Dean Kamen isn’t just the fabled Segway inventor who flew to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous Caribbean island and has an intriguing relationship with a pilot in Epstein’s orbit.
He’s also the boss of First Congressional District candidate Stefany Shaheen.
And that relationship looks very different after Friday’s document dump, which featured Epstein emails about Kamen’s travels and coordinating travel with “the girls.” So different, in fact, that Kamen’s FIRST robotics nonprofit has, temporarily at least, pushed him out.
“The FIRST Board of Directors has engaged an outside law firm to conduct an independent review, and Dean has indicated he will cooperate fully with the review. During the review, Dean will take a leave of absence from the FIRST Board of Directors and all other FIRST activities, effective immediately,” according to a statement from board chair Laurie Leshin.
But it’s Kamen’s close relationship with the Shaheen family, and Stefany Shaheen in particular, that has political observers paying attention.
Kamen is the founder of the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI). Based in Manchester, N.H., ARMI (and its initiative BioFabUSA) is a nonprofit focused on the large-scale manufacturing of engineered tissues and organs.
Stefany Shaheen holds the title of chief strategy officer, a vague job whose duties are not clearly defined, in an industry where Shaheen has no evident expertise.
“What does Stefany actually do for Dean Kamen?” one Democratic activist told NHJournal on background. “It’s the biggest unkept secret in New Hampshire: nothing.”
Whatever Stefany Shaheen’s duties are at ARMI, what’s indisputable is that her mother, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, played a vital role in getting federal funding into Kamen’s hands.
She has heavily lobbied for and celebrated the delivery of massive federal grants to ARMI. This includes an initial $80 million from the Department of Defense in 2017 and a $44 million grant from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) in 2022.
Observers note that, as chair of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Commerce Department (which includes the EDA), Shaheen has direct influence over the budgets of the agencies that fund ARMI.
She also took a victory lap when the Biden administration’s trillion-dollar CHIPS and Science Act included language that led to ARMI’s “ReGen Valley” being designated as a national Tech Hub.
So when public data on ARMI shows Shaheen’s daughter had collected at least $900,000 from Kamen since 2018, it gets noticed.
Now Kamen’s getting notice of his own, and not in a good way for Shaheen’s congressional campaign.
Newly released documents from the Justice Department show that the relationship between Kamen and Epstein maintained robust email communication from 2011 to 2014, years after Epstein pleaded guilty to underage sex crimes in Florida.
Kamen’s association with Epstein was made public last year when Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee released an undated photo of Kamen alongside Epstein and U.K. billionaire Richard Branson.
The relationship extended beyond regular pen pals and included travel together to Epstein’s properties in New York, West Palm Beach, Fla., and Little St. James, the Caribbean island center stage in Epstein’s underage sex trafficking activities.
Kamen spent the night of April 13, 2023, on the island, per emails from his assistant. Days earlier, Kamen offered to foot the bill for flying “the girls” from New York to Palm Beach before arriving on the island.
“Thank you for hosting an incredible visit to a magical place,” wrote Kamen, days later on April 20, 2013. “It really is almost unbelievable.”
Their correspondence also includes Kamen‘s inability to visit Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, scheduling multiple phone calls, and even helping an unidentified woman secure an internship.
The Epstein-Kamen connection also reopens ongoing questions about how Epstein’s enabler, Ghislaine Maxwell, ended up hiding in a $2.5 million Bradford, N.H., chalet.
The one big name in the Granite State with connections to Epstein: Dean Kamen. No doubt the new revelations will renew those questions, particularly given Kamen’s relationship with a pilot from Epstein’s orbit
Kamen maintained a documented relationship with Nadia Marcinko, a pilot and longtime associate of Epstein. According to aviation journalist Christine Negroni, Marcinko “had a curiously close and previously undisclosed years-long relationship” with Kamen as well.
Marcinko, also identified as Nadia Marcinkova, is a Slovak-born pilot who has been linked in victim testimony to Epstein’s targeting of underage victims. There are also allegations that Epstein referred to her using terms such as “sex slave,” though Marcinkova has never been criminally charged.
“Marcinko, who lived with Epstein and was accused by victims of participating in some of the sexual assaults, spent the period of Epstein’s incarceration visiting him in jail and learning to fly,” Negroni reported in 2020. “She obtained her pilot’s license and became a certified flight instructor. Two years later, she was right-seating in Epstein’s private business jets. Marcinko also had a documented relationship with Kamen’s company, DEKA.
Ironically, Marcinko talked about that in an interview posted on the FIRST website.