Leon Botstein ran Bard College for half a century, and on Wednesday he quit every last job he had there, professorship included, after House Democrats revealed an email they say he sent to Jeffrey Epstein about a young woman. The line: "Is [Jane Doe] for me, or are you keeping her for yourself." Botstein says he never wrote it.
The Email Nobody Was Supposed to See
According to The Guardian, Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Madeleine Dean sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel laying out what committee Democrats found in the unredacted Epstein files. The email was redacted by the Department of Justice in the public release. Democrats on the committee can see the unredacted version. They say it came from Botstein's then Bard account, [email protected].
The lawmakers called it "startling." That is a restrained word for a college president allegedly asking a convicted sex offender whether a young woman was available to him or being kept for Epstein's personal use.
Here's the part that should make your skin crawl. The email was sent in May 2014, right around the time Epstein sent the young woman to meet Botstein, supposedly so he could assess her musical talents. Her musical talents. Sure.
Who Jane Doe Was Supposed to Be
The Democrats' letter describes a young foreign model and aspiring vocalist who, they say, was being groomed by Epstein throughout 2014. Records in the files indicate Epstein was offering her advice and help with her plans to attend school and build a career in the US.
What he actually did, according to the lawmakers, was pressure her into sex education and massage courses and "employ" her while sexually abusing her. They wrote that "by all appearances, Epstein was trafficking this young woman across state and international lines by mid-2014." She was sent to Europe, Canada, and multiple destinations in the US.
The letter further alleges Epstein "used his relationship with Leon Botstein to convince Jane Doe that she could have a successful musical career after modeling." Read that again. The pitch to a young woman being abused was that a respected college president could open doors for her. That's what a famous name and a prestigious institution were worth to Epstein. They were bait.
Botstein Says He Didn't Write It
Botstein denies everything. He called the allegations "untrue," including "an email that I did not author or send." He also said that "any assertion that I knew of or was involved in Epstein's criminal behavior is wrong."
He then resigned from every Bard-affiliated position anyway, including his professorship and his roles in the college's music programs. His stated reason was that he doesn't want "even false allegations" to put the institution at risk. The executive committee of Bard's board voted unanimously to accept the resignation.
You can believe that's a man protecting his school. You can also notice that people with nothing to hide don't usually clear out every office they hold in a single evening. We don't know whether the email is authentic. We know the people who can see the unredacted file say it is, and we know the man they're accusing says it isn't.
A Spokesperson Already Said It Had "Absolutely Nothing" To Do With Bard
This is where the timeline gets ugly for Bard. The Guardian asked the college about the May 2014 message back in April. It appeared in the redacted files as an email Epstein forwarded to himself, originally sent from an address that showed only the name "President."
A Bard spokesperson responded that the message "has absolutely nothing to do with Bard College or President Botstein." That is a confident denial about an email whose sender was, at that point, hidden behind a redaction.
Now committee Democrats say the unredacted version came from the president's account. So either the spokesperson knew something the public didn't, or the college dismissed a question it had no way of answering. Neither is a great look for an institution that says it is now conducting "a full review."
Fifty Years, a Pile of Warnings, and a Dozen Whistleblowers
None of this landed out of nowhere. Botstein stepped down as president in May after an independent review by the WilmerHale law firm found that his frequent interactions with Epstein "could have alerted" him to the possibility that he and Bard would be facilitating Epstein's abuse of women. Botstein had even visited Epstein's island. In April, he told staff there was no way he could have known Epstein was "reprehensible," and predicted he'd be cleared of any hint of impropriety. Epstein, remember, was a convicted sex offender during their dealings.
Raskin and Dean say that more than a dozen whistleblowers have given the committee allegations of "decades of unpunished sexual misconduct at Bard." Board chair Brandon Weber responded that the college president hasn't had unilateral authority over Title IX cases since the 2015-16 school year, which is a very specific way to answer a question about decades.
Then there's the Justice Department. The lawmakers wrote that the evidence "meets the federal standard for opening a criminal investigation," yet DOJ and the FBI "apparently had it for at least 18 months without investigating Botstein." They are demanding an investigation into Botstein and other potential co-conspirators.
The Dingo Take
A man doesn't walk away from fifty years of his own life in one evening over an email he says is fake.
Maybe he truly is protecting Bard. Maybe the email is a forgery or a misattribution, and the review will say so. Botstein has denied it, and he gets the benefit of that denial until someone proves otherwise. But the pattern here is the same one we keep seeing with the Epstein files. A powerful man's name turns up, the institution insists it's nothing, and then the redactions come off and the nothing turns into something.
The bigger scandal is the 18 months. Democrats say DOJ and the FBI sat on this evidence while Blanche and Patel ran the show, and the people who promised the public total transparency on Epstein were apparently fine leaving the unredacted version in a drawer. Why does it take a House minority and a letter to get a criminal referral on a document the government already had? Somebody at the Justice Department needs to answer that under oath, and the answer shouldn't take another year and a half.
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