← The Epstein Chronicles
The Epstein Chronicles
Harvard and Bard Face New Questions Over Jeffrey Epstein (6/19/26)
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Harvard University and Bard College are facing renewed congressional scrutiny over whether their relationships with Jeffrey Epstein helped him rebuild his reputation and maintain access to elite academic circles after his criminal conduct was known....
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What's up, everyone? And welcome to another episode of the Epstein Chronicles. There is no story that includes Jeffrey Epstein that can avoid the fact that he was embedded in academia. And after all these years, the bill is finally coming due. And people like Larry Summers and Leon Botstein are finally being called upon to answer for their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. And as you can imagine, their answers have not been great. And of course, it's led to Larry Summers being shitcanned at Harvard. And now Botstein is stepping down from his president's position. Now, of course, he's not leaving Bart entirely, but he is stepping down from that position. And now we have Jamie Raskin who is looking for a comprehensive accounting and he wants to have an interview with Mr. Botstein. And look, just to be clear, I'm not saying that Mr. Botstein was taking part in any kind of abuse. I don't know that. But I do know that he enabled Jeffrey Epstein. I know that he helped refurbish Jeffrey Epstein's image. And I know that led to other people being abused. And if this was a RICO case, well, might be a different conversation. But considering that's just a hope and a dream, we have to deal with the reality before us. And when it comes to people like Botstein, people like Summers, the most we can hope for probably is embarrassment. And honestly, that's a drop in the pill compared to the suffering of Jeffrey Epstein's victims and survivors. So look, I get it, right? Nobody wants to demean somebody. I'm not going to sit here and call somebody a diddler if we have no proof of it. But at the same time, you have to answer for your relationships. You're a grown ass man. You can't have relationships with people like Jeffrey Epstein when he's a known child abuser and then think that it's going to be okay, that nobody's going to have anything to say about it. Because I assure you, people, people have some shit to say. And so do I Today's article is from the Guardian, and the headline, harvard and Bard Face Fresh Questions from Lawmakers over Ties to Epstein. This article was authored by Stephanie Kirch Gastner. Harvard University and Bard College are facing new questions about the institution's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein amid allegations that the convicted CH child sex trafficker leveraged his ties to the universities and their faculty to traffic women while also burnishing his reputation to avoid detection. That's exactly what happened. That's not an allegation. That's not a maybe. That's what happened. And for all these years, they've denied it, they've made excuses, and they've acted like it's been overblown, but the truth is they've been covering it up. And not to veer too far off course, but it looks like a serious trafficking ring has been covered up over in the UK as well. Rupert Lowe has a new report out about grooming gangs, and we're going to get into that, too, because I think it dovetails with what we talk about now. Of course, there's people who say that the numbers inside of that inquiry are overblown, but my response to that is even one girl is enough. If one girl suffered that kind of fate at the hands of some kind of grooming gang and it was covered up, that needs to be investigated. And I think it goes directly to the heart of what we're dealing with when it comes to Epstein. A lot of it has to do with institutional embarrassment. I need you guys to understand that. And these governments will go to great lengths to try and make sure that that doesn't occur, even if that means covering up something like Jeffrey Epstein or the grooming gangs over in the uk. Jamie Raskin, top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that Harvard and Bard had both previously attempted to investigate the role their universities and leadership played in facilitating Epstein's abuse, but that those attempts either failed or fell short of a full accounting of what occurred. Well, hold on one second. You mean internal investigations don't work? Come on, you should be able to investigate yourself, right? If you commit a crime. Hey, don't worry about it. I'm taking a look at myself. I just looked at my books and everything's okay here. Meanwhile, you're stealing money hand over fist. The whole entire internal investigation is some of the biggest BS in the history of big bs. Among other demands for information, Raskin has asked Bard to make Leon Botstein its outgoing president, whom Bard has said will retain a role as at the college, available for a Transcribed interview. Braskin also requested records related to Epstein's donations, communications, admissions interactions, and institutional decision making, as well as the full results of an internal review by the college. Raskin is also seeking extensive records from Harvard, including all records, financial documents and communications relating to Epstein's funding or of research and his personal relationship with faculty members. I mean, that's good, and we should be getting all of that, but I doubt he will remember. A lot of this stuff was clandestine. A lot of this stuff was done on the down low. And Epstein knew not to have a paper trail. He knew better. So the whole entire internal review has always been a bunch of nonsense to me. Raskin is also seeking extensive records from Harvard, including all records, financial documents and communications relating to Epstein's funding of research and his personal relationships with faculty members. Raskin said Harvard's previous investigation into the university's ties to Epstein, conducted in 2008 and 2019, were at best incomplete and at worst misleading. Man, am I really agreeing with Jamie Raskin right now? Not exactly somebody I agree with all the time, but he's not wrong here. And there needs to be a full accounting. Any of these universities that receives one single dollar in public money should be on the hook to explain away their relationship with someone like Jeffrey Epstein. And up until this point, Harvard has not done so. Every single excuse they give, every reason they give, is worse than the last. I mean, if the president of your university is palling around with Jeffrey Epstein, and Jeffrey Epstein has an office on the campus of Harvard, I'd say that that's a problem that starts at the top, right? The president of the university. We're not talking about some rebel ass professor who decided to do this after the university told him no. The university encouraged it. They might not have said it, but their behavior encouraged this kind of shit. And with their internal reports, the idea was to whitewash that, to make it like the university had no idea and that it was just a couple of professors and a couple of people on campus who thought it would be a good idea to have a relationship with Epstein. That's what they tried to frame it as, but that was never the truth. And now Jamie Raskin is is calling them out. Raskin said the internal investigation failed to uncover a series of donations Epstein made after Harvard had instituted a ban against such donations in 2008, as well as the full extent of his relationship with Harvard faculty members, including Harvard's former president, Larry Summers, and the depth of his personal involvement with student admissions and faculty research. Yeah, how many people got in there because of Epstein. How many times did Epstein reach out and get somebody into the school? I'm sure a few. Remember, at the heart of it, that's what Jeffrey Epstein was, a fixer. And he knew if he could get some vulnerable girls into Harvard, then he'd be able to abuse them. And not just sexually, but in general, have them do whatever he wants them to do, whenever he wants them to do it. Because if they don't, well, they'll lose their spot at Harvard and they'll lose their immigration visa and they'll have to go back to whatever country they're from. And that was the guillotine hanging over the head over these girls. It's time for Harvard, like the rest of America, to come clean and engage in the comprehensive accounting that will allow us to learn from this nightmare, take appropriate legislative action and make sure nothing like it ever happens again, raskin said in a letter to Harvard president AS Alan Garber. And look, I doubt we're gonna stop it from ever happening again, but hopefully we're more vigilant this time. And hopefully people recognize the signs and they do something about it. They step up
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Harvard announced in February that Summers was resigning from teaching at the end of the academic year. The announcement followed the Justice Department's release of of the Epstein files, which revealed more details about Summers and Epstein's relationship. The email showed Summers and Epstein communicated frequently on topics ranging from politics to women, including Summers pursuing a relationship with a person who saw him as an economic mentor. Like, I never understood the whole thing about teachers trying to hook up with their students, even in college. Why are you? What are you doing? Why would you cause yourself that kind of headache, that kind of drama? Go to the local pub, find yourself somebody else, a different girl. Whenever there's that power imbalance, you're setting yourself up for disaster. And when you walk into it willingly, well, you get what you deserve. Summer served as Harvard's president from 2001 to 2006. Epstein donated more than 9 million to Harvard and its affiliated programs from 98 to 2008, which overlap with Summers tenure. Summers has previously said, I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein. Yeah. After you got called out, after the whole country knew you were a scumbag, how come you didn't do it previously? In a separate letter addressed the bar chair James Cox Chambers, whom the Guardian previously reported has recently stepped down from that role. Raskin said he was seeking to understand how Epstein exploited and leveraged multifarious ties in higher education from Bard to Columbia University, Harvard and nyu. Raskin pointed out in the letter that Botstein was resigning from his position as president, a role that he held for more than 50 years following a Bard initiated investigation. The that concluded his tenure was marked by substantial lapses in leadership and candor. Not exactly legacy building, huh? Imagine they do this report and that's what they come back with. Now can you imagine what an external report would find? There was evidence, Raskin said, that Epstein's relationship to Botstein and Bard leaders helped him maintain and expand his illegal activities, including potentially trafficking women in New York and the Russian Federation. And that's a big story. The Russian Federation. I doubt it's ever going to get legs, but boy, there were a lot of women and girls abused from the Russian Federation 100%. And that's because Epstein knew that he had friends in FSB that would press these women, make sure they didn't talk. I mean, look at the emails that he sent about Ganieva and the response from his Russian contact, how they're going to press her, how she's not protected by anybody in Russia. So it should be easy. And that should give you a little bit of a look at how these people operated. And when we're talking about people from the Russian Federation, what are they going to do? Go to the local police chief who's in the pocket of insert oligarch here. The Guardian reported last month that Bard's board of trustees voted to end Botstein's 51 year tenure after board members were presented with the results of an independent review of his relationship with Epstein. Botstein framed his departure as a long planned retirement in a statement on May 1st. Oh yeah, retirement. Forced retirement, you mean. These people shouldn't be able to save face with those kinds of statements. An Epstein victim who had previous interactions with Botstein said she believed the Bard College president was part of a group of influential and and accomplished men whose proximity to Epstein helped to rehabilitate his reputation 1 million percent. And that's the part that a lot of people leave out. A lot of people are like, well, so and so didn't take part in any abuse, so what's the big deal? They enabled it. They helped rehabilitate this piece of shit's reputation. And that of course led to countless girls being abused. And there was certainly levels to it, and there were certainly levels that reach criminality. And if we ever had a real investigation, well, we would have seen that. A summary of an internal investigation conducted by the Wilmer Hell law firm, which was initiated by Bard's board of Trustees and was released publicly on May 1, found that nothing Botstein did in connection to his relationship with Epstein was illegal. It also found that the bar president was not fully accurate to in describing his relationship with Epstein publicly or to the Bard community, and stated that Botstein did not fully see a risk to Bard's reputation when he pursued Epstein as a donor for the college or the potential risk his contacts with Epstein posed to Bard students. I mean, you know, a guy that's already been to prison for abusing a girl who was underage, no risk here. Guy squeaky clean. He's the fucking Pope. The law firm noted that Botstein had not disclosed fees he accepted under a consulting agreement with Epstein entity. Botstein previously denied being friends with Epstein and has also said he never witnessed anything inappropriate nor had any visibility into Epstein's monstrous crimes. He's never been charged with any wrongdoing related to Epstein. We have received the letter and are reviewing it, a Bard College spokesperson told the Guardian. Harvard did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Raskin is seeking information from both universities by July 1. Look, this story is just beginning when it comes to higher education, academia and places like Harvard and Bard. And like usual, we'll be here every step of the way as the story unfolds. As for this one, well, that's going to do it all. The information that goes with this episode can be found in the Description box.
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