Jeffrey Epstein’s sperm may have survived him

Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019, but his genetic material may live on.

Emails and records in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department indicate that Epstein had been banking his sperm for at least several years before his death and that he did not want the cryobank to discard it if he died.

Epstein deposited his sperm with California Cryobank some time before October 2012, and he signed a new contract in 2016. The files contain an email from 2012 notifying him of an upcoming renewal payment for his storage with California Cryobank, as well as the 2016 contract with his signature.

The contract specified that, if he died, his sperm would fall under the control of his estate or of another legal representative. The arrangement was not publicly known until the Justice Department files were released this year.

The documents do not indicate when Epstein first banked his sperm. He pleaded guilty in 2008 in Florida to soliciting prostitution from a minor, and he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges when he died by suicide in a New York City jail in 2019.

Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey who studies reproductive technology and bioethics, said that whether it was ethical for a sperm bank to accept sperm from a sex offender was a matter of debate in the fertility industry.

Some people in the field argue, Mutcherson said, that if anybody can procreate by having sex, then anybody should be able to procreate using technology – and that gatekeeping services like sperm-banking based on character, criminal history or other judgments about who is fit to parent would open the door to policies that have, in practice, often been used to discriminate based on race, class and disability.

But at the same time, she added, it’s reasonable to ask “whether this is a set of circumstances where people would find the use of this person’s sperm to be particularly odious”.

Epstein left much of his money and possessions to his girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, through a trust administered by his lawyer, Darren Indyke, and his accountant, Richard Kahn.

Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the University of Virginia who specialises in trusts and estates, said that any dispute over how its terms should apply to the banked sperm would most likely be resolved under the laws of the US Virgin Islands. Epstein’s private island was there, his estate is being administered there, and the trust document specifies that its provisions should be interpreted under those laws.

Cahn said the administrators’ legal obligation was to dispense Epstein’s proper