File 75 - The Charitable Foundations That Funded Him

Epstein pledged $30 million to Harvard but delivered only $6.5 million. It was enough to buy him a campus office and over forty visits after his conviction.

Three charitable foundations controlled by Epstein and his lawyers funneled money to buy access, launder his reputation, and claim donations that never arrived. Leon Black routed $158 million through shell LLCs. This is philanthropy weaponized.

Sources for this episode are available at: https://epsteinfiles.fm/?episode=ep75

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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 followed the insurance trail and why JP Morgan ended up suing its own insurers over Epstein settlements. Today we're pulling apart the charitable foundation's three entities controlled by Epstein and his lawyers used to buy access to elite scientists, launder his reputation after conviction, and claim donations that never happened. As always, every document and source we reference is available at Epsteinfiles FM. So in 2003, Epstein pledges $30 million to Harvard to create the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics run by Martin Nowak. Only six and a half million actually arrives. But it buys Epstein something money can't normally buy. An office on campus that staff call Jeffrey's office. And more than 40 visits between 2010 and 2018, all after his conviction. And that gap right there. The 30 million pledged versus the six and a half delivered. That's the whole strategy in a nutshell. It's not about the gift. No, it's about the leverage. The promise of the gift creates. We think of philanthropy as, you know, a simple transfer. A donor gives, a cause receives. But with Epstein, the foundations were never about giving. They were tools. Tools for what? Access? Control? All of the above. They were mechanisms for reputation management, for access, for control. When we started the audit on these entities, what was immediately clear wasn't the generosity, but the architecture. The entire corporate structure was designed to obscure, not to distribute. And the structure itself is. It's surprisingly intricate. It's not just one foundation with a simple mission statement. Not at all. We're talking about a triad of nonprofit vehicles. A three headed entity almost. You have to look at the documents from Littlesys and the tax filings ProPublica uncovered. Okay, so let's walk through them. The first One is the CO UQ Foundation. That goes back to 1998. Right. Then in 2000, he establishes the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation. The sex is key. That's for Virgin Islands. It establishes his offshore nexus from the very beginning. And then much later, you see a new one pop up. Gratitude America Limited. That's from 2012. Exactly. And the timing on that one is very specific. It appears right when he needs a new cleaner looking vehicle to handle very large sums of money. Coming from a very specific source. Leon Black. Leon Black. But before we get there, the most telling detail is what these three foundations have in common? Despite the different names, different eras. You pull the 990pf forms, the tax returns for private foundations, and the org chart is identical. A perfect mirror. It's a closed loop. Every single time I'm looking at the officer lists from the filings, it's the same three names again and again. President Jeffrey Epstein, of course, Vice President Darren Endyk, his lawyer, and Treasurer Richard Kahn, his accountant. So you have the principal, his personal attorney, and his personal accountants. That is not a board of director. No, that's an extension of his personal office. In any legitimate nonprofit, you expect what, an independent board, some kind of oversight. You demand it. Good governance requires checks and balances. You need people who can challenge the President, who can ask, does this grant align with our mission or. Or is this expenditure appropriate here? The board was the payroll. Indyk and Kahn weren't just allies, they were his employees. They were entirely captured. And that's the critical link people need to understand. These aren't just names from the past. Darren Endyke and Richard Kahn are the very same two men who were named co executors of Epstein's $636 million estate after his death. So there's a direct, un unbroken line of control from managing the charity to managing the final estate. Total continuity. There was never a point where the VI foundation was functionally separate from Jeffrey Epstein's personal financial operation. It was just a different pocket, one with significant tax advantages and a veneer of respectability. Let's focus on that first entity for a moment. The Couq Foundation. The name itself is an enigma. I've been through the archives, the old filings. Does anyone know what COUQ stands for? It's never documented. It's never defined in any of the incorporation papers we could find. It's just a string of letters. But the spending, unlike the name, is very clear. This wasn't just for funding, say, obscure scientific research. Not even close. Its ledger reads like a political playbook. The foundation was used as a pass through for political influence. We tracked about 1 1/2 million dollars in political donations flowing directly out of COUQ. Which raises red flags immediately because private foundations face very strict prohibitions on political campaigning. They do, but the donations are there in the records. Money going to the Democratic National Committee, checks written to Bill Clinton, to John Kerry. It allows him to operate on two tracks at once. He can enter a room and present himself as a science philanthropist. But he's also signaling that he's a political donor, a player. It builds a multifaceted shield of legitimacy. But the single most significant transaction we found in the COUQ files, the one that tells the clearest story, happens in a very specific month. January 2008. Right. You're talking about the Wexner transfer. The transfer to the YLK Charitable Fund. It's a massive number.$14.2 million in a single transaction. It moves from Epstein's COUQ foundation to ylk, which is the charitable entity controlled by Leslie Wexner. And the context of that date, January 2008, is everything. This is precisely when the non prosecution agreement in Florida is being finalized. He's about to be convicted. It's the financial unwinding from Wexner. We know that Wexner was, at that point, desperately trying to sever all ties. The sex crimes case was becoming public and toxic. This $14 million transfer doesn't read like a charitable donation from Epstein to Wexner's cause. It reads like a settlement, a closing of the books. It looks like a return of capital. It's Epstein paying Wexner back for something and using the architecture of charity to do it. Why do it that way? Through the foundations? Because it's efficient. If you pay him from your charity to his charity, there's no tax event on the transfer. It's a clean, quiet way to move a huge amount of money while maintaining the fiction of philanthropy. It's deeply cynical. So that's the infrastructure. A closed loop of control used for political access and, it seems, for settling private financial matters. Yeah. Now let's pivot to what this infrastructure bought him in the academic world. Harvard. The Harvard situation is a case study in how a relatively small amount of money, when leveraged correctly, can purchase an enormous amount of institutional credibility. The document trail here is primarily the report from Harvard's own Office of General Counsel. And to their credit, it is a brutally honest self assessment. They had no choice. The facts were too damning. The report lays out that pledge versus reality dynamic. We started with the public relations blitz in 2003 via PR Newswire, announces a $30 million pledge. That's the number that sticks. 30 million. It instantly makes him a top tier donor. It puts his name on the map at Harvard. But the OGC report confirms the ledger. Actual cash delivered six and a half million. Now a $23.5 million shortfall. Wouldn't the university's development office raise alarms about that? You'd think so, but six and a half million is still real money. And universities are accustomed to pledges being paid out over many years. What Epstein did was secure all the benefits of being a $30 million donor upfront for a fraction of the cost. And he didn't just buy goodwill. He bought a title. The title is crucial. In 2005, Harvard appoints him a visiting fellow in psychology. A man with no undergraduate degree. No academic credentials whatsoever. None. But that title gave him an ID card. It gave him a legitimate university sanctioned reason to be on campus, to use the facilities to meet with faculty and students. It was a badge of legitimacy. What's most disturbing in the OGC report for me is the timeline of his physical presence. The assumption would be that after his 2008 conviction, after he becomes a registered sex offender, that Harvard would sever all ties. The report shows the opposite happened. His access didn't stop. It intensified. And this is where Martin Nowak, the head of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, becomes the key enabler. He's the facilitator. The investigation found unequivocally that Nowak provided Epstein with a personal office within the peds space on campus. And this wasn't just a desk in a corner. The staff had a name for it. Jeffrey's Office. It was his space. He had a key. He would host meetings there. The report documents more than 40 separate visits by Epstein to the Harvard campus between 2010 and 2018. All after the conviction. Every single one. Think about that. Our registered sex offender is visiting Harvard five or six times a year for eight years, walking into his private office, being welcomed by a senior professor. Nowak didn't just give him physical space, he gave him digital real estate too. Right. He authorized a dedicated webpage on the official Program for Evolutionary Dynamics website. It was an homage to Epstein, framing him as a great science philanthropist. So if you were to Google Jeffrey Epstein's name in, say, 2015, what would you find? Noak wanted you to find that Harvard webpage first. He wanted Harvard Philanthropist to be the top search result to bury Florida sex offender. It was active reputation laundering, using Harvard's powerful domain authority as the detergent. Harvard eventually did act, but it was very, very late in the game. Years too late. It wasn't until March 2021 that the university formally shut down the entire program for Evolutionary Dynamics. And Nowak himself faced sanctions. He did. The university barred him from receiving new grants or taking on new graduate students for a period of two years. And the official statement from Harvard explicitly cited two providing Epstein with campus access, post conviction and creating that webpage. So the university's own review concluded its resources had been co opted. They admitted that Their physical campus and their digital reputation were hijacked to rehabilitate a convicted predator. It's a stunning admission, but if Harvard's failure was about providing access, MIT's was about engineering concealment. The MIT story is different. It's less about one professor and more about a systemic administrative effort to handle what they knew was toxic money. It is the key document. Here is the fact finding report done by the law firm Goodwin Proctor. It reads like an anatomy of institutional cognitive dissonance. It all starts with a specific term in their donor. Disqualified, Squalified. After the 2008 conviction, MIT's compliance system did what it was supposed to do. It flagged Jeffrey Epstein's donor file with that status. In the world of university fundraising, that is a red light. It means do not solicit funds, do not accept funds. The relationship is over. But that wasn't the end of it. It was the beginning of a workaround. The report details how senior staff, we're talking vice presidents and directors, convened to create a special process just for him. And the process was built around one word. Anonymity. Exactly. They decided they would continue to accept his money, but only on the condition that it was recorded as an anonymous gift, which is an inversion of the usual dynamic. Normally, a donor requests anonymity to be humble, right? Anonymity is usually to protect the donor from unwanted attention. In this case, the anonymity was designed to protect the university from reputational harm. They wanted the money, but the they couldn't have his name in the annual report. There's an email that serves as the smoking gun for this from Peter Cohen, who is the director of development for the Media Lab. The email is incredibly direct. It just says, quote, jeffrey, money needs to be anonymous, needs to be a requirement, a condition of acceptance. And the staff, they were all aware of this? The MIT Tech Review reported on the internal culture around this. They had a nickname for Epstein, Voldemort, or He who Must Not Be Named. Think about what that reveals. It shows a complete, universal understanding within the fundraising department that this person was radioactive. They knew his name could not appear on any official ledger because it would trigger the central compliance alarms they had just created a way to bypass. So they created a ghost protocol for a donor they knew was toxic. And that protocol wasn't just for Epstein's personal checks. This is the next evolution of his strategy. He realized his own name on a check was a liability. So he became a broker, a middleman. He became a gatekeeper to other much larger pools of money. This is what you could call the whale hunting phase. He understood that while MIT might get nervous about a$100,000 check from him, they would never, ever say no to millions from Bill Gates or Leon Black. So he positions himself as the connector. He tells the billionaires, I have the relationships at the MIT Media Lab. And he tells the Media Lab, I can bring you the whales. It's a brilliant move. In a predatory way, he makes himself indispensable without having to write the big checks himself. Let's look at the specifics. The Bill Gates donation. October 2014. A $2 million donation goes from Gates to the MIT Media Lab. Publicly, it looks straightforward, but the internal records, the ones Goodwin Proctor audited, tell a different story. Internally, MIT's own system logs that $2 million as an Epstein directed donation. Why? Because the email traffic show shows Epstein is the one who brokered the gift. He's the one emailing Joy Ito, the director of the Media Lab, saying, effectively, Bill is gonna send you 2 million. He acted as the agent, so he gets the institutional credit for a donation that isn't his money. Correct. And it's the same pattern with Leon Black, the head of Apollo Global Management. He directs five and a half million dollars to MIT research, again logged internally as Epstein facilitated. If you add it all up, Epstein himself gave about$850,000 directly to MIT after his conviction. But he directed another seven and a half million from other billionaires. So in the eyes of the development office, he's not an 850k donor. He's an $8.3 million asset. And that explains why they were willing to call him Voldemort and create a secret system to tick the money. The return on investment was too high to ignore for Epstein. It keeps him relevant. He's still a science philanthropist moving millions, even if it's not his own. The central figure at MIT in all this was the director of the Media Lab, Joi Ito. Ito was the recipient of this directed funding, and he became the public face of the scandal. The reporting from the New Yorker and Business Insider showed that his relationship with Epstein went beyond just securing funds for the lab. It became personal. Deeply personal. The records show Joy Ito received $1.25 million from Epstein. That went not to MIT, but to Ito's own private investment funds and ventures. That's a catastrophic conflict of. It's the fatal flaw. It explains the motive. Why would a celebrated university director go to such lengths to bypass his own institution's rules for a disqualified donor? Because he was personally profiting from the relationship and he wasn't the only one. There was also a physics professor, Seth Lloyd. Seth Lloyd admitted to accepting a $60,000 personal gift from Epstein back in 2005 and 2006. And crucially, he said the money was deposited into his personal bank account, not a university research account. That's a fundamental breach of academic ethics. It is. You cannot personally enrich yourself from a donor whose work you are potentially involved with. The moment these details were published in Ronan Farrow's New Yorker expose, the entire system of concealment imploded. How quickly did ito resign? Within 24 hours. The exposure to sunlight was something the arrangement could not survive. Let's follow the Leon Black connection, because that leads us to the third foundation, Gratitude America, and some truly staggering sums of money. The MIT money was just a fraction of the financial relationship between Black and Epstein. The primary source here is the investigation from the Senate Finance Committee under Senator Wyden, as well as a report commissioned by Black's own firm from the law firm just shirked. And the headline number from those reports is almost unbelievable.$158 million. That's the amount Leon Black paid Jeffrey Epstein personally between 2012 and 2017. 158 million. The official justification provided was that these were fees for advisory services. What kind of advisory services could possibly be worth that much? The claim is that it was for complex tax and estate planning advice. Specifically, Epstein supposedly advised Black on the use of grantor retain annuity trusts or G eras. But Epstein wasn't a licensed professional. He had no qualifications to give that kind of advice. He wasn't a cpa. He wasn't a tax attorney. He was a college dropout. The Senate Finance Committee, in its report, described the payments as inexplicably large. The Deshirt report, which again was paid for by Black, tries to justify it. It does. It argues that Epstein's advice on these jurats was so brilliant that it saved Black's family somewhere between $1 and$2 billion in future estate taxes. So they're arguing the fee was justified by the savings? That's the argument. But the legality and propriety of that fee structure for an unlicensed individual remains a central question for the Senate's investigation. It raises other possibilities. Was it a payoff? Was it hush money? The documents don't give a definitive answer, but the sum is so large it begs the question. And some of this money connected to Black then flows through Epstein's newest foundation. Right? Gratitude America. This is where the banking system's failure comes into view. Propublica and other outlets tracked a $10 million donation from Black into Gratitude America. But it wasn't a direct transfer. No, it was layered. The money went from Black to a shell company he controlled called BV70 LLC, and then from BV70 LLC to Gratitude America. It's a deliberate act of obfuscation. And the bank handling the Gratitude America account was Deutsche Bank? Yes. And their role in this led to a massive regulatory fine. In July of 2020, the New York Department of Financial Services fined Deutsche Bank $150 million. And a major component of that fine related to their handling of Epstein's accounts. Specifically Gratitude America. The bank had an elite unit called the Key Client Partners Group, which handled their wealthiest and most sensitive clients. And they had Epstein flagged as high risk. He was flagged all over their system. But the investigation found that the Key Client Partners Group consistently overrode the compliance warnings. They processed payments for Gratitude America that had no apparent charitable purpose. They let him treat the foundation's bank account like a personal slush fund. So the bank's internal controls failed. The regulators found that the bank effectively decided the revenue from the client was more important than the risk. They looked the other way. So we have foundations run as personal fiefdoms, universities building secret backdoors, military banks ignoring their own red flags. It all paints a picture of systemic failure. But what about the actual philanthropy itself? The money supposedly being given away? This is perhaps the most audacious part of the entire scheme. What we call phantom philanthropy. It's where the myth making was most aggressive. It starts with a regulatory change in 2008. A critical one. In 2008, in the midst of his legal troubles, the Jeffrey Epstein VI foundation lost its official 501c3 tax exempt statement status. With the IRS now, losing your tax exempt status sounds like a bad thing, A punishment For a legitimate charity, it would be a death sentence. But for Epstein, it was a liberation. How so? Because having 501C status requires you to file a public IRS form 990 each year. That form forces you to disclose your financials, your board members, and most importantly, a list of your major grantees. It enforces a minimum level of transparency. So by losing the static, he was freed from that disclosure requirement. The VI foundation became a black box. No one could compel him to show who he was giving money to or if he was giving any money at all. Opacity became a feature, not a bug. And into that vacuum of information, he and his PR team projected a completely fabricated reality. A massive one. His Personal website and a carefully managed Wikipedia page began to claim that his foundations donated $200 million per year to charity. 200 a year. That would place him among the most generous philanthropists on the planet. It's an astronomical number, but it was a complete fiction. An NBC News investigation did the forensic work to check that claim. They got access to some of the financial records from 2015 to 2017. And what was the actual number? The total giving over that three year period was approximately$1.84 million. So not 200 million a year? More like 600,000 a year. The claim was off by a factor of more than 300. It's less than 1% of what he publicly stated. It was a lie of staggering proportion. The NBC investigation didn't just look at the numbers, did they? They actually contacted the organizations Epstein listed as beneficiaries on his website. This is the most damning part. They contacted 56 different organizations that the Epstein 6 Foundation website claimed to be a proud supporter of. And the responses? 10 major household name institutions went on the record to say they had absolutely no record of ever receiving a donation from Epstein or his foundations. Who were some of these phantom recipients? The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Duke University, the Ohio State University. These are not small organizations that might misplace a check. You don't accidentally claim to be a major donor to the Met Museum. No, this was a calculated branding strategy. If you look at the archived version of his Foundation's website from 2014, it's a wall of logos from prestigious institutions. The entire purpose was to create an image of a science financier. And the goal of that image was to obscure the reality, to crowd out the sex offender label. It was search engine optimization for a criminal. He was building a firewall of fake philanthropy around his real activities. And for more than a decade, it largely worked. Okay, let's synthesize this. We've traced the infrastructure, the academic capture, the banking complicity, and the fabricated donations. What's the unified theory of Epstein's philanthropy? The consistent methodology is transactional leverage. He never engaged in altruism. Every charitable act was a purchase order for something he wanted. Before his conviction, it was more direct. Pre conviction, he used his own money to buy tangible assets of legitimacy. The visiting fellow title at Harvard is the perfect example. It was a direct transaction. Cash for a title and a campus id. And after the conviction? The strategy had to adapt. Post conviction, his own money became too toxic. So he pivoted. He began to use the promise of other people's money to maintain his Access and relevance. That's the MIT model. He wasn't the donor anymore. He was the indispensable broker who could bring in Gates in black. And throughout both phases, the element of control was absolute, never relinquished. That's why the role of IndyC and Khan is so fundamental. By staffing his boards with his own lawyer and accountant, he ensured there was never an independent voice to question the mission. To question why a charity was buying political access or serving as a pass through for settling personal debts. And the institutions? Harvard, mit, Deutsche Bank. What's the final verdict on their role? Their role was not passive. They weren't simply duped. They actively created administrative bypasses to accommodate him. The anonymity protocol at MIT wasn't a glitch in the system. It was a feature designed for a specific problematic user. They built a backdoor for a known sex offender. They did because the financial incentive was determined to outweigh the reputational and moral risk. In that sense, the system didn't fail. For a donor of his tier willing to leverage his connections, the system worked exactly as it was designed to. That's a chilling conclusion. That the safeguards are in fact selectively permeable. It forces a difficult question. How many other disqualified donors have Voldemort protocols built for them at major institutions? Right now, the documents we have only answer for this one case. An investigation for another day. Next time, the corporate board's the team that gave him legitimacy. We look at the public companies and retail empires that kept Epstein in the boardroom long after the police reports were public. The patterns of access and accommodation in the corporate world are just as pronounced. I have no doubt you can find all reference documents for this file at Epsteinfiles fm. Thank you for listening. 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 at Epsteinfiles 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.