Financier Charged With Sex Trafficking Has Given Millions to Harvard

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Harvard University declined to comment on Monday about whether it would return donations from Jeffrey Epstein, the millionaire who was arrested this past weekend on sex-trafficking charges.

According to a grand-jury indictment that was unsealed on Monday, Epstein lured young girls — some as young as 14 — to his properties and paid them hundreds of dollars for sexual acts.

Prosecutors said more than 100 girls had been victimized by Epstein, who, according to the indictment, “created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit.” When a case was first brought against Epstein, in 2007, he was able to avoid federal sex-trafficking charges through an extraordinary plea deal that earned him only 13 months in jail, the Miami Herald reported. He was facing a life sentence under federal charges.

The new indictment has cast an unfavorable spotlight on Harvard, which has accepted large donations from the millionaire in the past and has been called out at times for doing so.

Epstein’s ties to Harvard stretch back decades, and to some of the most powerful figures at the institution. In 1990 he donated money to construct a new campus building named for an old friend, Henry Rosovsky, a former dean of the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Rosovsky declined to comment to The Chronicle, citing health issues. In 2003, Epstein pledged $30 million toward the creation of the university’s program in evolutionary dynamics.

When news broke about the allegations against Epstein in 2006, Harvard said it would not return the $6.5 million it had received from him toward his $30-million pledge for the evolutionary-dynamics program. A spokesman told The Harvard Crimson at the time, “Mr. Epstein’s gift is funding important research using mathematics to study areas such as evolutionary theory, viruses, and cancers.”

A representative of the university told The Chronicle that the $6.5-million donation had already been used to fund the program’s operating costs in its first years. The official also said that Harvard accepts donations “in good faith and with the expectation that the philanthropy is intended to have — and will have — a positive impact on learning, scholarship, teaching, research, and the student experience at Harvard.”

The new indictment against Epstein says his predatory endeavors were supported by employees and other associates. In the aftermath of the first arrest, Epstein was represented by a legal team that included Alan Dershowitz, now an emeritus professor at Harvard. Since then, Dershowitz has been accused of taking part in the sex ring by Sarah Ransome and Virginia Roberts, two of the women allegedly victimized by Epstein, the Daily Beast reported. Dershowitz has denied all allegations.

In the early 2000s, Epstein also served on the advisory board of the Harvard Society for Mind, Brain, and Behavior, and hosted seminars about evolutionary biology that were frequently attended by senior administrators and Lawrence H. Summers, then Harvard’s president. Epstein also served with Summers on the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, according to the Crimson.

He also made donations to individual faculty members, including Anne Harrington, a professor of the history of science, and Stephen M. Kosslyn, now a professor emeritus of psychology. Neither responded to requests for comment by The Chronicle, but Harrington told the Crimson in December 2018 that had she known about Epstein’s criminal behavior, she would never have accepted the donation.

The Crimson also reported that David R. Gergen, a professor of public service, was approached by Epstein in 2004 or 2005 because he was interested in donating to Harvard’s Kennedy School. Gergen said the university had vetted Epstein’s background and found some questionable information about his past, but didn’t disclose what. The deal fizzled out from there.

Grace Elletson is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @graceelletson, or email her at grace.elletson@chronicle.com.