Jeffrey Epstein Was a Sex Offender. The Powerful Welcomed Him Anyway.

Ms. Siegal recalled, “He said he’d served his time and assured me that he changed his ways.”

For someone purported to have vast resources at his disposal, Mr. Epstein’s early endeavors to improve his image were oddly unpolished. In 2010 he created the first of at least a half-dozen websites, with names like JeffreyEpsteinScience.com and JeffreyEpsteinEducation.com, dedicated to extolling his philanthropy and fashioning himself a patron of technology and medicine.

The websites looked amateurish, the photos of him meeting with top scientists dated to years before his time in prison, and the name of the Harvard professor who led a research center Mr. Epstein had funded, Martin A. Nowak, was often misspelled.

At the same time, Mr. Epstein launched a public-relations campaign composed of a blizzard of news releases, along with canned write-ups designed to resemble news stories. For the most part, the announcements, which circulated from 2012 to 2014, were recycled accounts of donations he had made in the early 2000s and did not reflect new charitable giving. The earliest releases listed Mr. Epstein’s personal contact information, though later ones had the name of a media consultant. Some of the ersatz news stories found their way onto sites like Forbes and The Huffington Post.

Of all the names Mr. Epstein dropped, perhaps the most frequent was Harvard’s.

Though Mr. Epstein never attended Harvard or even got a college degree, the university has been a recurring theme in his self-styled image as a Renaissance man of finance and science. He found Harvard’s doors open to him once he opened his wallet, with donations starting in the early 1990s that eventually totaled at least $7.5 million.

He took to wearing Harvard sweatshirts, gravitated to mingling with celebrity scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Steven Pinker, and developed friendships with the former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers and the law professor Alan Dershowitz, who later helped defend him. (In civil suits, Mr. Dershowitz has been accused of having sex with two of Mr. Epstein’s accusers; he has denied the allegations and accused their lawyers of malfeasance.) Mr. Epstein, a former math teacher, even popped up for lunchtime discussions among scientists at a Harvard cafeteria, Dr. Pinker said in an interview, adding, “He weighted his own opinions as much as scholarly literature.”

By 2014, a page appeared on the website for Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, the initiative Mr. Epstein had financed 11 years earlier with a $6.5 million donation (and a pledge of $23.5 million more that never came), featuring a studio portrait, his résumé and links to his websites. “He is one of the largest supporters of individual scientists, including theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Seth Lloyd and Nobel Laureates Gerard ’t Hooft, David Gross and Frank Wilczek,” the Harvard bio said, in what appears to be an exaggerated claim.

A Harvard spokesman said he did not know who was responsible for the page, which has since been removed.