When Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, wanted to attend Columbia University’s dental school in 2012, she was rejected initially. Then, Mr. Epstein pulled some strings, and some of the school’s most important people helped her get in, files from the Department of Justice show.
As a favor to Mr. Epstein, who said he was considering a $5 million to $10 million donation to the school, the dean of the dental college at the time reached out personally to Ms. Shuliak’s old medical school in her native Belarus. She had nearly finished her dental studies there, and he asked for her records, the former dean said in an interview.
Another administrator, the chair of adult dentistry, sent Ms. Shuliak an outline for Columbia’s entrance exam and study guides. After she was admitted, a third person — the vice dean for academic affairs — helped develop a personalized plan of study, which was needed because Ms. Shuliak had joined Columbia later than was typical for a dental transfer student, according to the records.
After these courtesies were extended to a woman who would later become the primary beneficiary of his estate, Mr. Epstein made donations. In 2012, he gave $100,000 to a public health project run by Dr. Ira B. Lamster, the dean of the dental college. In 2014, he gave $50,000 to the dental school’s annual fund.
Though the medical school ultimately decided not to pursue the multimillion-dollar donation, the vice dean, Dr. Letty Moss-Salentijn, agreed six years later to meet with Mr. Epstein to discuss a potential $450,000 gift to the school, the documents show. Columbia said that the donation never was made.
Hundreds of pages of documents in the Epstein files reveal how the disgraced financier used his connections to try to facilitate entry into colleges and pay the tuition for many of the young women in his orbit, including those who charged that he sexually abused them. College administrators and scientists at Columbia and other universities corresponded with him and promised help, even after his 2008 felony convictions and prison sentence for solicitation of prostitution by a minor.
In the interview, Dr. Lamster, 75, who no longer works at Columbia, said that he was introduced to Mr. Epstein in early 2012 by Mr. Epstein’s dentist, who was a well-connected alumnus. He said that during conversations about the potential multimillion-dollar gift, Mr. Epstein asked him for help with “someone who is interested in obtaining a dental degree.”
Dr. Lamster said that he treated that request as he would one from any prospective major donor and said he would look into it. He said he didn’t know more about Mr. Epstein’s crimes than he had read in news reports and that he believed that Mr. Epstein had paid his debt to society.
“The reality, and maybe it’s a harsh reality, is that when you have a potential donor and a favor is asked, and if the favor’s not unreasonable, you grant that favor because you’re trying to develop a relationship with the person,” he said. “And that, I do remember, was the attitude that I took.”
Dr. Thomas Magnani, Mr. Epstein’s dentist, served as the point person, arranging Ms. Shuliak’s tour of the school and helping to resurrect her application, the documents show. On the eve of her entrance exam, Dr. Magnani pushed back when Mr. Epstein suggested delaying the test a week so that he could visit the school first.
“He says not to rock the boat,” Mr. Epstein’s assistant, Lesley Groff, told her boss in an April 2012 email, referring to a call she had just had with Dr. Magnani.
“She is with the most powerful people there who are already meeting half way and moving things around to accommodate her,” she told Mr. Epstein about Ms. Shuliak’s precarious position. “He doesn’t want the initial fears everyone had to be roused again.”
Ms. Shuliak, now 36 and believed to be living in New York, was the last person Mr. Epstein spoke to on the phone before his suicide in a prison cell in 2019. In his will, he bequeathed her $100 million and his 33-karat diamond ring, and while he was alive, he paid for her Columbia dental school tuition and courses elsewhere. A Department of Justice financial ledger states that Mr. Epstein made $631,000 in payments to Ms. Shuliak marked for tuition.
She declined, through a lawyer, to comment. Dr. Magnani and Dr. Moss-Salentijn did not return requests for comment.
On a broader scale, offering to help young women gain admission to colleges, and arranging for scholarships, was a tactic that Mr. Epstein used to attract and control them, evidence from the files indicates.
The documents back up allegations made by Congress in January, when Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote in letters to the presidents of Columbia and New York University that Mr. Epstein had lured several women, including minors, by promising them admission to their institutions and paying for them to attend, even as he continued to sexually assault them.
Between 2000 and 2002, Mr. Epstein paid for a young woman whom he abused to go to N.Y.U. and arranged a scholarship for her, Representative Raskin alleged. When that woman transferred to Hunter College, he arranged for her tuition there. The committee also alleged that Mr. Epstein had paid for at least two women he had abused to attend Columbia, one in 2002 and another between 2004 and 2007, according to information given to them by women who were abused.
Columbia and N.Y.U. said that they were cooperating with a congressional request for more information. “We support efforts to bring transparency to Epstein’s horrific conduct,” a statement from N.Y.U. said.
Income tax filings from the C.O.U.Q. Foundation, a charitable organization that Mr. Epstein controlled, document more than $200,000 in scholarship payments to N.Y.U., Columbia and Hunter College between 2001 and 2006 — the same period cited by Representative Raskin, the Epstein files show.
Mr. Epstein also tried to use the lure of admission to New York institutions to entice foreign women to enter his orbit. In January 2014, Mr. Epstein wrote to an unnamed young woman in Poland who was looking for nursing or midwifery schools, the files show.
“if you don’t find anything this week in poland I will fly you to ny,” he wrote. “I won’t be there. I will give you an apt to stay in. you can look at schools in ny. you can come to the island for a few days to discuss, and then go home.”
A financial ledger compiled by Deutsche Bank for federal prosecutors in New York in 2019 lists six “ostensible foreign models” — their names are redacted — whose tuition was paid for by Mr. Epstein, in amounts ranging from $7,000 to $52,000.
In 2016-17, he paid about $20,000 in tuition to the Fashion Institute of Technology for a woman who “appears to be a Swedish model,” the ledger shows. He also paid $116,000 for a model from Russia to study global studies at the New School between 2014 and 2019.
His efforts to help with admissions also extended to the children of business contacts. In 2016, Mr. Epstein attempted to secure entry to Columbia for Alice de Rothschild, the daughter of Ariane de Rothschild, a billionaire European banker he often corresponded with, the documents show.
He asked Richard Axel — a Nobel laureate and a powerful scientific figure on Columbia’s campus with whom he had a long relationship — to lobby the admissions office on Alice de Rothschild’s behalf.
“I have spoken with columbia admissions and she is good but not strongest candidate. I am pushing,” Dr. Axel wrote to Mr. Epstein on Nov. 16, 2016.
She was not admitted. Dr. Axel wrote to Mr. Epstein in February 2017, breaking the news. She ultimately enrolled at N.Y.U., where she studied biology.
“Alice de Rothschild’s university admissions in the United States, as well as her rejections, are entirely due to her grades,” the Rothschild family said in a statement. “Alice cannot be held responsible for Jeffrey Epstein’s unilateral actions.”
Dr. Axel has no power over the college’s admissions process, Samantha Slater, a Columbia spokeswoman, said.
“Dr. Axel’s association with Jeffrey Epstein has long been publicly known,” she added. “He has acknowledged that this connection represented a serious error in judgment, and he has apologized to his friends, colleagues and students for the problems this unfortunate association has caused.”
But the cause closest to Mr. Epstein appeared to be his effort to secure a spot at Columbia for Ms. Shuliak, who was then 22. Dr. Lamster served as a voice of reassurance. He wrote directly to Mr. Epstein several times. “Spoke with the admissions dean,” he wrote in May 2012. “As we understand the situation, all is fine, and Karina will join us in September. Visa is not an issue due to her special status.”
Sometime in 2012, the development office at Columbia’s medical center told Dr. Lamster that he should not solicit a major gift from Mr. Epstein, presumably because of Mr. Epstein’s criminal history. But after Dr. Lamster stepped down as dean of the dental school and became a professor at Columbia’s public health school, Mr. Epstein contacted him, he said.
Mr. Epstein wanted to donate $100,000 to a new public health initiative that he had heard Dr. Lamster was starting. Dr. Lamster felt that he could take the money, he said, because he hadn’t asked for it, and it was for an important cause.
That same day, to his surprise, Mr. Epstein’s driver came by with a $100,000 check, written out to him personally, he recalled. He had to send it back and ask for it to be made out to Columbia as a donation, which the school ultimately accepted, Dr. Lamster said. He thanked Mr. Epstein in an email.
“Maybe I’m naïve in assuming, but from my perspective, there was no quid pro quo,” he said. “$100,000 was not a payment for her being admitted.”
In 2014, Mr. Epstein donated $50,000 to the dental school annual fund in honor of Ms. Shuliak. A year later, after Ms. Shuliak graduated with her doctor of dental surgery degree, she and Mr. Epstein sent Dr. Richard Lichtenthal, the chair of adult dentistry, a gift card for the Metropolitan Opera as a thank you.
Dr. Lichtenthal, now 89, recalled how Mr. Epstein had waited in his office the entire time Ms. Shuliak took her entrance exam, about six hours. At the time, he said, he didn’t know anything about him, just that he was a potential donor who had brought in an applicant.
“I treated her like I would any other transfer student,” he said of Ms. Shuliak, adding that she passed the exam and ultimately did very well in the course. “Had I known, would I have done anything different? I don’t think so,” he said. “She’s an innocent kid.”
Dr. Mangani was still encouraging Mr. Epstein to donate to the dental school in January 2018. He wrote to Mr. Epstein to say that he had just had dinner with the new dean of the school and Dr. Moss-Salentijn, the vice dean “who was Karyna’s mentor and did the most to help her get in and finish up dental school.”
Dr. Mangani said that it would be appreciated if Mr. Epstein would donate $450,000 to a high-tech dental training initiative that Dr. Moss-Salentijn was involved with, according to the files. Months later, Dr. Moss-Salentijn sent along a funding proposal, and a dinner with Mr. Epstein was planned, the files show. Campus Reform, a conservative news site, first reported the exchange.
A Columbia official briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly said that Dr. Moss-Salentijn never attended the dinner, and added that Dr. Magnani was no longer teaching or serving on the dental school admissions committee or board of advisers. In all, Columbia is aware of about $200,000 in donations from Epstein-related charities, a number that does not include tuition payments, the official said.
In 2025, Ms. Shuliak graduated again from Columbia, with a certificate in advanced dentistry.
Duy Nguyen and Zach Seward contributed reporting. Georgia Gee contributed research.
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
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