After a congressman highlighted an explosive email apparently sent from Bard College’s former president to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the school jumped into action.
It hired a cybersecurity forensic firm to examine whether the email was real. The company quickly turned around a report on Monday suggesting it could be fake.
Some congressional Democrats were incredulous, saying the email might simply have been deleted and that the firm’s analysis did not explain why or how someone might have manufactured the message.
In it, someone writing from the Bard president’s email address asks Mr. Epstein whether a young woman was “for me, or are you keeping her for yourself.”
The contention over the email is the latest, and perhaps most intense, dispute over the former Bard president’s ties to Mr. Epstein. Leon Botstein, the longtime president of the small liberal-arts college, retired over the summer amid the scrutiny, although he remained in several Bard positions.
He stepped away from all of them this month, on the same day that Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a scathing letter to Bard highlighting the message about a young woman.
For his part, Dr. Botstein welcomed the report from the cybersecurity forensic firm. “As I previously said, I did not author or send that email,” he said in a statement. “I appreciate the effort to find the truth.”
That email, dated May 2014, concerns a young foreign model and aspiring vocalist who Mr. Raskin suggests was being groomed and trafficked by Mr. Epstein. In his letter, the congressman wrote that Mr. Epstein used his relationship with Dr. Botstein, who is also the principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra, to convince the woman she could have a successful music career.
Bard said it was reviewing the claims in Mr. Raskin’s letter, which included other allegations against the president, including that he played an improper role in how sexual misconduct cases on campus were handled. It also immediately hired the cybersecurity firm, FTI Consulting, to investigate the authenticity of the message to Mr. Epstein.
Twelve days later, the firm issued its report.
The email was not the original, but was contained in a message Mr. Epstein forwarded to himself, making it harder to analyze, the firm noted. Mr. Epstein often forwarded emails and news articles to himself, including in some instances where he kept potentially embarrassing or incriminating information about people in his orbit.
The firm said it could not find the 2014 email stored in Bard’s email system. The firm also found discrepancies in the date and formats that the investigators suggested might point to tampering, though it could not say so definitively.
FTI did not answer questions about its report or about how someone might have manufactured the disputed message. Bard declined to comment beyond its statement.
Democrats on the House committee released a sharp response, questioning the firm’s methods and conclusions. Among other things, they pointed out that the email could have been deleted or lost.
“The report also raises a vague claim that the email could have been manipulated without explaining why Epstein would forge an email incriminating himself,” Nelly Decker, a spokeswoman for House Judiciary Democrats, said in a statement.
Matthew Green, a cryptography expert at Johns Hopkins University who reviewed the FTI report at The Times’s request, said that the messages “don’t really look right.”
“They do look like someone might have hand written the dates,” Dr. Green said. “That doesn’t prove that all of the text was forged, but I think there’s something unusual about them.”
A trove of records released earlier this year by the Justice Department showed a friendly correspondence between Dr. Botstein and Mr. Epstein that lasted for years. Dr. Botstein signed off one message “Miss you,” and sent supportive notes to the convicted sex offender after negative media coverage. Dr. Botstein also visited Mr. Epstein, even planning a trip to his island in 2012.
Dr. Botstein, known as a talented fund-raiser who kept the once financially struggling liberal arts college afloat, has consistently maintained that the sole purpose of his relationship with Mr. Epstein was to convince him to give a major donation to Bard — money that never materialized.
Among the many messages the men sent each other, Dr. Botstein has only questioned the authenticity of the one highlighted by the congressman.
Dr. Botstein’s critics have painted the message as a smoking gun, suggesting that he may have abetted or even taken part in Mr. Epstein’s abuse. Mr. Raskin’s letter said it was hard to construct an innocent explanation for the question, which he noted was asked to “the most famous sexual predator of our time.”
It appears the report won’t end scrutiny of the message and Dr. Botstein’s broader relationship with Mr. Epstein. Ms. Decker said in her statement that the judiciary committee has requested all emails between Dr. Botstein and Mr. Epstein to determine “the full extent of his culpability.”
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