Latest / The Vault: The Epstein Files / Harvard’s Hidden Donor Scandal: How Epstein’s $25K Reached Women’s Rugby Without Disclosure (5/1/26)

Transcript

Harvard’s Hidden Donor Scandal: How Epstein’s $25K Reached Women’s Rugby Without Disclosure (5/1/26) · The Vault: The Epstein Files

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: What's up, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the
• 0:03
  Epstein Chronicles. I don't think it's any secret at this
• 0:06
  point that Jeffrey Epstein was a big shot on the
• 0:09
  Harvard campus and that Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard,
• 0:13
  relied on Jeffrey Epstein when it comes to raising money
• 0:17
  and getting donations, and one of many problems with that
• 0:21
  happens to be that he didn't let people know where
• 0:25
  that money originated from. And according to a new report
• 0:29
  that's coming out from Harvard, Epstein donated twenty five thousand
• 0:34
  dollars to the women's rugby team and they were told
• 0:37
  to keep quiet about it. And when I tell you
• 0:39
  that this cover up has many tentacles, this is the
• 0:41
  kind of shit I'm talking about. And then when you
• 0:43
  add to the fact that Jeffrey Epstein had an office
• 0:46
  on campus, it makes things that much more disturbing. What
• 0:50
  exactly was he using that office for and what exactly
• 0:52
  was going on in there? Because I have a hard
• 0:54
  time believing that Epstein had that office and would just
• 0:57
  leave a resource like the Harvard campus untouched, untapped, as
• 1:02
  him and Glaine say, it would be a fertile hunting
• 1:05
  ground for new biles, right, wasn't that they're saying? And
• 1:09
  what better place to do it than a campus like Harvard.
• 1:13
  Now we have to keep in mind that Epstein he
• 1:16
  liked vulnerable women. So if it's going to be somebody
• 1:19
  at Harvard, it's probably somebody over here on some kind
• 1:23
  of visa, whether it's you know, a visa for college
• 1:27
  or a visa for work whatever. Epstein would exploit that,
• 1:31
  and we've seen it countless times. So that's certainly the MO.
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  But does that mean that nobody was coerced or abused
• 1:39
  from Harvard? Of course it doesn't. Today we have an
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  article from the Harvard Crimson, and the headline women's rugby
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  players were told to keep the twenty five thousand dollars
• 1:49
  gift quiet. The donor was Epstein. The author of this
• 1:53
  article is Hugo Kiasen and Elise Spenner. In December two
• 1:59
  thousand nine, nineteen, more than a decade after graduating from Harvard,
• 2:03
  Emily Reel, class of six, got an email about a
• 2:06
  twenty five thousand dollars gift directed toward her college rugby team.
• 2:10
  A lawyer hired by Harvard was reviewing the two thousand
• 2:14
  and four donation and wanted to know what she could remember.
• 2:18
  I've seen online that you were the president of the
• 2:20
  Woman's Rugby Club that year. The lawyer Martin F. Murphy wrote,
• 2:24
  I was hoping that you might have a few minutes
• 2:26
  to speak to me about this. So he's an ominous
• 2:29
  message to get. Huh. Imagine being Emily Reel and getting
• 2:34
  that message and figuring out it has to do with Epstein.
• 2:38
  Talk about a shitty start to the day. The donor,
• 2:42
  he quickly revealed, was convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. That
• 2:48
  was the first time that Reel had heard Epstein's name
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  connected to the gift. And I'm sure that there was
• 2:53
  plenty more like this where Epstein was the undercover donor,
• 2:58
  and people like Larry So just said the donation came
• 3:01
  from anonymous sources or from somebody else. That's the kind
• 3:07
  of shit they do. Look, they want Epstein's money, right,
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  They don't care what he was up to, they don't
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  care what he was convicted of. Give him an office,
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  give him stature, give him prestige. It's not our kids,
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  what do we care? And that's pretty much the mindset
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  and all these sick degenerates and higher education. They're all disgusting.
• 3:30
  Documents obtained by the Crimson and Pablo Tory finds out
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  show that the connection was explicit from the start. In
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  June two thousand and four, Harvard established the Jeffrey Epstein
• 3:41
  Fund for Women's Athletics, noting a preference for women's rugby.
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  One month later, then university president Lawrence H. Summers wrote
• 3:49
  directly to Epstein to thank them for the contribution. And
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  you notice it's always women's sports, right. This sick degenerate
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  knew exactly what he was doing. He wanted access to
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  all these girls. That's what he wanted. Whether it was
• 4:06
  a back door or whether it was at some function,
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  it didn't matter to him. He wanted access one way
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  or the other. And what's the best way to get there?
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  Pay for it? Right? He knew the game and he
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  played it well. Your support of Jerome Kagan and your
• 4:22
  contribution to women's rugby are only two recent examples of
• 4:26
  your sustained commitment. Summers wrote, Your generosity does not go unnoticed. Well,
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  he's not wrong about that. We certainly noticed, and we
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  want some answers. What was Jeffrey Epstein doing on the
• 4:39
  Harvard campus? Why did he have access to an office
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  and who thought that was a good idea? Well, we
• 4:45
  all know it was Larry Summers, and there was never
• 4:47
  any kind of repercussions for Larry Summers. The issue had
• 4:51
  to be forced and it didn't happen until there was
• 4:54
  email evidence of the relationship. But Summers knew exactly how
• 4:58
  close they were. He knew that Jeffrey Epstein was an
• 5:01
  absolute piece of shit. He knew it. He did not care,
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  just like the rest of them. But to Reelle and
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  her teammates, none of that was visible. They said they
• 5:11
  believe that the money had come from Massachusetts Hall, routed
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  through Summer's office after players confronted them over a disparity
• 5:18
  between the men's and women's rugby program. The team, they said,
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  was never told the money originated with Epstein. Well, I
• 5:27
  don't see that being a problem, honestly, because a lot
• 5:30
  of times they're not going to tell you where the
• 5:31
  money comes from. That's up to Larry Summers. That's up
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  to the administrators to make sure they're doing their due diligence.
• 5:39
  It's not up to the Sports department unless they're the
• 5:41
  ones who brought the donor in. But if they contact
• 5:44
  Larry Summers and they're like, hey, look we need money
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  for the program. And Summer shows up with a fat bag.
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  They're not going to be like, where'd that come from?
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  We need to check it, because that's Larry Summer's job, right.
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  So when I say the buck stops with the boss,
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  that's what I mean, and that goes for anything in life.
• 6:02
  If you're the boss at McDonald's and something goes wrong,
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  guess what I want to talk to you, not the
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  fry cook. There's absolutely no way that we would have
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  touched a dime from him had we known the source
• 6:17
  of the funding, Rielle said. But that information was never
• 6:21
  provided to us. So I don't think anybody should be
• 6:24
  upset with the gals that were on the rugby team.
• 6:26
  It's not their fault. They're just trying to play sports.
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  The problem is with Harvard and the fact that Harvard
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  would have a relationship with this dude that ran so deep,
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  and then of course they lied about it time and
• 6:42
  time again. They had their dumbass little internal report that
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  we know is BS, and now that more information is
• 6:49
  coming out and more damning information, it's going to be
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  harder and harder for them to keep up the hustle,
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  so they should have just been honest from the very start.
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  But Reelle replied to Murphy. She said that she relayed
• 7:07
  exactly that Summers had facilitated the donation and Epstein's name
• 7:12
  had never come up, and the team had been told
• 7:15
  to keep the gift quiet. That's usually a tell, right,
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  somebody tells you, hey, keep this quiet. Probably a reason.
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  But when Harvard released the report Murphy was working on
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  in twenty twenty, the episode was not included explicitly, and
• 7:29
  instead folded into a tallly of Epstein's donations to the school.
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  Remember when I told you that that internal report was garbage,
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  Well now you can all see it in playing Daylight
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  for yourself. They omitted things, they wrapped things up, they obfuscated,
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  and the whole entire idea was to whitewash it, not
• 7:48
  to get to the bottom of it. Left unexamined was
• 7:50
  the core tension of the gift. Harvard's internal records tied
• 7:54
  the money to Epstein from the start, while the cash
• 7:57
  strap players it was meant to support were left believe
• 8:00
  that Summers had personally answered their please for help. Well
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  he did, but he made a deal with the devil
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  to get it. Harvard's twenty twenty report acknowledged the total
• 8:10
  of twenty six gifts from Epstein to the university between
• 8:13
  nineteen ninety seven and two thousand and eight. A Harvard
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  spokesperson confirmed that the two thousand and four gift to
• 8:20
  the women's athletes was included in that total, but declined
• 8:24
  to comment further. Of course, they know they've been caught
• 8:27
  and it blows their narrative out of the water. But
• 8:29
  now they've been caught red handed playing games, so it's
• 8:32
  just gonna make things worse. Like I always tell you,
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  just be upfront, just be honest, don't try and run
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  from it, and you're gonna be better off. A spokesperson
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  for Summers wrote in a statement that Summer's fundraising was
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  conducted with a full involvement of the Development Office and
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  the university's legal, financial and due diligence functions. The spokesperson
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  added that the fundraising reflected the Athletic department's desire to
• 9:01
  expand women's club sports to bring them on par with
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  the men's club athletics. You mean to tell me that
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  all the people that have graduated from Harvard, you couldn't
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  find one person a pony up twenty five racks, not
• 9:14
  one person. I don't buy it. At the time, though
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  women's rugby team was fighting to make ends meet. Players
• 9:25
  said they pieced together a budget of roughly six grand year.
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  They cleaned dorm bathrooms through dorm crew, volunteered for psychology studies,
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  and solicited donations from parents. While they were a club squad,
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  so they're in charge of all their own travel, they
• 9:40
  have to pay for everything. Basically, the men's rugby team,
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  by contrast, had access to an endowment and a century
• 9:48
  old alumni base. The men traveled by coach bus Rial recalled,
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  while the women often walked to Central Square to rank
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  cars from Enterprise. Well, unfortunately, that has a lot to
• 9:59
  do with the fact that the program was very old
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  from the perspective of men, and they had alumni and
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  supporters and boosters and people willing to donate to the program.
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  And my guess is if Harvard would have reached out
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  to some of those donors, they would have helped the
• 10:15
  women's program out too. But it's more than just getting
• 10:18
  the money right. There's a lot more going on behind
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  the curtain, and it's also they wanted access to Epstein.
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  They wanted to keep that tap running. Keep that in mind.
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  By two thousand and four, frustration had boiled over. The
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  team raised their concerned directly with Summers. Reel and another
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  teammate recalled. Soon afterward. The two said they were told
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  there was good news. The women's team would receive access
• 10:44
  to a twenty five thousand dollars fund, a large infusion
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  of support for the fledgling program. Under the terms of
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  the gift, the money would be held in a fund
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  with roughly one thousand dispersed to the team annually for
• 10:56
  at least five years, beginning in the summer of two
• 11:00
  and five. According to real, one thousand a year. What so,
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  it's a twenty five thousand dollars fund, but one thousand
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  a year that doesn't seem like very much. The Harvard
• 11:15
  spokesperson did not specify how much of the original twenty
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  five thousand dollars gift was spent on women's rugby, but
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  confirmed that in twenty twenty, Harvard donated the unspent balance,
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  including interest it had accrued, as part of more than
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  two hundred thousand dollars in donations to two nonprofit organizations
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  supporting victims of human trafficking and sexual assault, and that
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  was all part of their cleanup project. After they showed
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  up and they were like, you know what, we better
• 11:43
  donate this money and try and get some optics on
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  our side. But it was already too late because people
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  have seen enough. They know exactly what Harvard was up to,
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  and they don't like what they see. The sum earmark
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  for women's rugby was a sliver of the nine point
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  one million that Epstein ultimately to Harvard between ninety eight
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  and two thousand and seven, but the gift as a
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  new dimension to scrutiny of the university's ties to Epstein
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  and of Summer's role in sustaining them. Well, it was
• 12:13
  all about Summers. That was Epstein's guy, and Heimos certainly
• 12:16
  opened the door for Epstein at Harvard. Documents released by
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  the House Oversight Committee and the Department of Justice since
• 12:23
  November show Summers maintained a long standing relationship with Epstein,
• 12:28
  exchanging emails from the nineties until the day before Epstein's
• 12:32
  twenty nineteen arrest. The records also detail the extent of
• 12:37
  that relationship. Summers traveled on Epstein's private jet multiple times,
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  including during his tenure as Harvard's president. He spent part
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  of his honeymoon on Epstein's private island, Little Saint James.
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  He was also named as an extra executor in a
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  twenty fourteen draft of Epstein's will. Yeah, I had no
• 12:58
  idea who Epstein was, hardly new him. But he's going
• 13:01
  to put me as an executor. Okay, sure we all
• 13:03
  believe that story, Larry Summers. The fallout's been swift. Harvard
• 13:09
  has reopened its investigation int Epstein and his affiliates. Summers,
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  his step back from public commitments, left his teaching post,
• 13:17
  and announced that he will resign at the end of
• 13:20
  the academic year. For the women who played rugby in
• 13:24
  two thousand and four, the resolution still feels incomplete. I'm
• 13:28
  glad that this is coming out now, and I'm glad
• 13:30
  that there's finally some reckoning, Rial said. Maybe not to
• 13:34
  the degree that is warranted given everything that he did,
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  but it's better to talk about it late than never
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  at all, she added, And she's not wrong about that.
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  But I think what it really shows you is just
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  how deep Jeffrey Epstein had his tentacles when it comes
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  to Harvard. And I think that we've only begun to
• 13:52
  scratch the surface of what really happened at Harvard and
• 13:55
  just how deeply Jeffrey Epstein was embedded. So we'll keep
• 13:59
  following along with the story as this new investigation cracks off,
• 14:03
  and we'll see where it all ends up. Until then,
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  that's going to do it for this one. All the
• 14:08
  information that goes with this episode can be found in
• 14:11
  the description box.