Controversial director Brett Ratner, whose documentary “Melania,” about the first lady, premiered last week, found himself in the headlines once again over his alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

A photograph, part of the trove of files released Friday in the Department of Justice’s investigation into Epstein, shows Ratner sitting on a couch with his arms wrapped around a woman, whose identity is concealed. She is sitting next to Epstein and a second woman, who is also redacted in the photo and is sitting at the far end of the couch next to the disgraced financier. It is unclear where the photo was taken or when.

The filmmaker is among several prominent individuals from the worlds of entertainment, technology, politics and business — including L.A. Olympics boss Casey Wasserman — who have turned up among the millions of files that the Justice Department has released.

Epstein died by suicide in 2019 in Manhattan Correctional Center while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

Ratner’s name also surfaces in a number of emails contained in the released files in which Epstein discusses his attempts to connect with the director and descriptions in which their social circles overlap.

It is not the first time Ratner turned up in Epstein’s orbit. In December, his photo appeared in an earlier batch of files the department released.

In the undated photograph, Ratner is seen seated, hugging a shirtless Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent and an Epstein associate.

Brunel died of an apparent suicide in 2022 in a French prison while awaiting trial on charges that he had raped a minor.

Ratner has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.

A spokesperson for the director did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During a Monday appearance on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” Ratner said that the recently released photograph was taken about 20 years ago. He said that the woman he is hugging was his then-fiancée, whom he declined to name, and that she had invited him to an event where the picture was taken.

“I’ve never been in contact with Jeffrey Epstein before that photo and never in contact with him after,” he said on the show.

Among the emails in which Ratner is mentioned, in December 2010, Epstein discusses a dinner he is having at “7:30” in which he says that he has invited Ratner but has not yet heard back.

In December 2010, it was widely reported that Epstein hosted a dinner at his Manhattan townhouse just months after he finished serving a prison sentence and house arrest for soliciting a minor for prostitution. The dinner was attended by a number of boldfaced names including Woody Allen and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew.

A year later, Epstein’s assistant appears to email Ratner saying, “Jeffrey would like to speak with you regarding [redacted] could you please give us a call.” It is unclear whether Ratner followed up.

In another heavily redacted email from 2018, Epstein writes to someone saying: “Hi I’m Jeffrey. brett Ratner thought we should meet.” He follows up with a second email asking whether Ratner had spoken to this person yet.

During the Cannes film festival in 2012, celebrity superpublicist and ubiquitous presence on the awards circuit Peggy Siegal emailed Epstein that she was sitting with Ratner about to watch a Roman Polanski documentary, adding that “Brett says ‘hi’ and he loves you!”

In other gossipy emails Siegal sent to Epstein, she cites Ratner in her listing of which power brokers and celebrities are in attendance at various parties and who is staying on whose yacht in St. Barts (Ratner, she wrote, was staying with his business partner, the Australian billionaire James Packer).

Siegal’s relationship with the convicted pedophile came under renewed scrutiny in 2019 after Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges, particularly as she helped facilitate his return to society following his prison sentence.

“Had I known that he had been accused of abusing underage girls, I would not have maintained a friendship with him,” she told the Hollywood Reporter.

Siegal could not be immediately reached for comment.

On Nov. 1, 2017 — the day The Times published its investigation in which six women accused Ratner of sexual misconduct — Epstein emailed lawyer Reid Weingarten: “brett ratner now oy.”

Ratner’s career was derailed nine years ago after The Times published detailed allegations against the director made by multiple women who accused him of harassment, groping and forced oral sex. Actor Olivia Munn claimed that Ratner masturbated in front of her when she delivered a meal to his trailer on the set of the 2004 film “After the Sunset.”

At the time, the director’s attorney Martin Singer rejected the women’s claims, saying that his client “vehemently denies the outrageous derogatory allegations that have been reported about him.”

Ratner’s agents at WME dropped him, as did his publicist, and projects were put on hold. Ratner parted ways with Warner Bros.

“I don’t want to have any possible negative impact to the studio until these personal issues are resolved,” he said in a statement.

In 2020, Ratner became embroiled in another Hollywood sex scandal, involving British actor Charlotte Kirk.

In a sworn court declaration, Kirk said she was victimized by then-Warner Bros. Chief Executive Kevin Tsujihara, Ratner, Packer and Millennium Films CEO Avi Lerner, stating that the men “coerced me into engaging in ‘commercial sex’ for them and their business associates.”

Singer, who represented the men, “categorically and vehemently” denied any wrongdoing on the part of his clients.

“Melania” is the first film Ratner has directed since he was largely exiled from Hollywood. The documentary has received harsh reviews from critics, who have also questioned the $75 million Amazon paid to distribute and market the movie. However, during its opening weekend, it grossed a better-than-expected $7.1 million at the box office.

The Teamsters of California is calling for the suspension of Waymo’s operations in the state amid growing safety and job security concerns.

The union, which has 250,000 members across dozens of industries, called on the California Public Utilities Commission on Monday to indefinitely suspend the driverless car company’s license to operate. The demand comes less than two weeks after a Waymo self-driving taxi struck a child near a Santa Monica elementary school, triggering a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation.

In a statement, Teamsters California co-chairs Peter Finn and Victor Mineros called the incident a “horrifying wake-up call for California policymakers who have repeatedly ignored the growing list of red flags concerning robotaxis.”

The child, who ran out from behind a large SUV to cross the street, wasn’t injured in the collision. The Waymo had been traveling at 17 miles per hour before the child appeared and reduced its speed to 6 miles per hour before contact was made.

“We are committed to improving road safety, both for our riders and all those with whom we share the road,” Waymo said in a statement last week about the accident. “Our peer-reviewed model shows that a fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.”

Waymo has been the subject of previous NHTSA investigations and recalls following collisions. In December, motionless Waymo vehicles clogged San Francisco streets after a power outage.

“Imagine a scenario where more and more of these vehicles are on the street and there’s an earthquake,” said Finn of Teamsters California in an interview. “There’s people trying to evacuate, there’s emergency response, and these things can’t move at all.”

Waymo also poses a threat to Californians who depend on driving jobs for their livelihood, Finn said. As the race to master autonomous vehicle technology heats up, the union is concerned that companies will eliminate human jobs to lower labor costs.

A statewide poll conducted last year by Teamsters California found that more than 80% of respondents were concerned about the impact of AI and automation on job availability.

“This incident is emblematic of the broader goal Big Tech companies have to replace skilled human labor with AI … and force our communities to reckon with the fallout of automation’s shortcomings,” the Teamsters’ statement said.

Kodiak AI, a Mountain View-based tech company, is developing autonomous semi trucks it says will improve safety and efficiency on the roads. Tesla is also working on its robotaxi technology, and Elon Musk has shared ambitions for self-driving cargo trucks.

Teamsters California is leading a legislative effort to require a human operator to be present in autonomous commercial delivery vehicles at all times.

Autonomous trucks could be a safety hazard and could eliminate thousands of jobs, the union said. Driving jobs are among the most common jobs.

“The stakes get even higher when we’re talking about trucks and delivery vehicles,” Finn said. “It feels like the regulators, in this case CPUC and the Department of Motor Vehicles, should have to do more to get a handle on this.”

It can hardly be disputed that science and medicine today are awash in disinformation.

It’s why respected scientists get physically assaulted and hauled before partisan committees in Congress to be smeared. It’s why childhood vaccine rates in some places are plummeting and measles is on the rampage across the country.

Therefore, it behooves us to look at the origins of this outbreak of politically manipulated pseudoscience. Nature has given us a peg, with the death Jan. 13 of former UC Berkeley scientist Peter Duesberg, at 89.

At the dawn of research into what is now known as HIV/AIDS, Duesberg took the heterodox view that HIV was a harmless virus that had nothing to do with AIDS.

“That virus is a pussycat,” he said. He maintained that the cause of AIDS had to be found elsewhere, notably the lifestyles and drug habits of gay men. His claim motivated a phalanx of AIDS deniers, the forebears of the anti-vaccine militants today.

“Duesberg was a pioneer of disinformation on infectious disease,” says John P. Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College and the author of a devastating 1996 takedown in Nature of Duesberg’s claims.

Duesberg’s embrace of a dangerously wrong hypothesis to the point that it destroyed his career is almost a Shakespearean narrative.

The German native built a career in the U.S. as a brilliant virologist with significant discoveries to his credit and long had been revered among his colleagues. But that ended when he entered the HIV wars. By 1996, Richard Horton, then the editor of the Lancet, the British medical journal, could marvel: “He is now perhaps the most vilified scientist alive.”

Some of the adversaries against whom he leveled ad hominem attacks — he accused Anthony S. Fauci, the respected immunologist and long-term director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, of committing mass murder by promoting the use of the highly toxic drug AZT against HIV — could barely hear his name without suffering apoplectic fits. AZT remains part of standard HIV therapies and is estimated to have saved or prolonged millions of lives.

Asked by science journalist William Booth to respond to a Duesberg statement, Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV, replied, “I cannot respond without shrieking.” Fauci derided Duesberg’s scientific claims as “absolute and total nonsense.”

But it would be a mistake to think that Duesberg’s baleful influence on medical science will end with his death.

Duesberg’s heirs are all around us. Actually, they’re more than that — they’re now in charge.

As secretary of Health and Human Services, Duesberg’s most highly placed follower, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is presiding over what has become an overtly anti-vaccination and anti-science agency with a stranglehold on government health policy and funding.

“Peter Duesberg was an AIDS denialist,” says Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist who was active in the AIDS research community starting in the 1990s. “He is the precursor to contemporary denialists like RFK Jr., who brought AIDS denialism into the 21st century.”

Indeed, Kennedy has embraced the denialist position that HIV is not the cause of AIDS: In a 2023 interview with New York magazine, Kennedy attributed the conclusion that HIV and AIDS were inextricably linked to “phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people,” referring to AZT.

In his 2021 book “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy highlighted Duesberg’s depiction of Fauci as an all-powerful scientific panjandrum intent on blocking his grant applications because his findings might be costly for Fauci’s patrons, Big Pharma.

Kennedy also picked up Duesberg’s broader brief against government science agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Duesberg’s claim was that the CDC existed only to drum up medical emergencies so the NIH could solve them, ensuring the continued flow of taxpayer dollars into both agencies.

Starting in the mid-1970s, Duesberg asserted and Kennedy quoted, “‘the CDC increasingly needed a major epidemic’ to justify its existence.”

Kennedy added his own gloss: “Drumming up public fear of periodic pandemics was a natural way for NIAID and CDC bureaucrats to keep their agencies relevant.”

One can draw a straight line from that statement to the unapologetic malevolence with which Kennedy treats the CDC and NIH, insinuating that they’re rife with corruption and conflicts of interest. I sought a comment from Kennedy about Duesberg’s influence on his thinking, but received no reply.

Because AIDS isn’t caused by a virus, Duesberg maintained, the antiviral drugs used as therapies were worse than the disease. He specifically targeted AZT, then as now a common component of AIDS therapies.

The publicity his claims received encouraged untold patients to refuse AZT, causing a toll that may number in the millions. Duesberg met with South African President Thabo Mbeki and chaired a South Africa conference on alternative AIDS theories in 2000, and influenced Mbeki to deny AZT treatments for South African patients. That policy contributed to more than 300,000 deaths from AIDS in that country alone.

“That’s his biggest legacy in terms of the death toll,” Moore says.

Duesberg’s intellectual journey points to an eternal question in science: At what point does a theory become so discredited and the empirical evidence against it so strong, that its advocates should be ignored?

For Duesberg, that point may have come in 1989, when he published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences outlining his position in detail. The article was filled with with so many assertions about virus science that experienced virologists knew to be false that it “closed the book on him,” Moore told me.

But as Jon Cohen of Science magazine would observe, “the press was less skeptical.” Journalists saw Duesberg as an iconoclastic truth-teller because he carried “visible credentials,” as Gallo put it — after all, he was a professor at a leading research university and a member of the elite National Academy of Sciences.

The press feasted on Duesberg’s self-portrayal as the victim of ostracism arising from professional jealousies — a target of cancel culture before that was a thing. But it rang as false then as do those of RFK Jr.’s anti-science appointees who claim today to have been silenced for their unorthodox views while proclaiming their victimhood at university-sponsored symposiums and appearances on Fox News.

Duesberg’s position also appealed to “the unwary, desperate or gullible” with “twisted facts and illogical lines of argument,” Moore wrote in 1996.

He attracted followers eager to make their name by challenging the scientific consensus on HIV and AIDS.

One was Robert Willner, who had lost his medical license in Florida for claiming to have cured an AIDS patient by administering ozone. Willner went on the road with presentations that included his injecting himself with blood from an AIDS sufferer, as if to show that there was nothing to be feared from HIV. (Willner died in 1995 of a heart attack.)

In his 1989 article, Duesberg had insisted that the true cause of AIDS was drug use by abusers and nitrite poppers favored by homosexuals. AIDS had only been discovered and named, he wrote, because “the particular permissiveness toward these risk groups in metropolitan centers encouraged the clustering of cases that was necessary to detect AIDS.”

His advice was that AIDS prevention efforts should be “concentrated on AIDS risks rather than on transmission of HIV,” which — if followed — would have set AIDS research inexorably down the wrong path.

Duesberg kept making his argument well after evidence that the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, causes AIDS became incontestable. It’s on that evidence that AIDS treatment is based today, with spectacular success — with proper treatment, an AIDS patient can live about as long as an uninfected individual. In the old days, an infection was a death sentence.

The memorial page posted by UC Berkeley after Duesberg’s death walked a tightrope in acknowledging his descent into infamy. In its first sentence, it labeled him as a “public controversialist,” a term new to me. It recounted, “In his later years, Peter enjoyed being a maverick and the center of controversy.”

But it candidly addresses the controversies he triggered by noting that his unorthodox stance “was amplified by political leaders to the detriment of public health.”

And it delivers a final verdict that “the scientific consensus is that HIV is indeed the primary cause of AIDS, and that the current suite of anti-retroviral agents is very effective in slowing or halting the progression of the disease and its spread in the population.”