‘I Love You,’ Big U. of Virginia Donor Told Harvey Weinstein

Paul Tudor Jones II, the billionaire hedge-fund manager and big-time University of Virginia donor, privately expressed his loyalty to Harvey Weinstein after the film producer’s long history of sexual harassment came to light, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Mr. Jones, who serves on the advisory board of a center at the university, resigned from the all-male board of the Weinstein Company after the allegations surfaced against Mr. Weinstein, who was fired as the company’s chief executive.

But on October 7, the day before Mr. Weinstein was fired, Mr. Jones sent an encouraging email to the embattled film impresario, the Times reported.

“I love you,” Mr. Jones wrote.

According to the Times, Mr. Jones went on to detail steps Mr. Weinstein should take to rehabilitate his image.

“Focus on the future as America loves a great comeback story,” he wrote to Mr. Weinstein.

Signing off, Mr. Jones wrote, “The good news is, this will go away sooner than you think and it will be forgotten!”

In a statement sent on Wednesday to staff members at the Tudor Investment Corporation, the asset-management group founded by Mr. Jones, the investor said that he came to know Mr. Weinstein as a generous philanthropist. But Mr. Jones conceded that he had defended Mr. Weinstein for “too long.”

“Harvey’s actions were horribly wrong, and in the wake of these disclosures I told him that,” Mr. Jones’s statement, which was provided to The Chronicle by his spokesman, says. “I also encouraged Harvey to get the help he truly needed and to begin to change his life. Because some of the arguments I personally made to Harvey to try and be more like the person so many of us thought he was sound excessively encouraging now, I want you to understand the context in which they were made.

“I deeply believe in redemption,” he continued, “but what I know now is that Harvey was a friend I believed too long and defended too long. Perhaps in your own life you have faced a similar dilemma — how to react to a friend who is revealed to be someone other than the person you believed him or her to be.”

The Times’s reporting comes amid a period of heightened scrutiny and awareness about sexual harassment and sexual assault on college campuses, and specifically at the University of Virginia. Last week the university informed John Casey, an award-winning creative-writing instructor accused of multiple acts of sexual harassment, that he would not be permitted to teach in the spring of 2018 and would be barred from other duties until the conclusion of a Title IX investigation.

In recent years Mr. Jones and his wife, Sonia Jones, have given nearly $50 million to the University of Virginia, where Mr. Jones earned a bachelor’s degree in economics, in 1976. Mr. Jones’s $35-million gift granted the family naming rights to the university’s basketball stadium. The John Paul Jones Arena, is named for Mr. Jones’s father, also a Virginia alumnus.

Their generosity led to the creation of the university’s Contemplative Sciences Center, which promotes research about how meditation, yoga, and other such practices might improve creativity and productivity.

Mr. Jones serves on the center’s advisory board.

Awkwardness in the Past

The hedge-fund manager’s links to the university have invited criticism and awkwardness in the past. In 2013 he told a group of Virginia students and alumni that having children could be a career “killer” for women working in finance. In his experience, Mr. Jones said, women were “overwhelmed by the most beautiful experience” of having children and lost the focus needed to be successful traders, The Washington Post reported.

Mr. Jones also figured in the notorious failed ouster of Teresa A. Sullivan, who was unceremoniously forced out as the university’s president, in 2012, only to be reinstated amid a public uproar. At a time when the leaders of the university’s Board of Visitors seemed to have little if any support for their actions, Mr. Jones came to their defense.

In a column published by The Daily Progress, the Charlottesville newspaper, Mr. Jones suggested that the board’s “bold action” had upheld the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, the university’s founder.

No one at the university, including a communications official and several people affiliated with the Contemplative Sciences Center, responded immediately on Wednesday to requests for comment about Mr. Jones’s support for Mr. Weinstein.

In addition to his affiliation with the University of Virginia, Mr. Jones serves on the leadership council of Harvard’s Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership. The group provides “intellectual and financial” support to the program, according to its website.

The Kennedy school’s communications office did not respond immediately on Wednesday to a phone message requesting comment.

Lawrence S. Bacow, a fellow at the leadership center, said in an email on Wednesday that he was unfamiliar with the comments attributed to Mr. Jones. Even so, Mr. Bacow said, he was uncomfortable with the notion that a university might critique anyone’s personal loyalties and friendships.

“I must confess some unease if we are to start judging people merely on whether they are loyal to their friends, whomever they happen to be,” Mr. Bacow, president emeritus of Tufts University, wrote in the message. “Moreover, I don’t think universities should be in the business of shaming people who some believe have not distanced themselves sufficiently from others. Universities have values, and we should stand for them, but these values also include freedom of speech and expression.”

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.