As revelations about the Bard College president’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein became public over the years, he had a ready explanation for his dealings with the felon. Charming wealthy donors for money, even unsavory ones, was the cost of keeping his small college financially healthy.
But the latest batch of documents related to Mr. Epstein released last week by the Justice Department show that Mr. Epstein’s ties to Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, went beyond the college’s finances.
The president, for example, ended one 2013 email to the sex offender, “Miss you.”
In early 2017, Dr. Botstein and Mr. Epstein appear to have worked together to buy an expensive watch, eventually leading to confusion about who it was for and who would pay for it.
Mr. Epstein connected the filmmaker Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, with Dr. Botstein as the couple’s daughter, Bechet Allen, was considering colleges. The family thanked Mr. Epstein for “getting Bechet into Bard” in one email. (A spokesman for Dr. Botstein said the applicant was accepted on her own merit.)
The documents also show that Dr. Botstein’s office had planned out a trip to Mr. Epstein’s island in 2012. The revelation was reported by The Times Union, a local newspaper, on Thursday.
The new details about the relationship between the two men were part of more than three million pages of documents that painted a clearer picture of how Mr. Epstein had sought respectability and wielded his power. Mr. Epstein’s web ensnared many academics, including Lawrence M. Krauss, a prominent theoretical physicist who, following his own sexual misconduct allegations, asked Mr. Epstein, “Can you help?”
In a statement on Friday, Dr. Botstein said that making appeals for money requires cultivating long-term relationships.
“As I have said for years, engaging with Jeffrey Epstein was in service of one agenda, which was fund-raising for Bard,” he said. “These interactions happened over years when I invested enormous time transforming Bard’s financial footing through pursuing and securing major donations for the college.”
Like many small liberal-arts colleges, funding has often been a challenge for Bard, a liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, about 100 miles north of New York City. That was especially true after the 2008 financial crisis. By 2016, a ratings agency had downgraded Bard’s economic outlook, partly because it had little cash. Many on campus credit Dr. Botstein’s aggressive fund-raising for keeping it afloat.
The board chair, James Cox Chambers, could not be reached for comment on Friday about the latest details about Dr. Botstein and Mr. Epstein. After the previous revelations, Dr. Botstein maintained the support of the board and remained popular on campus.
While many of the interactions occurred over a decade ago, the two men were in touch as late as 2018, not long before Mr. Epstein died by suicide in a federal jail cell the following year, the new documents show.
Those communications related to a watch Dr. Botstein obtained in March 2017. He is a collector, and it was a rare open-faced Swiss pocket watch from the 1920s. In February 2018, Richard Kahn, Mr. Epstein’s in-house accountant, emailed Dr. Botstein, asking him to send $51,615 for the watch, or to return it.
Rather than respond to Mr. Kahn, Dr. Botstein emailed Mr. Epstein directly, asking, “What would you like me to do?” Later that night, Dr. Botstein wrote another email to Mr. Epstein, saying that he could begin to pay off the watch after a personal loan he had applied for came through.
After that, Dr. Botstein sent some payments before Mr. Epstein wrote in July 2018 to say no more money was necessary. A year later, Mr. Epstein was arrested by federal authorities on sex trafficking charges. He died Aug. 10.
Dr. Botstein, 79, has said that his love of watches traces back to their role in helping save the lives of his family members during the Holocaust who could barter them in the Warsaw Ghetto. This particular watch, however, was not for him, but for Mr. Epstein, he said in his statement.
“Epstein suggested he might want to buy himself an antique watch,” Dr. Botstein said. “I helped him locate one.”
Dr. Botstein added that Mr. Epstein had changed his mind, and so he had “felt obliged to make the parties whole, and purchased the watch for myself with my own resources.”
Dr. Botstein has previously acknowledged that he personally received $150,000 in consulting fees from a foundation created by Mr. Epstein, Gratitude America. Dr. Botstein told The New York Times in 2023 that he had rolled that money into a personal $1 million donation to Bard. “I didn’t benefit personally at all,” Dr. Botstein said at the time.
The latest document release also shows that Dr. Botstein’s office coordinated a 2012 trip to Mr. Epstein’s island. The trip included Leon Black, a billionaire who in 2021 would step down from his private equity firm, Apollo Global Management, over ties to Mr. Epstein.
Dr. Botstein’s spokesman, David Wade, said the president had dinner on Mr. Black’s boat, and said he does not remember if he was on Mr. Epstein’s island.
“This was nearly 14 years ago,” Mr. Wade said. “President Botstein came down with a severe flu on the trip, kept to himself after dinner and isolated himself in a resort-style bungalow overnight. He doesn’t recall where the bungalow was located.”
The trip resulted in a $250,000 donation from Mr. Black to Bard.
Dr. Botstein, also the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, became a college president at age 23, the youngest in the United States. He started leading Bard in 1975 at 28 and is regarded as a gifted fund-raiser and a driving force behind the college’s success. The billionaire George Soros donated $500 million to the college’s endowment in 2021.
No such windfall would ever come from Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Epstein “was constantly intimating that he might make a major contribution, only to leave Bard empty-handed,” Dr. Botstein said in his statement. “He delighted in manipulating the expectations of a college president responsible for meeting a large fund-raising burden.”
Vimal Patel writes about higher education for The Times with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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