The president of Bard College, Leon Botstein, has said he does not remember key details about a trip he had planned to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, after details emerged about the visit in 2012.
Dr. Botstein got very sick, his spokesman, David Wade, said in a statement last week, and stayed in a bungalow. He wasn’t sure whether the bungalow was on the island.
But a new email has surfaced showing that a day after the visit, on Dec. 23, 2012, Dr. Botstein emailed Mr. Epstein to say: “I had a great time. The place is great.”
On Monday, Mr. Wade said in a new statement that Dr. Botstein was referring to “the overall environment of St. Thomas, an area which was new to Dr. Botstein.” It is unclear from the emails whether he was present on the island.
Additional messages — part of a trove of documents released by the Justice Department on Jan. 30 — show that the Bard president struck a warm tone with Mr. Epstein. Dr. Botstein has said his relationship with Mr. Epstein was entirely about persuading a wealthy donor to give money to his institution. But the previously unreported messages show how the college president gave the convicted felon access to Bard’s orbit, suggesting deeper ties than Dr. Botstein has so far acknowledged.
In several emails to Mr. Epstein, Dr. Botstein mentioned or quoted Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist. “Nabokov became famous and admired only at the end,” Dr. Botstein wrote to Mr. Epstein in a lengthy March 2013 note in which Dr. Botstein wrote about how he was haunted by early criticisms of his work in music. Mr. Nabokov wrote “Lolita,” a 1955 novel about an intellectual who becomes sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old. Mr. Epstein kept a first edition of the novel in his Manhattan townhouse.
In that message, Dr. Botstein also wrote, “I greatly cherish this new friendship and I have real admiration for how you go about doing things.”
In December 2018, weeks after the publication of a deeply reported Miami Herald story about Mr. Epstein’s sex abuse and how he had minimized legal exposure, the financier received a sympathetic note from Dr. Botstein.
“Given the support you have shown and the help given (despite vociferous objections),” Dr. Botstein wrote, “I want you to know that I hope you are holding up as well as can be expected.”
Mr. Wade said that Dr. Botstein had not regularly tracked press coverage about Mr. Epstein but had heard that the donor was not doing well. “Dr. Botstein often reaches out to donors during difficult times including illness or other difficult circumstances,” Mr. Wade said.
In a statement Dr. Botstein added, “The nature of my contact with Epstein never permitted the recognition of how monstrous, cruel, and dangerous he turned out to be.”
“There is no way to reaffirm more unequivocally that the only reason I ever communicated with Jeffrey Epstein was in the work of fund-raising for Bard and its programs, particularly in the arts,” Dr. Botstein said in the statement. “He wasn’t a friend.”
About a month after Dr. Botstein had planned a visit to Mr. Epstein’s island, the sex offender gave the academic a phone.
“Thanks for lunch and the blue phone, which I am now plugging in,” Dr. Botstein wrote to Mr. Epstein on Jan. 17, 2013.
Mr. Wade said the phone was a rotary phone in the color blue, similar to one he said Mr. Epstein had. “It was a conversation piece,” Mr. Wade said in a statement. “He gave Botstein a similar retro blue rotary desk phone as a tchotchke gift after a fund-raising meeting. He didn’t keep it and gave it to the college for possible use as a theatrical prop.”
In late February 2013, the month after he had received the phone, Dr. Botstein emailed Mr. Epstein, who had been convicted by a Florida court in 2008 of soliciting prostitution with a minor, about a time and place to meet.
Dr. Botstein suggested a high school connected to his college. “Do you want instead to pop down to the Bard High School this afternoon?” Dr. Botstein asked.
It is not clear if the visit occurred. Dr. Botstein “doesn’t believe Epstein ever visited the program,” Mr. Wade said. “He had donated computers for the program.”
Mr. Epstein had been a supporter of the college’s national network of high schools, Bard Early College, which are meant to smooth the transition to college. The program serves a large percentage of low-income students. An email in late 2012 suggested he had donated $50,000 to a high school in Queens. And an undated photo in the documents depicts what appears to be three young women or girls, whose faces are redacted, two of whom are wearing shirts that read “Bard High School Early College Cleveland.”
In a Sept. 30, 2013, message, Mr. Epstein instructed an assistant to go shopping for clothes with a woman, whose name is redacted, so that she would be “appropriately dressed for Bottstein,” spelling the president’s name incorrectly.
That same day, assistants for the two men went back and forth scheduling a backstage meeting between a woman, whose name is redacted, and Mr. Botstein, a renowned conductor and music director of the American Symphony Orchestra. The woman appeared to be a student, who said she was tied up in class in the afternoon.
“Dr. Botstein greets many guests, sometimes hundreds, in a reception line or green room greeting after concerts,” Mr. Wade wrote, “as do most conductors, and his office is often asked to include guests on those lists, or arrange tickets for donors.”
The Justice Department documents also show Mr. Epstein had interest in another institution connected to Bard. Smolny College, which was a liberal arts curriculum within St. Petersburg State University, in Russia, had a dual credit program with Bard. Mr. Epstein helped students navigate between the two institutions, assuring one in July 2013 that Smolny’s president would accept the student. The month before, Dr. Botstein had invited Mr. Epstein to Smolny’s commencement.
Dr. Botstein has led Bard, a small liberal arts college about 100 miles of New York City in Annandale-on-Hudson, since 1975. He is known as an aggressive and successful fund-raiser, an activity he has said requires personal relationships with unsavory characters. “Capitalism is a rough system,” he told The Times in 2023.
Bard’s board chair, the billionaire James Cox Chambers, could not be reached for this article. He has not publicly addressed the relationship between Dr. Botstein and Mr. Epstein over the years.
The Times and other media outlets last week reported that the two men had a closer relationship than was previously understood, which sometimes veered into the personal. The two worked together to buy a rare watch, for example. And Mr. Epstein, who would kill himself in federal prison in 2019, occasionally visited Bard, landing his helicopter on campus. The financier also connected the filmmaker Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, to Dr. Botstein while one of the couple’s daughters was considering colleges.
Vimal Patel writes about higher education for The Times with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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