"The Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics": We Investigate Harvard's Hidden Epstein Files (Part 1)
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What is the significance of Jeffrey Epstein's donation to Harvard?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
I just remember feeling so sick because we never asked to be affiliated with this monster.
Right after this ad.
You sound older. Do I? I should have asked you this, by the way, before I made you spend the last several months of your life helping me investigate a tip about Jeffrey Epstein. How old are you? 20.
Okay. I was probably 19 when we started it, though. Oh, God. Yeah. So you're class of what? 2027. I'm a kid. I'm a kid.
It is horrifying in ways I can't fully express that I graduated in 2007.
You're a hunk in this space.
You're real old. I'm 20 years older than you. That feels surreal. I feel like I'm looking at my mortality. And yet, one reason that I wanted to do this episode with you, Dhruv Patel, managing editor of the Harvard Crimson, and thank you for being here. Of course. I wanted to do this because everybody who works on my show can tell you, I have genuine nostalgia. for my time at Harvard. I was, in fact, there last month meeting with you. I was also speaking at the law school about investigative sports journalism. And the irony is that I constantly find myself investigating stories that will not wind up in the alumni magazine. And these are stories about Harvard alums like Steve Ballmer and Dennis Wong, the co-owners of the Clippers, for instance, the Aspiration co-founders, Joe Sandberg and Andre Czerny.
And this episode happens to fit quite neatly into a deeply awkward tradition because this is an episode about Jeffrey Epstein and Harvard University, which is also known as as your beat, Dhruv, at the Harvard Crimson.
That would be correct. I fear I've taken on the Epstein beat as of late, which maybe isn't the greatest thing to say, and it probably is not the reason why I joined the Crimson, but here we are.
It's really impressive to me as a washed old Crimson editor to see you guys not pull punches.
It has been difficult. It has been difficult, I'll say that. But I think at the end of the day, if we're doing our jobs right, our job as a college newspaper is to hold power and account, right? Accountability journalism's our job. It's our responsibility. And so in a way, I think of what we're doing as no different than what a local newspaper would do for a small little town. And so in this case, our town just happens to be Harvard. But that just makes our task more difficult, but it makes it all the more important as well.
So there are lots of superlatives you could use to describe the town known as Harvard University, but what you should know immediately is that it is the richest academic institution in the entire world, by far. Harvard's endowment hit a record $56.9 billion last June, which is a reflection of the university's incredibly meticulous approach to donations and donors. But our focus here is actually on a related superlative, Because according to the New York Times, the school that received the most money via donation from a donor named Jeffrey Epstein was Harvard University. And so what did Harvard know about Jeffrey Epstein and when exactly did they know it is the big question that I started this whole investigation with.
And after partnering with my old college newspaper, The Crimson, and granting anonymity to a couple of key sources due to fear of reprisal, and also unearthing a set of documents that have yet to see the light of day, the answer, it turns out, is big enough for us to tell you in two parts. The first today, the second tomorrow, but starting here with a quick disclosure of our own. Not all of the Crimson's coverage over the years has aged gracefully. I fear it has not. I want to take you to a story from 2003, three years before Epstein was indicted for the first time. And I'd like you to just read this quote about Jeffrey Epstein that Harvard math professor Martin Novak gave the Crimson. And this was the year, by the way, that I showed up on campus.
Here we go. He is one of the most pleasant philanthropists to deal with, Novak says.
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