File 70 - The University Scandal and Harvard's $9 Million Secret

Epstein funneled over $10 million into Harvard and MIT while facing criminal allegations. Internal emails show staff calling him 'Voldemort' and labeling his gifts 'Jeffrey money, needs to be anonymous.' A whistleblower told administrators he was a pedophile and was told 'we're planning to do it anyway.' Both institutions knew who he was. Both took the money.

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The Epstein Files is an AI-generated podcast analyzing the 3.5 million pages released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA). All claims are grounded in primary source documents.

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Transcript

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3 million pages of evidence. Thousands of unsealed flight logs. Millions of data points, names, themes and timelines connected. You are listening to the Epstein Files, the world's first AI native investigation into the case that traditional journalism simply could not handle. Welcome back to the Epstein Files. Last time we looked at why the media buried this story for years. Today, we're following the money into Harvard and mit. How two of the most prestigious universities in the world knowingly accepted millions from a convicted sex offender. As always, every document and source we reference is available at Epsteinfiles FM. So in September 2014, Joy Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, gets a confirmation about an Epstein donation and tells his staff to record it as anonymous. His development chief, Peter Cohen, writes back. Jeffrey, money needs to be anonymous. Keep in mind, this is six years after Epstein was convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution. MIT already has him flagged as disqualified in their own donor database. And the money keeps coming. Anyway, that email, it's. It's just a stunning document. You place it right next to the university's compliance rules, and the contradiction is absolute. Right. You've got a senior administrator, Peter Cohen, not even asking if they should take the money. He's operationalizing how to hide it. And that date is critical. September 2014. By that point, Epstein is a registered level three sex offender. It's public knowledge. So before we get into the mechanics of that cover up the how, we really need to establish the how much. Yes, because the scale of this financial relationship, that's what made the concealment necessary in the first place. We are working from two key documents today. The Harvard report from 2020 and the Goodwin Proctor report that MIT commissioned. Correct. These are the internal audits. They're the closest we're going to get to a complete ledger. And when you look at the data from both, you see just a massive inflow of capital. Let's start with Harvard. Okay. The internal review there identified $9,179,000 flowing from Epstein controlled entities directly into Harvard accounts. 9.1 million. That is a substantial sum even for an institution like Harvard. It is. That's put your name on a building level. Money. And that funding came in between 1998 and 2007. Now, MIT's total, it looks smaller on paper. Right. It was less than a million. Around $850,000 across 10 separate donations. But. But just looking at the dollar amount, you miss the entire story. It's the timeline. It is all about the timeline. Specifically relative to Epstein's criminal history. This is where the Whole narrative of, oh, we didn't know just completely falls apart. So let's break that down, because there's a clear line between money accepted before the world knew who he was and money accepted when he was already charged with sex crimes. Exactly. And Harvard. Harvard operates in what you could call a gray zone. For most of their funding, the single biggest gift was six and a half million dollars in. And that money established a program for evolutionary dynamics. The PED. Correct. And in 2003, you know, Epstein is just some hedge fund manager with a murky reputation. He hasn't been arrested. So from a purely legal standpoint, that money is clean. But then the timeline shifts. 2006, he's arrested in Palm Beach. This is all over the news. He's charged with soliciting a minor. And that is the pivot point, because despite that arrest, despite the active criminal case against him, the documents show Harvard accepted another 700. So while the legal department is looking at an active indictment for sex crimes with a minor, the finance department is still cashing its checks. The university continued to process gifts during the active criminal proceedings. Now, to be fair, Harvard did eventually draw a line. After the 2008 conviction, once he was formally on the sex offender registry, Harvard officially stopped accepting direct gifts. They stopped the direct flow of cash. Yes. The spigot was turned off, at least on paper. Which brings us to mit, because their timeline is basically the inverse of Harvard's, it's a completely different strategy. MIT took a small amount, $100,000, way back in 2002 for the AI pioneer Marvin Minsky. But the vast majority of MIT's money from Epstein, 750,000 of it, was accepted after his 2008 conviction. So just as Harvard stops taking his money because he's a convicted sex offender, that's when MIT really starts. MIT becomes the post conviction beneficiary. Effectively, yes. Which brings up a question I see from listeners all the time. Why, you know, why would an institution with a multi billion dollar endowment risk its entire reputation for $750,000? It's a rounding error for them. That's the part that just doesn't track. It seems like an enormous risk for a very small reward. It does until you understand the internal economy of academic research, especially at a place like the media lab. They run on something called soft money. Explain what that means. So hard money is your stable funding. It's tuition, endowment, income, state funding. Soft money is grants and gifts. If you're a professor or a lab director like Joy Ito, you are in a constant hunt for soft money, just to keep your projects alive. Right now, you can go get a federal grant, say, from the National Science foundation, but that money is restricted. You have to write these massive proposals, submit quarterly reports. You can only spend it on pre approved items, and the university takes a huge chunk for overhead. It's high friction money. It's a hassle. It's an enormous headache. Epstein represented the unrestricted gifts. This is the holy grail for a researcher. It's just cash. No proposals, no reporting, minimal overhead. You want to buy a new piece of equipment, go for it. You want to fly your team to a conference in Tokyo? Done. So for a director like Joy Ito, $50,000 from Epstein is actually worth much more than 50,000 in federal grants. Exactly. Because of the liquidity and the speed. It's fast cash. And Epstein knew that. He understood that unrestricted money bought him a different kind of influence, a different kind of loyalty, and he weaponized it. We see that so clearly in what the report calls the test case at mit. This involves a professor named Seth Lloyd. This is a crucial moment. June 2012. Epstein's out of jail. He's a registered sex offender, and he decides to see if MIT is open for business. It's a penetration test. It is. He writes an email to Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering. I'm reading from the document here. Epstein writes, I'm going to give you two 50k tranches to see if the line jingles. To see if the line jingles. That's not the language of philanthropy. No, that is the language of a probe of an intelligence operation. He's testing the security perimeter. He wants to know if the compliance department is paying attention. He's effectively saying, I'm going to throw a rock at the fence and see if any alarms go off. And Seth Lloyd, a tenured MIT professor, he doesn't report this? He doesn't go to the administration and say a convicted sex offender is trying to test our system? No, he facilitates it. He accepts the funds. But there's another detail in the Goodwin Proctor report about Lloyd that casts this in an even darker light. Around this same time, Lloyd accepts a separate $60,000 gift from Epstein. Okay, but this money doesn't go to mit. Where does it go? It goes directly into Seth Lloyd's personal bank account. He took a personal cash payment from a donor. Yes. While helping that same donor navigate the university's compliance system, he bypassed university administration entirely for his personal gift. So you see, it creates this massive conflict of interest. Interest. Lloyd isn't just a professor raising money for his lab anymore. He is now financially beholden to Jeffrey Epstein personally. So when he helps jingle the line, he isn't acting as a gatekeeper for mit. He's acting as an agent for Epstein. And the test worked. The line jingled, the money went through, and nobody cut the cord. The donations were processed. Epstein proved that the system could be breached. And once he established that, the senior leadership at the Media Lab, Joy Ito, Peter Cohen, Israel Ruiz, they had to build a formal framework to keep that money flowing without alerting the public or the rest of the university. Which brings us to the mechanics of the COVID up. Because MIT actually did have safeguards. Their computer system wasn't broken. The flags were there. No, the software worked exactly as it was designed to. MIT uses a central donor database. It's called the advanced database. And the Goodwin Proctor repair confirms Epstein's file in that database was flagged. He was officially marked disqualified. Disqualified? I mean, that seems pretty clear. It's binary. In fundraising compliance, that is a hard stop. It means do not call, do not solicit, do not accept funds. If a junior development officer tried to enter a check from Jeffrey Epstein into that system, the screen should have, you know, locked them out, or at the very least, triggered a series of red flag alerts to the general counsel's office. So how do you get around a hard digital stop like that? You override it with human authority. The investigation found that a senior administrative framework was established involving Ito, Cohen and others. They created a special protocol just for Epstein. We will take the money, provided it is always marked anonymous. Which brings us right back to those emails we started with Joi Ito writing, make sure this gets accounted for as anonymous. And Peter Cohen immediately writing back, jeffrey, money needs to be anonymous. They're creating a shadow ledger. On one side, you have the official database screaming he is disqualified. And on the other, you have the Media Lab staff manually coding these donations as anonymous to bypass the public donor roles and the internal alarms. They are effectively laundering his reputation through their own finance department. And this wasn't just a paperwork issue for some bookkeeper. The staff knew why it had to be anonymous. They knew exactly who they were dealing with. The testimony from the Media Lab staff is incredibly consistent on this point. They were afraid of him. They even had a nickname for him in the office. Oh, Voldemort. He who Must not be named. You know, it sounds like a dark joke, but in an office environment, a nickname like that, it signals a culture of open secrecy. What does that mean, open secrecy? It means everybody Knows the monsters in the building. Everybody knows he's funding the operation, but leadership has imposed a code of silence so deep that you can't even speak his name out loud. But not everyone stayed silent. We have to talk about Sign Swenson. Sign Swenson. She was a development associate at the Media Lab. She is the key whistleblower in this, the one who really destroys the argument that, oh, everyone just went along with it. What did her testimony show? She stated it explicitly to the investigators and in her interviews, quote, I knew he was a pedophile. She didn't use euphemisms. She went to the fundraising team. She raised the objection. She flagged the moral and reputational hazard. And what was the response from her superiors? The response was, effectively, we know and we're planning to do it anyway. So when a junior staff member raises a direct flag about taking money from a known pedophile and senior leadership overrides her, you are no longer in the realm of negligence or poor judgment. You have crossed into active, willful complicity. Joi Ito did try to justify this internally, though. He didn't just say, we need the money. He used a very specific, almost academic sounding concept to rationalize it to his staff. He did. He deployed the language of restorative justice. Ito argued that by allowing Epstein to donate to science and technology, they were actually helping him rehabilitate his image. They were giving him a way to pay his debt to society through philanthropy. It's an extraordinary argument. There's an email where IDO tells his staff it's possible, not likely, but possible, that in the end, all of this new stuff will help clear him. Help clear him. Think about that phrase. Epstein had already pled guilty. He was a convicted felon. He was on the registry. There was nothing to clear. Right. Ito's email suggests that the director of the MIT Media Lab saw his role not just as a fundraiser, but as an active participant in Epstein's reputation laundering campaign. He was willing to lend MIT's prestige to help scrub a convicted sex offender's record. And Epstein needed that scrubbing because he was using MIT to get to other much bigger targets. This is really the third layer of the scandal. It wasn't just about Epstein's own $850,000. It was about the billions of dollars held by the people in Epstein's network. This is the billionaire proxy mechanism. Epstein wasn't just a donor, he was a bundler. He was a broker. If mit couldn't take $10 million directly from Jeffrey Epstein without a massive public relations Disaster. They could take money from other legitimate sources that Epstein claimed to control. And the MIT report found that he was aggressively claiming credit for soliciting millions from other billionaires. Oh, yes. The most high profile example, of course, involved Bill Gates. October 2014. We have an email from Joy Ito. He's discussing a $2 million gift from Bill Gates. And Ito writes to his team, and I'm quoting here, this is a $2 Meg gift from Bill Gates directed by Jeffrey Epstein. And Peter Cohen's response just confirms the entire concealment strategy. What does he say? Cohen replies, for gift recording purposes, we will not be mentioning Jeffrey's name as the impetus for this gift. So on the internal informal ledger, Epstein gets the credit, but on the official public facing ledger, his name is wiped clean. Exactly. Now we have to be very precise here. For the record, Bill Gates's representatives have strongly denied that these funds were directed by Epstein. They state the donation was independent of him. Right. We don't have access to their internal communications. We don't. But what we do have is the paper trail showing the internal perception at mit. The documents prove that the fundraising team at MIT believed they were dealing with Epstein. They credited him internally. They allowed him to believe he was pulling the strings. So whether Gates intended it or not, MIT was effectively selling Epstein the credit for that donation. And there was another channel for this proxy funding, one that seemed even more established. They called it the Leon Black route. Yes, this appears in a July 2014 email from another fundraiser, Richard McMillan. A check has come in. And McMillan asks his colleagues what happened to the Leon Blackroute. That phrasing the Leon Black route. It implies a standard operating procedure, a pre existing channel. It absolutely does. It suggests this wasn't a one off thing, but a known established pipeline where Epstein would route money through Leon Black, who is the CEO of Apollo Global Management. And Black eventually gave five and a half million dollars to the Media Lab and the staff. They understood this was Epstein influenced money. Yes. The whistleblower sign. Swenson testified to this directly. She explained that the understanding in the development office was that these weren't just random acts of charity from these billionaires. She said, quote, jeffrey has friends who owe him favors. Favors. That reframes the entire dynamic. It turns the donation from a gift into a transactional repayment of a debt. It implies that Epstein held some kind of leverage over these incredibly powerful people. He used that leverage to compel them to donate to mit, which in turn solidified his own standing with the university. He was buying legitimacy using other people's checkbooks. So while MIT was laundering the money, Harvard was providing something just as valuable, maybe even more sophysical, access and a stamp of intellectual approval. We've talked about the money trail there. But the visiting fellow appointment is. It's a true anomaly. It's an academic absurdity. Jeffrey Epstein did not have an undergraduate degree. He was a college dropout from Cooper Union. And yet in 2005, he is admitted as a visiting fellow in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. And these fellowships, they're usually reserved for distinguished scholars, right? PhDs, authors, people with a long track record of publication, Correct? You don't just, you know, write a check and become a visiting fellow. You need a faculty champion. You need someone on the inside to vouch for you. In this case, that person was Stephen Kostinen, who was the chair of the Psychology department at the time. And we have the recommendation letter he wrote for Epstein. What was his justification? Costlyn described Epstein as having a, quote, high level of intellectual acumen. He called him creative and extraordinarily analytic. He was essentially arguing that Epstein's raw, untutored genius superseded any need for actual academic credentials. So he gets in for the 2005, 2006 academic year, then he's readmitted for 2006, 2007, yes. And he only withdraws from the fellowship after his 2006 arrest in Florida makes it physically impossible for him to be on campus. But, and this is the absolutely critical part, the loss of the title did not mean the loss of his access. After his conviction, after he served his time, he comes right back to Harvard, and this is where the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, the ped, comes back into the story. This is the center he funded, run by Professor Martin Nowak. Right. Nowak was a star professor, and Epstein had funded the creation of his center with that initial $6.5 million gift. So after 2008, after the conviction, Epstein essentially treats the PED as his own private clubhouse on the Harvard campus. The Harvard report estimates he visited the PED offices more than 40 times between 2010 and 2018. Forty times. That's what, once every couple of months for eight straight years? And these were not brief meetings in a shared conference room. He had a dedicated space office. 610. The staff there refer to it as Jeffrey's office. Describe that office, because the details from the report are very specific. They are. This wasn't just a spare desk they gave him. He brought in his own private rug. He hung his own photographs on the walls. It was furnished to his personal Taste. But the most damning detail is the infrastructure. The phone line. A dedicated Harvard telephone line installed in Office 610, active until 2017. A dedicated landline implies permanence. You don't give a casual visitor their own phone number. And you definitely don't give them a key. No. Epstein and his assistants possessed physical keys and key cards to the building. They had their own passcodes. They could bypass the front desk security. They could enter the building at night, on weekends, whenever they wanted. So to be perfectly clear, a Level 3 registered sex offender had 247 unescorted access to a building on Harvard's campus for the better part of a decade. That is the documented reality. The security protocol that would apply to anyone else simply did not exist for him. And just like we saw at mit, he used this physical perch to aggressively manage his reputation. How so? Epstein's publicist contacted the PED and requested that they put links to Epstein's foundations on the official Harvard website. And did they do it? Martin Nowak approved it. They created a page on the PED's Arvid hosted site that featured Epstein's photograph and a glowing biography. It was linked under a tab that was labeled Friends. And who else was listed on this Friends page? No one. He was the only friend listed. It was a digital billboard linking Harvard's brand directly to Jeffrey Epstein's name long after he was a convicted criminal. And the proxy funding mechanism that was at work at Harvard as well? Very much so, yeah. The Harvard report shows that donors introduced by Epstein gave an additional $7.5 million to Nowak's work and another 2 million to the work of geneticist George Church. So he was, in effect, paying his rent for office. 610. By bringing in fresh capital from his network. We have to shift to the most recent revelation, which involves Larry Summers. This came out later than the initial reports, but it paints a picture of these relationships continuing right up until the very end. Larry Summers. It's a huge name. Former treasury secretary, former president of Harvard, a titan of the American establishment. And the emails that were released are from 2018 and 2019. So this is a full decade after the Florida conviction. It's right before Epstein's second arrest in New York. It is. And the content of these emails, it's striking because it's not about economics or university policy. Summers was seeking personal relationship advice from Jeffrey Epstein from a convicted sex offender, specifically regarding a romantic interest he had in a younger woman, who is described in the reporting as a mentee. The reports characterized Epstein's Role as being a wingman. For Summers, it's just a bizarre power dynamic. You have one of the most powerful economists in the world asking a known sex trafficker for advice on dating a mentee. It creates a strange kind of indebtedness. It establishes a bond that's deeply personal, not professional. And then we see the transactional nature pop up again in these same email chains. Summers solicited donations from Epstein for his wife's non profit work. And the fallout from these emails becoming public was immediate. Immediate. Summers resigned from the board of OpenAI the same day. And Harvard was forced to launch yet another investigation, this time specifically into Summers ties to Epstein. Which brings us to the final reckoning. We detail the money, the concealment, the emails, the keys, the offices. But maybe the most important takeaway from all of this is how it finally ended. Because it did not end with a compliance officer finally standing up and doing the right thing. No. And that is the central tragedy of the institutional response. The institutions did not police themselves. It took investigative journalists. It took Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald, who reopened the original criminal case. And it took Ronan Farrow at the New Yorker who exposed the MIT emails. Let's just look at the speed of the collapse at mit. Ferrell publishes his article detailing the COVID up, the Voldemort culture, the emails, and Joi Ito resigns in less than 24 hours. Think about that. He had survived for years while his own staff knew, but the moment the public knew, he was gone in a day, the internal firewall just crumbled instantly upon public exposure. And the president of mit, El Rafael Raif, he had to issue a university wide apology admitting that accepting the funds involved a profound mistake of judgment. And the Goodwin Proctor report, the one MIT commissioned. What was their final verdict on the senior staff who enabled this? They threaded a very careful legal needle. They found that senior team members, people like Ruiz and Morgan, had acted in good faith but made significant mistakes of judgment. Good faith. That seems like a generous interpretation. It's a very generous interpretation. The argument was that because the administrators weren't personally enriching themselves, Seth Lloyd being the exception, but were trying to secure funding for the university's mission. Their motives were technically good, but the report did confirm the informal framework existed. It confirmed the anonymity was a deliberate strategy. And what happened? Harvard, Martin Nowak was placed on Tate administrative leave. The pzd, the research center that Epstein's money build, was slated for permanent closure. And the 2020 report from Harvard's leadership acknowledged institutional and individual shortcomings. And the money? What happened to the remaining funds? Harvard found they had about $200,000 of unspent Epstein funds left in their accounts. They donated all of it to charities that support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault. A symbolic gesture at the end. Unnecessary one. So if we step all the way back and look at the synthesis of all this evidence, you have two of the most respected academic institutions in the world, the smartest people in the room. They had the data, they had the sex offender registry. They had their own internal disqualified flags blinking red. It really boils down to a conflict between knowledge and action. Both institutions had documented knowledge of the risk Epstein posed. And yet both institutions created space, specific documented mechanisms, anonymity protocols at MIT Office 610 at Harvard to bypass that knowledge and mitigate that risk. Because the money was unrestricted and because the network he promised was just too valuable to turn away. The documents strongly suggest the decision was driven by the intense competition for funding. The allure of Epstein's network, you know, the access to Gates, to Black, to that entire class of billionaires, it simply outweighed the moral and reputational cost. They gambled that they could keep it secret. And for years they did. Until they lost. So we have proof of the money. Over 9 million at Harvard, nearly a million at MIT. We have proof of the concealment in their own emails. We have proof of the access, the keys, the offices, the fellowships. What we still don't really know is the full extent of those favors that science Swenson talked about. That remains the black box. We can see the money that went to the universities, we can read the emails. But the full ledger of social debt, who owed what to whom in that network and why? That is something that is not in the Goodwin Proctor report and it's not in the Harvard report. That is still unknown. Next time, Silicon Valley's dirty secret. You have just heard an analysis of the official record. Every claim, name and date mentioned in this episode is backed by primary source documents. You can view the original files for yourself@epsteinfiles.com fm if you value this data first approach to journalism, please leave a five star review wherever you're listening right now. It helps keep this investigation visible. We'll see you in the next file.