] had an absolute horror of corrupting the innocence of children, which is why he wrote that book.” He quoted from The Board of the International Vladimir Nabokov Society, which responded to the revelations that Epstein had penned lines from Lolita on the skin of young women: “This is exactly the sort of exploitation and complicity that Nabokov’s novel exposes, and Epstein is precisely the sort of villain Nabokov gave the world eyes to see.” Boyd continued, “It’s just the height of ignorance to assume that there’s anything paedophiliac about Nabokov or about anybody who’s interested in him as a writer or interested in Lolita as a book. I mean, only idiots who have never read the book, could think that there’s anything paedophilic about him.” I said, “Epstein read the book. Epstein was a paedophile. And he obviously had this intense, intimate interest in the book, which is disturbing, isn’t it? His association with it could mean that Epstein will overshadow Nabokov.” “Nonsense,” he replied. “Epstein will be remembered as a particularly nasty creep. But Nabokov will be remembered as a major writer on a completely different level.” By coincidence, Boyd was interviewed at length by Justin Agluba in ReadingRoom last week, in portraits published on Monday and on Tuesday. They were an admiring look at the rise of a schoolboy from Palmerston North who became one of the world’s leading Nabokov scholars, and had once elicited praise from the great author, who wrote to him “Brilliant!” Boyd is the author of numerous studies, and has worked on a biography of Karl Popper for the last 30 years. He has enjoyed a great and distinguished academic career. I asked Boyd, “Do you think his relationship with Epstein is going to be a black mark against you?” “No, I shouldn’t think so. I don’t see why.” “I’m the first person from the media to call you, but I would be surprised if others don’t. [Boyd later emailed to say the Herald had contacted him.] How are you feeling about that prospect?” “Oh well. It’s not my fault. It’s Epstein’s fault.” His email to Epstein on May 14 concludes, “Thanks for the opportunity! Best, Brian.”