"The Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics": We Investigate Harvard's Hidden Epstein Files (Part 1)

How did an unforgettable donation from the most notorious pedophile in America get past the most prestigious university's self-investigation? And why did Harvard allegedly ask to keep it confidential? Pablo and The Harvard Crimson's Dhruv Patel unearth internal financials, the secret role of president Lawrence Summers, plus new Jeffrey Epstein correspondence — and speak to the team that "never asked to be affiliated with this monster." • More from The Harvard Crimson: Women’s Rugby Players Were Told to Keep a $25,000 Gift Quiet. The Donor Was Epstein. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/30/epstein-rugby-donation/ (Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre and today we're gonna find out what this sound is.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  I just remember feeling so sick because we never asked to be affiliated with this monster.

• 0:17Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm Chris Richards, general manager at Safran Volkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend Happy.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Happy Harry Turner, special finance manager at SafranCredit.com. If you're in an open Chapter 13 bankruptcy, recently filed a Chapter 7, or you've been turned down because of credit challenges, don't give up. For nearly 30 years, I've helped people get reliable transportation when others said no. Visit SafranCredit.com. Remember, I'm not happy unless you are.

• 1:24Pablo Torre?

  This episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach, and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools. It's used by sales teams of all sizes, from small businesses to larger

• 2:09Pablo Torre?

  organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at Apollo.io. That's Apollo.io.

• 2:32Pablo Torre?

  You sound older.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Do I?

• 2:34Pablo Torre?

  I should have asked you this, by the way, before I made you spend the last couple of months of your life helping me investigate a tip about Jeffrey Epstein. How old are you?

• 2:43Speaker 04

  20.

• 2:44Pablo Torre?

  Okay.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  I was probably 19 when we started it, though.

• 2:47Pablo Torre?

  Oh, God.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:48Pablo Torre?

  So you're class of what?

• 2:50Speaker 04

  2027. I'm a kid. I'm a kid.

• 2:53Pablo Torre?

  It is horrifying in ways I can't fully express that I graduated in 2007.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  You're a hunk in this space. You're real old.

• 3:01Pablo Torre?

  I'm 20 years older than you.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  That feels surreal.

• 3:04Pablo Torre?

  I feel like I'm looking at my mortality.

• 3:08Pablo Torre?

  And yet, one reason that I wanted to do this episode with you, Drew Patel, managing editor of the Harvard Crimson, and thank you for being here.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 3:16Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 3:27Pablo Torre?

  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 Charney. 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 your beat, Drew, at the Harvard Crimson.

• 4:04Speaker 04

  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.

• 4:12Pablo Torre?

  It's really impressive to me as a washed old Crimson editor to see you guys not pull punches.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  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 is 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.

• 4:48Pablo Torre?

  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?

• 5:33Pablo Torre?

  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.

• 6:07Speaker 04

  I fear it has not.

• 6:09Pablo Torre?

  I want to take you to a story from 2003, three years before Epstein was indicted for the first time. 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.

• 6:25Speaker 04

  Here we go. "He is one of the most pleasant philanthropists to deal with," Novak says. "Unlike many people who support science, he supports science without any conditions. There are not any disadvantages to associating with him."

• 6:39Pablo Torre?

  I don't know if there's a worse take you could have in 2026 than there are not any disadvantages to associating with Jeffrey Epstein.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  I don't think this looks great.

• 6:48Pablo Torre?

  And the reason, by the way, for people who haven't been keeping up with your reporting, you know, it's exemplified in an article that you co-authored last November about then Harvard professor and then board member of OpenAI, Larry Summers. Could you please read that headline for us here?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  As Summers sought clandestine relationship with woman he called a mentee, Epstein was his, quote, "wingman."

• 7:12Speaker 05

  Summers appears to ask Epstein for relationship advice. Epstein refers to himself as Summers' "pretty good wingman." Some of you will have seen my statement of regret, expressing my shame. This now viral video from Tuesday shows Summers addressing the scandal with his class, a day after he published a statement announcing he'd be stepping back from his public commitments, but at the time, he planned to continue teaching. Lola D'Acentis is his student and recorded the video.

• 7:40Speaker 06

  What's important to remember is that even before this, Larry Summers was known to be a creep.

• 7:46Pablo Torre?

  And so I just gotta jump in here to point out that Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, was the president of Harvard when I showed up as a freshman. Summers was running the school. His name was also literally on the money we had in our pockets. And so to just give the audience, I think, a rough sense of how important Harvard was as a brand to the making and the marketing of Jeffrey Epstein, who, by the way, was never a student but loved wearing Harvard sweatshirts, not totally dissimilar from the one that you Drew were wearing right now, although.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  You know, unintentional.

• 8:19Pablo Torre?

  And I need you to do something you've done a lot in the last several months. If you could just search the Epstein files for us, how often, at the time of this recording, does the word Harvard appear?

• 8:34Speaker 04

  Well, there's 9,811 hits for the word Harvard. Sizable, to say the least. That's not a number that I think the school loves to advertise. And there's a whole collection here. There's Harvard News and Updates, which seems like a press release, Harvard Trip, Key for Harvard. It's the whole gamut.

• 8:54Pablo Torre?

  And this gamut is the thing that brings us to the file, the new document that made me reach out to you in the first place.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 9:02Pablo Torre?

  Because this is a document that is not one of those 9,811 mentions in the Epstein files. This document has never been referenced in public at all, actually. And this may be because, along the very bottom of this document, Drew, which I am holding in my hands and you also have in front of you, it says what?

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Confidential, Harvard University.

• 9:26Pablo Torre?

  And across the very top, for those who are not watching on YouTube or Apple Podcast video, what do you see?

• 9:32Speaker 04

  At the very top, we've got Harvard's iconic logo with the crest.

• 9:36Pablo Torre?

  The one that says Veritas on it, the same word on the sweatshirt Jeffrey Epstein is wearing in those photos. And what does it say right beneath that?

• 9:46Speaker 04

  Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics.

• 9:54Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, that is the account term, full name, as listed. The Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics, which, according to the same document, began in 2004. It's a baffling and disturbing concept to learn of such a fund, of such a document. And that's in part because in 2005, a year after this fund was born, Palm Beach Police began investigating Epstein after the parents of a 14-year-old girl alleged that Epstein had paid her for a massage and molested her. And there's also the fact that, as federal prosecutors later uncovered, Epstein had started creating a, quote, "vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit in locations, including New York and Palm Beach." This

• 10:38Pablo Torre?

  from, quote, "at least in or about 2002." And yet, no one anywhere has ever mentioned the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics. Not in public. And in case anyone's wondering, I could not find any other records of Epstein making personal donations to any other college sports programs either. And in fact, having now pored over the Epstein files, I can tell you that Jeffrey Epstein's personal opinion of sports as a concept in general is pretty clear. For instance, this is Jeffrey Epstein after receiving an opportunity to quote, "play tennis with Rafa Nadal on Sir Richard Branson's private island", exclamation point. Epstein emails Branson in 2013, Drew, to say what?

• 11:24Speaker 04

  As you recall, I have little interest in sports, but will gladly, if appropriate, bring some friends that I promise will not be too difficult to look at just for a few hours that you could designate.

• 11:34Pablo Torre?

  At one point, Epstein also told one of the pioneering computer scientists behind artificial intelligence, this being Harvard's own Marvin Minsky, simply this.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  I hate sports.

• 11:46Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, followed by the two commas because punctuation.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  Brevity is a virtue.

• 11:50Pablo Torre?

  Look, message on that front received. And so what you do when you're baffled is, of course, you keep digging. So how should we be describing you?

• 12:01Speaker 06

  I am a longtime employee of the university, working primarily with donor relations, information, and fundraising data.

• 12:11Pablo Torre?

  And so this current Harvard employee, Drew, agreed to go on tape with us if we could modulate their voice, which you just heard. What level of access did you have to Harvard's internal fundraising database?

• 12:25Speaker 06

  Total knowledge from various angles in terms of relationship building and having a total view of a donor. And that means their professional life, their relationships, their interests in the university and outside of the university. The data that they maintain is very comprehensive.

• 12:46Pablo Torre?

  But the big thing to know about this employee is that they directly worked with donor information, including information about the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics, the full text of which my source could also access from inside of the university's fundraising system.

• 13:03Speaker 06

  Quote, "The gift of Jeffrey E. Epstein to establish the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics. The income and principal of the fund will be used at the discretion of the Director of Athletics and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Women's Athletics Club Sports, with a preference for the women's rugby."

• 13:19Pablo Torre?

  But just as a reporter, Drew, the word rugby also is just like, what the [bleep]? Like, why is it earmarked for women's rugby?

• 13:29Speaker 04

  It's also a club sport at the time. You're not talking basketball.

• 13:33Pablo Torre?

  Right. And so this is where I need to mention something that is very important from Harvard's point of view, I think, which is that during the summer of 2019, this was after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and then died in prison here in Manhattan, student journalists like you at The Crimson had been digging into the university's relationship with him. And Harvard knew that it needed to deal with what was becoming at that point already this massive reputational and ethical and political crisis. And so in September of 2019, I read this story in The Crimson.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Here's the lead. Harvard's Office of the General Counsel will conduct a review of billionaire donor and convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein's donations to the university. Vice President and General Counsel Diane E. Lopez announced in an email to Harvard affiliates Friday afternoon.

• 14:21Pablo Torre?

  And so how would you describe the promise of the university's review?

• 14:25Speaker 04

  So that promise came after alumni, faculty, students, even other donors basically said, Harvard, you gotta do something here, right? You gotta look into the ties that this guy has to the university. You have to take some sort of action. And so the response that the university said is, okay, we're going to launch a comprehensive investigation. So the promise was meant to be sweeping.

• 14:45Pablo Torre?

  This is the report, the self-report that Harvard published in 2020, the next year. It is the 27-page product of that self-investigation. It is the closest thing Harvard has offered to a central document of accountability. And immediately, what you'll notice as we flip through it is that what is not mentioned anywhere in this self-report is the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics, or rugby, or anything I could discern related to that donation, right? I mean, that's just not in here.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  Nothing.

• 15:17Pablo Torre?

  And so what I wanted to find out was how exactly a donation like this with this kind of title, as unforgettable as it is, from the most notorious pedophile in America, could have possibly gotten past Harvard's fleet of lawyers and investigators, which led us into this even deeper rabbit hole, which accounts for all the documents now strewn across this desk, because I eventually obtained exclusively another stack of documents. And this is a collection, Drew, that I've come to think of in our own way as Harvard's own version of the Epstein files, these documents that were

• 15:55Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 15:55Pablo Torre?

  kept secret for decades, for far too long, I think we would argue.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 16:01Pablo Torre?

  Until today.

• 16:20Pablo Torre?

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. With Apple Card, you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases like groceries, or merch, or tickets to the game. Plus, it can be used anywhere MasterCard is accepted. No matter your team, no matter where you shop, Apple Card is here to help you tackle game day. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 16:53Speaker 06

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana.

• 17:12Pablo Torre?

  Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. Thirty-three presidents.

• 17:24Speaker 06

  I called the president at 4:30 in the morning and he answered.

• 17:27Pablo Torre?

  Seven decades in space.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  We want to see what's beyond the next star.

• 17:31Pablo Torre?

  Sixty Super Sundays.

• 17:32Speaker 06

  They were probably the best team in the league every single year.

• 17:34Pablo Torre?

  Fifty-three thousand, five hundred puzzles.

• 17:37Speaker 06

  I use a different starting word every day.

• 17:39Pablo Torre?

  Twenty-five thousand recipes.

• 17:41Speaker 06

  And I love a one-pan recipe because I don't love washing pans.

• 17:44Pablo Torre?

  The New York Times, celebrating 175 years of helping you understand the world. Subscribe now for a special offer at nytimes.com/subscribe.

• 18:01Pablo Torre?

  So before we return to the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics, I would like you to help explain the document that Harvard actually wanted the public to see.

• 18:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 18:10Pablo Torre?

  So the cover page on this document here reads what?

• 18:14Speaker 04

  Report concerning Jeffrey E. Epstein's connections to Harvard University.

• 18:19Pablo Torre?

  And who are the folks with the bylines down below?

• 18:23Speaker 04

  Three people. Diana Lopez, who I mentioned before, that's Harvard's top lawyer, general counsel. Second is Ara Gergens-Horn, who's an attorney for Harvard. And then you've got Martin Murphy, who is with a firm called Follyhog.

• 18:36Pablo Torre?

  Yes, and it's dated May 2020. And, look, I love, on some level, an internal investigation because we talk a lot about such investigations on this show. We talk about organizations in sports like the NBA, like the NFLPA, the Players Union, purporting to hold themselves accountable by paying friendly law firms to, quote-unquote, "investigate them." And in September of 2019, Harvard president at the time, Lawrence Bacow, had called Epstein's crimes, quote, "utterly abhorrent, repulsive and reprehensible," end quote, and he further expressed, quote, "profound regret about Harvard's past association with them." And so the tonnage of work, the stats, the math on what the report laid out.

• 19:22Pablo Torre?

  Could you please quote that?

• 19:23Speaker 04

  Since September, we've interviewed more than 40 individuals, including senior leaders of the university, staff in Harvard's Office of Alumni Affairs and Development, faculty members, and others. We also collected and conducted targeted searches and reviews of more than 250,000 pages of documents, including records from the Development Office and pursuant to procedures the university adopted in 2014, amended in 2015, emails from a number of faculty and staff.

• 19:49Pablo Torre?

  And it goes on like that.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 19:51Pablo Torre?

  All of this, making it very curious, of course, that the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics is not mentioned in any way. But what I can now report is that the reason for omission is not because Harvard's lawyers did not know about the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics. And we know this because of an email sent by Harvard's lawyers in December of 2019 that we have also uncovered in our investigation.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  So, December 2nd, 2019, at 10:18 in the morning, it's a Monday morning. Martin Murphy, who we talked about, the guy from the other firm, Folly Hogs, says, "Dear Professor Reel, the Harvard Development Office records indicate that in 2004, one of Epstein's charities gave $25,000 for the support of Harvard Women's Athletics with a preference for the gift to benefit women's rugby. I've seen online that you were the president of the Women's Rugby Club that year. I was hoping you might have a few minutes to speak to me about this as we are trying to run down as many details as we can. If you could get back to me, I would appreciate it. Thanks, Martin Murphy."

• 20:54Pablo Torre?

  And so, we called up the woman who received that email, the aforementioned Professor Reel, the president at the time of the Women's Rugby Club, then known as Radcliffe Rugby in 2004. And we asked if she might be willing to go on tape.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm Emily Reel. I'm the Kelly Miller Professor of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins. And from 2002 to 2003...

• 21:15Speaker 06

  2006, I played for Radcliffe Rugby as a Harvard undergraduate and I served as club president for two years in that interval.

• 21:23Pablo Torre?

  When was the first time you found out that Jeffrey Epstein had anything to do with the sport that you loved and played?

• 21:32Speaker 06

  When I received an email at my job at Johns Hopkins from a lawyer who had been hired by Harvard to dig into Epstein's donations to Harvard College and University. So, surprise and confusion were some initial responses.

• 21:49Pablo Torre?

  And what Professor Emily Reel immediately did, understandably, was get a bunch of her rugby teammates from her college days on a giant email thread to try and get to the bottom of what in the [bleep] this lawyer was talking about. And one of Emily's teammates, who was an officer of the team at the time, one of two other rugby players that we've interviewed, she was willing to go on tape as well, ultimately, if we could keep her anonymous.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  She sent an email around to a lot of us, "Does anybody remember this?" And as we sort of collectively pieced this memory together, I mean, I just remember feeling so sick because we never asked to be affiliated with this monster. And it was shocking. It was shocking.

• 22:40Pablo Torre?

  So one key bit of context to understand here is that the Harvard brand, of course, indicates a certain level of fanciness and money, but Harvard Women's Rugby was born in 1982.

• 22:52Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 22:53Pablo Torre?

  This was not yet a R C sport back in 2004. And so, yes, Jeffrey Epstein was donating to a club sport. A club sport that was basically, in a word, Drew, how would you describe it?

• 23:04Speaker 04

  I'd say ragtag.

• 23:05Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna go with broke.

• 23:07Speaker 04

  Oh, close enough.

• 23:08Speaker 06

  So we were always sort of scrapping for extra money, fundraising for money. We were having people sign up for psychology studies. We were cleaning toilets in the dorm rooms of other students. So we just desperately needed...

• 23:20Speaker 04

  The money, this was something everybody could do. When we had an away game, we would walk down to Central Square and rent cars from Enterprise. That was sort of our existence. You know, meanwhile, Harvard also had a men's team, which was also a club team, but they'd been around for over a hundred years and had an endowment. And would take coach buses to games, which sounded a lot nicer than what we were doing.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  We were friends with the men's team. They played on the field right after us. But the disparity was so visible in their ability to hire a bus to take them to tournaments. And we would be driving ourselves and using personal cars. And the quality of their uniforms, the equipment that they were able to get. There's no way that we with our scrappy fundraising can make up for a hundred years of alumni. Who are already supporting the men's team.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  So this is basically the equivalent, it seems at least, of a billion year donating to rec league in a small town with 15 people.

• 24:29Pablo Torre?

  As a former Crimson sports writer who was on campus at the time, writing about these sports. I can vouch for the truth of this financial disparity. And so what happens is that in 2004, a few of the women's rugby players decided to point out the existence of this disparity. To someone important.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Lawrence H. Summers.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  So President Summers did Q and A sessions at the different undergraduate houses. And my bold teammates confronted him at one of these sessions. And essentially asked him, what would he do if he were in the position of the women's rugby team? And as a result of this question, my teammate was invited by Summers to send an email making the case. Which she did very persuasively.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And it was in the wake of sending that email that we got what we all thought was extraordinarily good news and vindication of our appeal, that there was this $25,000 sort of angel gift, right, as people think of it, that was going to fund our team.

• 25:53Pablo Torre?

  Andrew, again, I think it's worth noting the larger context of the PR issue that President Lawrence H. Summers was facing, beginning to face, at this moment in Harvard's history, especially with women on campus. And again, I remember this because I was in college when all this [BLEEP] was happening.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Harvard has had a lot of reckonings about its gender inequality over the last 20 years. And a lot of it actually started in the wake of President Summers' completely ridiculous and inappropriate remarks about women in science.

• 26:34Pablo Torre?

  At the end of the 2003-2004 academic year, this is according to The Crimson, yeah, 26 professors signed a letter to Larry Summers, calling on Harvard to reverse the downward trend in tenure offers made to women, to female professors. In 2006, even more famously, Larry Summers had to resign from the presidency of Harvard because he had said at a January 2005 economics conference that women might lack an intrinsic aptitude for math and science.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  My main take on Summers' comments had been, "You are actually the person in power, and you don't have any self-awareness of how your remarks create that system of inequality. Let's start there. Let's start there with that utter lack of self-awareness."

• 27:31Pablo Torre?

  And so at this point in his tenure, with that pressure on campus percolating, President Summers, we are told, came up with a solution for a specific issue with financial inequality in women's sports.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  His response is the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics.

• 27:49Pablo Torre?

  Which was not a direct $25,000 donation to women's rugby, according to Emily and her teammates that we've talked to. It was instead what?

• 27:59Speaker 04

  It was a fund that they could draw money down from. And over the years, when they needed to go to games, that they needed new T-shirts and uniforms and whatnot, they would draw down about $1,000 a year, is what Emily told us.

• 28:09Pablo Torre?

  And again, that's basically nothing to billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, the self-proclaimed wingman to Larry Summers. But it was something to this team, whose players were, again, cleaning toilets in order to rent cars to drive to playoff games. But something that became very clear in our reporting is that the name Jeffrey Epstein, for some reason, was never disclosed to the players at the time. The players only knew of one person responsible for this act of generosity.

• 28:42Speaker 06

  We only ever heard about it as money from Summers. Epstein's name was not mentioned. The name of the fund is not in our records anywhere. We were told to keep it quiet, which is interesting now.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  We were asked to keep news of the gift confidential, which also we, I guess, understood because there's only so many funds to go around. And, you know, maybe this was meant to be, you know, a one-time, small step in rebalancing some of the funding.

• 29:16Pablo Torre?

  And so when that Harvard lawyer just cold emails Professor Reel in December of 2019, ahead of the big self-report, she agrees to get on the phone with them, having talked to her old teammates now, having done that whole email chain. And she says, yeah, I'll fill in the blanks.

• 29:32Speaker 06

  So we told him everything that I'm telling you right now. You know, what the lawyer did with that.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Information I don't know. We just had the one phone call.

• 29:41Pablo Torre?

  And when we asked Harvard why the self-report never mentioned the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics, despite hearing so much of what we have now told you in this episode already, a Harvard spokesperson declined comment, but confirmed these facts. The 2020 report acknowledged 26 total gifts from Epstein received between 1997 and 2008. Included in these 26 gifts was a 2004 gift of $25,000, with the funds directed to support women's athletics. And in 2020, the unspent balance on that 2004 gift, including interest earned, was part of the $20937 that Harvard donated to two organizations that support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault.

• 30:25Pablo Torre?

  But all this just made me more curious, for obvious reasons, about what surprised the rugby players the most when it came to what was not included in the self-report that Harvard eventually publishes, the central document of accountability, which, yes, they eagerly read when it came out in 2020.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Larry Summers not being mentioned in the report, now knowing what we know, is pretty unbelievable. I would say I am a little surprised that then-President Summers was not mentioned more prominently in that report. You know, as far as we knew, this money was coming from him. It was coming from his office, the office of the college president, university president. The president is absolutely fundraiser number one. And the fact that a whole named fund was created, that all of the paperwork to set up a giving vehicle and a designated fund

• 31:25Speaker 01

  and all of that clearly had something to do with this relationship between Summers and Epstein. Why did he choose, out of all of the many wealthy donors who could have been tapped to help engage this situation? Why did you choose this to help address the inequality of this team of righteous, powerful, smart women?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Did you get some twisted pleasure from that? And, you know, who, who knows, right? I hope not. I hope not.

• 32:07Pablo Torre?

  When we asked Larry Summers' spokesperson why he specifically chose Jeffrey Epstein to solve the women's rugby fundraising issue, Summers' spokesperson did not address that question in particular, but did say, quote, "All fundraising by Larry Summers involving Epstein took place during Summers' presidency, which ended prior to Epstein's 2006 arrest," end quote. Larry Summers is mentioned in the 2020 self-report exactly once.

• 32:35Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 32:36Pablo Torre?

  And it's, it's, it's completely in passing. It's the part where Harvard describes how the official website for the university's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics contained the following text.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  "The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics was established in 2003 by Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers following a imaginative proposal by Jeffrey Epstein and Benedict Ross."

• 32:57Pablo Torre?

  And so, look, in my view, in our view, I think it's safe to say, there were a couple of necessary questions that emerged. How clear was it to the university at the time of this 2019-2020 investigation that reviewed 250,000 documents? That former President Larry Summers was actually the point person on something like the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics? And also, that Summers was the seemingly generous face of that $25,000 donation to the rugby team who were told to keep the existence of that donation, quote unquote, "quiet." And so, when we asked Harvard's spokesperson and Summers' spokesperson why the rugby players had been instructed to keep the donations quiet in the first place,

• 33:41Pablo Torre?

  and if it was because Summers was trying to hide Jeffrey Epstein's name and/or take credit for the donation to women's sports, neither spokesperson offered comment on those questions. But Summers' spokesperson did say this, quote,

• 33:57Pablo Torre?

  All fundraising by Larry Summers as Harvard president was done in line with university procedures and with the full involvement of the development office and the university's legal, financial, and due diligence functions. His fundraising activities reflected the priorities of various university departments and faculties, including athletics, which during his tenure was seeking to expand women's club sports to bring them on par with men's club athletics. In his official capacity, he routinely sent letters to donors thanking them for their financial support. End quote. We also went back to our source inside the university, who we talked to before, who happened to be across all of this fundraising data when the self-investigation was taking place.

• 34:41Pablo Torre?

  And I asked what they thought about the omissions of both the women's athletics fund and Summers himself, both of which the university seems to have known about, given how "easily accessible" this data was inside the fundraising system.

• 34:56Speaker 06

  I kind of felt like you have to be kidding me. Like, there was a moment of obvious frustration and just, I guess, defeat. I think an abandonment, too, of sort of a shared expectation everybody at the university has around certain values and certain things that are just non-negotiable. An omission of this nature feels like a betrayal to everyone here. There was an element of having someone stick their finger in your eye.

• 35:43Speaker 06

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000.

• 35:52Speaker 07

  $1,000. Help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star Trust Pilot Reviews. OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh. Anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them.

• 36:26Speaker 06

  Everybody, listen up.

• 36:27Speaker 07

  Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

• 36:42Speaker 06

  Are you the kind of sports fan that wants to dig into the story behind the stats?

• 36:46Pablo Torre?

  Then join us daily on The Athletic Live, where we'll be live on YouTube to cover all the sports stories you can't stop talking about.

• 36:53Speaker 06

  On game days, we watch the biggest matchups live alongside the athletic's most tapped in reporters.

• 36:59Pablo Torre?

  Or come hang on an off night for an inside look at how headlines happen.

• 37:02Speaker 06

  We want you dropping questions in the chat and we'll bring answers straight from the source.

• 37:07Pablo Torre?

  The Athletic Live is presented by Google Gemini. Subscribe now on YouTube. What is your sense of what Harvard sensitivity around Epstein would have been in 2004?

• 37:27Speaker 04

  It's a good question. I mean, the reporting on Epstein's crimes really only starts coming around 2005 when the Palm Beach incident happens. And so could one argue that Harvard knew absolutely nothing in 2004? Maybe you could argue that. Could one also argue that like some people were alleging that the crimes that did occur happened in the early 2000s and 2001, 2002? That's also true. So there's a world in which the fact that they were told to keep it quiet is just a byproduct of a lucrative gift.

• 37:56Pablo Torre?

  Something that I also really got a view of inside of this system, thanks to all of these documents, is how massive and how meticulous Harvard's fundraising operation is. For people who don't understand how Harvard works as a corporation, literally called the Harvard Corporation.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:17Pablo Torre?

  How would you explain that to someone on the outside?

• 38:20Speaker 04

  It's a behemoth. You've got hundreds of people across schools. You've got probably dozens embedded in each individual school. So the medical school's got its own people that are trying to raise money from all of the folks in biotech, for instance, and the law school's got its own batch of people. So it's a behemoth. You've got maybe more than 500 people whose job it is to find leads, connect with the people, ask them for money, solicit the donations, and call it a win in their books effectively.

• 38:47Pablo Torre?

  The notion that there are all these people inside the university who are watching with an internal view, what seems to be an unfolding story, a scandal, and yet what is communicated to the outside does not reflect their knowledge is where it gets interesting.

• 39:07Speaker 04

  100%.

• 39:08Pablo Torre?

  And I just want to pause here to acknowledge that we're not the only ones who have noticed that there are some conspicuous gaps in Harvard's self-investigation. Just last week, this was weeks after we taped with that university source, The New York Times wrote that the self-report, quote, "did not explore a number of clues suggesting that Mr. Epstein's ties to people at Harvard went far deeper," end quote. It quoted Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who said, quote, "There were people who made the decision to protect Larry Summers. Who are they?" end quote. How do you describe who was in charge of the investigation?

• 39:45Speaker 04

  The general counsel's office in consultation with the office of the president, because Bakau was the one that commissioned it, right? He's the one that said, okay, get me the report, figure out what's going on here, and I'm going to give you the final green light. And so the final person that saw the report before it was sent was Bakau. The person that sent the report to everyone was Bakau. So it was the office of the president that was involved. Maybe the actual fact finding was, you know, the Martin Murphy guy and Diane Lopez and the people, the lawyers did that work, but it's both.

• 40:12Pablo Torre?

  Right. And so this takes us back to our original question. What did Harvard, the office of the president, the highest levels of university, what did they really know before publishing this thing? And when did they know it? And when we asked a Harvard spokesperson if their self investigation involved interviewing Summers, really asking the questions that we've been asking, they declined to comment. But one other thing I think people should know about Harvard's fundraising system is that there are these pieces of internal information called contact reports.

• 40:46Speaker 06

  A contact report is a logging of any communication with a potential donor or someone with a relationship to Harvard. It could be as small as a text, a chance encounter in town, or it could be solicitations for gifts. It's basically just a way to put any type of interaction that you have into a text form that somebody in the future managing the relationship can have the context for whatever happened.

• 41:16Pablo Torre?

  A contact report, in other words, is exactly the sort of thing that an investigative journalist or a lawyer, a legal investigator, who's trying to determine with the benefit of full hindsight at this point, the last time anyone from Harvard made contact with Jeffrey Epstein before Jeffrey Epstein created the Jeffrey Epstein Fund for Men's Athletics on June 9, 2004,

• 41:37Pablo Torre?

  might have seen.

• 41:39Speaker 06

  Okay, so this is from April 15, 2004. That's the date on the contact report. The contact type for this is a presidential visit. The text of the contact report is President Summers flew from NYC to Boston on April 15, 2004, using Jeffrey Epstein's plane.

• 41:56Pablo Torre?

  I am not so numb, despite reading all of the Epstein files, to not have been staggered when you see this in print.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  Yep, and this is also in Harvard's internal system that everyone has access to. So if you search for Summers or you search for Epstein, pretty easy to find it.

• 42:14Pablo Torre?

  You see the mention of the plane ride, which also did not make it into Harvard's self-report either. For the record, but we can actually do something interesting here because of the Epstein flight logs. We can cross check that date, that plane ride with government exhibit 662-RR, which is an exhibit in the case of the United States versus Glenn Maxwell, where you can see what drove.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  You can see a handwritten note where it says JE, who of course is Jeffrey Epstein, comma, and you've seen Larry Summers' full name spelled capitalized, and it quite literally lists JFK to Bedford Airport, which is in Bedford, Massachusetts.

• 42:55Pablo Torre?

  Which is the desired airport for a private plane.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 42:59Pablo Torre?

  When you're trying to get to Harvard University. And so that is what was referenced in the contact report that was logged right before the fund was registered inside of the Harvard system. And if anyone might be wondering about the contact report, right after the Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund from his athletics was established, there is a letter dated July 21st, 2004, which we also obtained.

• 43:27Speaker 06

  So the text of the body of this looks like it's a mailed letter. Dear Jeff, this is just a short note to formally thank you for always stepping forward for Harvard. Your support of Jerome Kagan and your contribution to women's rugby are only two recent examples of your sustained commitment. Your generosity does not go unnoticed. Sincerely, Lawrence H. Summers.

• 43:47Pablo Torre?

  Your generosity does not go unnoticed is a bit of a poetic thing to discover after this letter was unnoticed, apparently by Harvard's own investigators.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  It's the kind of quote that Novak gave in 2003 in that piece.

• 44:00Pablo Torre?

  There are no disadvantages to associating with Jeffrey Epstein. Thank you for your sustained commitment to women's rugby. The late Jerome Kagan, by the way, can you explain him briefly? Because he is also somebody that Epstein apparently, yeah, donated to.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  So Jerome Kagan is the American psychologist. He was at Harvard for quite a few years, got some funding for some of his research.

• 44:21Pablo Torre?

  Child psychology.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 44:23Pablo Torre?

  Was a specialty.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  And you see in the files that we obtained, you know, $30,000 donation to fund research. And that's in 2004, and that's in May. So, right after the April visit in person, you've got a $25,000 donation, you've got a $30,000 donation, and those are going straight into Harvard's coffers.

• 44:41Pablo Torre?

  By the way, that's still like the biggest college endowment in the world, right?

• 44:45Speaker 04

  By far. By far.

• 44:47Pablo Torre?

  And again, the university had access to all of these records at the time of the self investigation in 2019, 2020, and chose not to disclose any of this, or, by the way, any of these six other Epstein contact reports that we've acquired here that mention Larry Summers and various meals and/or letters and/or visits.

• 45:10Speaker 06

  It very much seems like Larry basically got to like have final cut on this, or someone with Larry's public relations interests in mind. Like, you don't need to be an expert in any of this to really be like, okay, like, what are the incentives here to weed this out? But yeah, they just went for it.

• 45:31Pablo Torre?

  And so we asked Harvard whether they had seen the two contact reports in particular that we obtained, the one about Epstein's plane and the one with the letter explicitly thanking him for the donation, and the university spokesman declined to comment. Again, meanwhile, when we asked that same spokesperson whether Larry Summers had any influence on the self-report, they, you guessed it, declined to comment. But just to give our audience again a sense of how close Summers and Epstein became, Drew, I now need to take us to the winter of 2005, because Summers got married to a Harvard English professor named Lisa New, and 10

• 46:12Pablo Torre?

  days after their wedding, according to your reporting, what did they decide to do?

• 46:18Speaker 04

  They decided to go on a honeymoon. Fun. And so a spokesperson told us in November, and I'll quote it directly, "Mr. Summers and Ms. New spent their honeymoon in St. John in Jamaica in December 2005, which was long before Mr. Epstein was arrested for the first time. As part of that trip, they made a brief visit of less than a day to Mr. Epstein's island."

• 46:40Pablo Torre?

  And just to restate what you've just said, Larry Summers spent part of his honeymoon on Epstein Island. Oh, look, here it is. Here's the handwritten flight log.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  We see Larry's name, of course. We see Lisa's name, of course. But we also see GM, which of course stands for Ghislaine Maxwell.

• 46:59Pablo Torre?

  Ghislaine Maxwell, who, for those not familiar somehow, was later convicted as Epstein's partner in crime. And so this is Bedford, Massachusetts again to St. Thomas, which is not actually Epstein Island, but is in fact what?

• 47:13Speaker 04

  An island nearby, and you get there and then you have to take a brief helicopter ride over to Jeffrey Epstein's island. Takes about 15 minutes.

• 47:19Pablo Torre?

  And so this is 2005, when this romantic getaway is taking place, signaling beyond any reasonable expectation exactly how close these two men became. And meanwhile, that same year, earlier in 2005, what was happening back in Florida?

• 47:39Speaker 04

  So in Florida, in Palm Beach in particular, in March of that year, police began inquiring into allegations from the mother of a 14-year-old girl who said that Epstein had molested her daughter at his mansion in Palm Beach. And over the following months, detectives, you know, curious about the case in question, identified potential victims and witnesses, additional folks beyond this girl. In October of that year, police executed a search warrant on Epstein's home as part of that expanded investigation that they were working on.

• 48:07Pablo Torre?

  But look, in fairness to Harvard, that honeymoon trip only became known after the Epstein files got released last fall. And you, Drew, reported on this for the Crimson. And so I want to leave open the possibility that perhaps the university tried to turn over every conceivable rock, and they just couldn't get to this level of reported intimacy between Summers and Epstein, even though one of the former rugby players we talked to had her own view of what happened.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Larry Summers crossed that line. He clearly crossed it so many times. That's the big thing that I want people to know. Summers had so much power. It's disgusting that that man was in charge of this university. And the university clearly set him up to not be held accountable for crossing that line.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  And I'm embarrassed by that.

• 49:04Pablo Torre?

  And so I wanted to check this with our university employee source. Were you interviewed for the Harvard self-report that got published in May of 2020?

• 49:15Speaker 06

  No.

• 49:16Pablo Torre?

  Were you ever invited to participate?

• 49:19Speaker 06

  I was never invited to participate in anything like this. I've never heard of an open invitation from internal legal counsel or leadership about the avenue one would take to even start this process or be a part of it. There are just simply gaps and pieces of information that are not included.

• 49:50Pablo Torre?

  And so here's the thing that you should know about this story before we go any farther here. The Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics and the extensive relationship Epstein had with then-President Larry Summers are not the only pieces of information that Harvard decided to not include in its report concerning Jeffrey E. Epstein's connections to Harvard University in 2020. Far from it, actually. And for the record, we sent Harvard spokesperson a detailed list of nine questions in total, including about why Larry Summers's role was not examined more thoroughly in that 2020 self-report and whether any steps are being taken to ensure a comprehensive follow-up.

• 50:35Pablo Torre?

  And Harvard declined to comment across the board.

• 50:40Pablo Torre?

  But in part two of this series, dropping tomorrow, we bring you the rest of Harvard University's Epstein files. Because this story somehow is just beginning.

• 50:57Pablo Torre?

  We'll see you there.

• 51:07Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 51:13Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

• 51:34Speaker 07

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers. Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding.

• 52:17Speaker 07

  Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to build Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.