Jeffrey Epstein donated $125K and was invited to Queens high school, records show
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Jeffrey Epstein donated $125,000 to a Queens high school between 2011 and 2012 and at one point was invited to visit the school, Department of Justice records show. New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP, file
By Jacob Kaye
Jeffrey Epstein donated around $125,000 between 2011 and 2012 to a Queens high school affiliated with Bard College, whose president allegedly maintained a relationship with the disgraced financier years after he became a registered sex offender.
Documents recently released by the Department of Justice detail extensive communications about the gifts, including an invitation for Epstein to visit Bard High School Early College in Long Island City to meet with Bard President Leon Botstein. The Queens campus is among several college preparation high schools the college operates.
The invitation came a little more than a year after Epstein was registered as a sex offender in New York and around three years after he was released from a Florida prison for soliciting sex from a minor.
In an email to Bard College students sent on Tuesday, Botstein said that despite the invitation, Epstein “did not visit any Bard High School Early College campus,” the Times Union reported.
A spokesperson for Botstein confirmed to the Eagle that Epstein never visited the school, located near Thompson and Skillman Avenues in Long Island City.
The donations reportedly came as part of a broader relationship between Epstein and Botstein, who thanked Epstein for his “friendship” in a 2013 email exchange. The relationship between the two men was first reported by the Times Union. Additional details, including about one of the Long Island City school donations, were later reported by the New York Times.
Botstein has denied that he and Epstein had a personal connection and has characterized the relationship as no different than those he had with other prospective donors.
“All the interactions I had with Mr. Epstein were solely focused on the effort to secure funds for the programs of Bard College,” he said in the Tuesday email.
A spokesperson for Botstein told the Eagle on Wednesday that the “only reason…Botstein ever communicated with Jeffrey Epstein was in the work of fundraising for Bard and its programs.”
“He wasn’t a friend,” the spokesperson said. “He didn't like him.”
Epstein appeared to first get connected to both the Queens school and Botstein in 2011 by Anthony Barrett, a parent of two Bard High School Early College students and an employee of Ossa Properties, a real estate management company run by Epstein’s brother, Mark Epstein.
“I just want to thank you once again for the most generous donation,” Barrett wrote to Epstein in a 2011 email. “It's the largest donation in the school [sic] history besides the matching grant for $500K – you basically added 30 percent to the endowment. The principal nearly fell off her chair.”
In later emails, Barrett attempted to connect the two men.
Epstein was first invited to the campus by Catherine Luiggi, then Botstein’s assistant, in 2012.
In a lengthy exchange with Lesley Groff, Epstein’s executive assistant, Luiggi asked if Epstein “wouldn't mind coming to BHSEC Queens for the meeting.” But Groff indicated that Epstein would prefer to meet with Botstein at his Upper East Side mansion.
As the assistants continued to sort out dates, the question of location surfaced again.
“I think that the preference might be to meet at one of the BHSEC schools, but I would need to double check,” Luiggi wrote on Aug. 29.
Hours later, Groff said she was “sure [Epstein] would prefer his home at 9 East 71st [S]treet.”
“[T]hat is where he holds all his meetings,” Groff added.
Jeffrey Epstein donated $125,000 to Bard High School Early College in Queens between 2011 and 2012. Photo via BHSEC’s website
Several months later, Epstein confirmed that he wished to make the $50,000 donation to the Queens school in an email to his longtime accountant, Richard Kahn, and to Barrett, who again appeared to be acting as an intermediary between Epstein and the school.
“Please advise on Anthony email regarding a donation to Bard High School Early College Queens,” Kahn wrote to Epstein on Nov. 2, 2012.
“50k,” Epstein responded.
Botstein’s spokesperson said that Epstein also donated a number of computers to the school that year.
According to the spokesperson, the extensive communication between Epstein and Botstein and between their assistants wasn’t a result of a personal closeness, but a reality of the world of education fundraising.
“The college has been public and transparent about these fundraising contacts for years, and the public release of email records only illustrates how fundraising development takes shape,” the spokesperson said. “It is a painstaking process of cultivating prospects, and in this case trying to secure additional large contributions from an unsolicited existing donor who dangled the possibility of significant support.”
“Epstein was first presented as a billionaire philanthropist supporting higher education and the arts, who had served a sentence for a crime and had been released,” he added. “The world only later came to know the troubling circumstances behind his initial plea deal, let alone the horrors revealed after his 2019 arrest."
The Bard High School Early College donations were not the only time Queens appeared in the emails released by the DOJ last month.
In a 2014 email to Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, president of Harvard and Epstein’s friend, Epstein appeared to insult both Queensborough Community College students and members of the Department of the Treasury.
“[Y]esterday at treasury was an eye opener,” Epstein wrote. “I [thought] I was lecturing at Queens[borough] [C]ommunity [C]ollege. I now understand your [lack] of suggestions re smarts.”
The following year, Epstein appeared to make a trip to Forest Hills to visit the set of a film directed by Woody Allen, who also reportedly maintained a friendship with Epstein and who himself was accused of sexually abusing minors.
In October 2015, Groff and Ginevra Tamberi, Allen’s assistant, worked out a date and time for Epstein to visit the set on a day when the actors Jesse Eisenberg and Anna Camp would be there. Both actors starred in Allen’s 2016 film “Cafe Society.”
