Harvard University reportedly concealed the true source of a $25,000 donation to its women’s rugby team, allowing athletes to believe the money came from university leadership when it actually originated from convicted felon Jeffrey Epstein. According to an investigation by podcaster Pablo Torre and Harvard Crimson staffers Dhruv Patel, Hugo C. Chiasson and Elise A. Spenner, the university deliberately obscured Epstein’s connection to the gift — a deception that didn’t unravel until 2019, years after the money had been spent. The athletes had no idea who was funding them. Former team president Emily Riehl learned the truth only when a journalist investigating Epstein’s criminal history contacted her in 2019. “I’ve seen online that you were the president of the women’s rugby club that year,” attorney Martin F. Murphy wrote, before revealing the donor’s identity: “The donor was convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein.“ That was the first time Riehl had heard Epstein’s name connected to the gift, the report states. Harvard’s internal records tell a different story. Documents obtained by The Crimson and Torre show that in June 2004, Harvard explicitly established the “Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women’s Athletics,” noting a specific preference for women’s rugby. One month later, then-University President Lawrence H. Summers personally thanked Epstein for the contribution in a direct letter. But the team was deliberately kept in the dark. Players believed the money had come through Massachusetts Hall, routed personally by Summers after they confronted him about funding disparities between men’s and women’s rugby programs. “There’s absolutely no way we would have touched a dime from him had we known the source of this funding,” Riehl said. “But that information was never provided to us.” The team was struggling financially. The women’s rugby players operated on roughly $6,000 annually, cleaning dormitory bathrooms through work-study, volunteering for psychology studies, and soliciting donations from parents to keep the program alive, the Harvard Crimson reporters wrote. The $25,000 infusion was transformative — but only because its source remained hidden from those it was supposedly meant to help. Harvard’s 2020 report buried the truth, the report notes. When the university released its official investigation into Epstein’s donations, the women’s rugby gift was folded into a generic tally without addressing the core deception: Harvard’s internal records had always identified Epstein as the donor, while the “cash-strapped athletes” were left believing Summers had answered their financial pleas. Documents released by the House Oversight Committee and Department of Justice since November reveal that Summersmaintained a longstanding relationship with Epstein, exchanging emails from the 1990s until the day before Epstein’s 2019 arrest. “I’m glad that it is coming out now, and I’m glad that there is finally some reckoning,” Riehl said. “Maybe not to the degree that is warranted, given everything that he did — but it’s better to talk about it late than never at all.”
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