Details emerge in contested sexual assault claim by Epstein victim against former Stanford psychology professor

Editor’s Note: The Stanford Daily’s team of reporters and editors is working to review recently released Department of Justice documents for connections between Stanford, Silicon Valley and Jeffrey Epstein. We welcome your confidential tips here or at eic@stanforddaily.com.

Content warning: This article contains descriptions of sexual violence.

Virginia Giuffre, a prominent deceased victim of Jeffrey Epstein and his associates, described experiencing a sexual assault by Stephen Kosslyn Ph.D. ’74 in an unpublished manuscript of her memoir, an account that was later redacted when a federal court deemed it a “scrivener’s error.”

At Stanford, Kosslyn was a psychology professor and director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) from 2011 to 2013. The Daily’s review of recently released files found that Epstein and Kosslyn shared a close relationship that continued after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting sex from a minor. The files indicate that Kosslyn visited Epstein in prison multiple times during his first sentence.

The Daily also previously identified an allegation of sexual assault that Giuffre allegedly made against Kosslyn during an interview with Daily Mail journalist Sharon Churcher in 2011.

However, during a 2016 deposition from a defamation case involving Giuffre’s lawyers and Alan Dershowitz, Giuffre said that she “possibly” met Kosslyn and answered “no” when asked whether she ever had sex with him. Giuffre died by suicide in 2025.

In her unpublished manuscript, Giuffre wrote a detailed account of an encounter with Kosslyn. In the manuscript, titled The Billionaire’s Playboy Club, she describes meeting Kosslyn and being coerced into sex with him on Epstein’s island, Little Saint James. The manuscript was filed as evidence in Giuffre v. Maxwell, Giuffre’s 2017 defamation lawsuit against Maxwell. It was made public in 2019 after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered that related court documents be unsealed. 

The manuscript recounts that Epstein took Giuffre “to his island to meet a new client…a Harvard Professor, named Stephen Kosslyn.” She “would be spending two days with him, showing him around the island, dining with him, and treating him to a massage whenever he wanted,” the text states. 

Instructed to keep Kosslyn company, she wrote, “Without Jeffrey even verbalizing the need to have sex with him, he told me to keep him happy like I had my first client.” 

Upon picking Kosslyn up from the airport, the manuscript described him as a “quirky little man with white hair and a mad scientist look about him.” She then “showed him around as Jeffrey had asked and took him on an adventurous quad bike ride,” according to the text.  

Following a steak dinner on the outside veranda, she recounted Kosslyn asking “if he could receive one of the delightful massages he has been hearing about from Jeffrey.” After massaging Kosslyn in one of Epstein’s cabanas, Giuffre wrote that she “quickly got through having intercourse with him.” 

In an email to The Daily, Kosslyn’s lawyer, Christopher Serbagi, referenced a 2019 court document from Giuffre v. Maxwell making it a “stated term” that the mention of Kosslyn’s name in Giuffre’s draft was due to a “scrivener’s error,” a legal term referring to an unintentional mistake.

Giuffre and her lawyers agreed to redact Kosslyn’s name in the manuscript but did not support redacting Kosslyn’s name from Epstein’s 2004-2005 contact book, citing Giuffre’s view that “a redaction would…only serve to highlight the name.” The Daily confirmed that Kosslyn’s name appeared in the contact book.

Serbagi has not responded to The Daily’s request to provide the court filings or briefs that resulted in the court’s conclusion. He did, however, write to The Daily that Giuffre’s account of meeting Kosslyn was “mistaken.”

Serbagi also shared an email from 2020 in which Giuffre’s lawyer Sigrid McCawley stated, “[her] client Virginia Giuffre did not have sex with Stephen Kosslyn.” The recipient of the email was Barry Levine, author of The Spider, a book detailing Epstein and Maxwell’s criminal activities. 

McCawley has not responded to several requests to comment on this email and the court’s decision to rule Giuffre’s allegation a “scrivener’s error.”

In Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, published after her 2025 death, she tells a story similar to the one in her unpublished manuscript for The Billionaire’s Playboy Club, but does not name Kosslyn.

On page 135 of her book, Giuffre wrote, “The second person I was lent out to was a psychology professor whose research Epstein was helping to fund.” 

Epstein donated roughly $200,000 between 1998 and 2002 to Kosslyn’s research at Harvard University, where he was a psychology professor. 

Giuffre said that her trips to Little Saint James began in early 2001, when Maxwell and Epstein asked her to fly internationally.

In her published memoir, she described the unnamed professor as a “quirky little man with a balding pate of white hair” and recalled “taking him to a cabana and giving him a rubdown that ended with intercourse.”

University spokesperson Luisa Rapport wrote to The Daily that Kosslyn has not held a position at Stanford since the end of his appointment in 2013. Rapport also stated that the University “[does] not have additional information about any connections between Stephen Kosslyn and Jeffrey Epstein.”

The Daily has reached out for additional comment on whether the University had any knowledge of allegations against Kosslyn before, during or after his appointment at Stanford.

The Daily initially found a reference to the allegation against Kosslyn in a 2011 email from Daily Mail journalist Annette Witheridge, requesting answers from Epstein’s longtime associate Ghilane Maxwell. “These allegations were made during an interview between Giuffre and Churcher,” Witheridge told The Daily.

The email specifically referenced a claim that Giuffre “was required to have sex with friends of Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein, including…Stephen Kosslyn.”

Before she died in 2025, Giuffre said that she left many individuals connected to Jeffrey Epstein unnamed because she feared retaliatory litigation that might result in financial or physical harm.

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