Harvard women's rugby club players who cleaned residence hall bathrooms and participated in psychological studies while cobbling together an annual $6,000 budget gladly accepted a $25,000 donation in 2004.
Some didn't realize until a decade and a half later that the money had come from Jeffrey Epstein, who would subsequently be convicted of sex trafficking and die in prison.
Documents obtained by The Harvard Crimson student newspaper and the podcast "Pablo Torre Finds Out" show that the connection was explicit from the start. In June 2004, Harvard established the “Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women’s Athletics,” noting a preference for women’s rugby. One month later, then-university President Lawrence H. Summers wrote directly to Epstein to thank him for the contribution, staff writers Hugo Chiasson and Elise Spenner reported Thursday for The Crimson.
But to Emily Riehl, the women's rugby club president, and her teammates, none of that was visible, Chiasson and Spenner wrote. Players said they believed the money had come from Massachusetts Hall, routed through Summers’ office after players confronted him over a disparity between the men’s and women’s rugby programs.
“There’s absolutely no way we would have touched a dime from him had we known the source of this funding,” Riehl said, as reported by The Crimson. “But that information was never provided to us.”
It should be noted that Epstein's first well-known entanglement with the law came in June 2008, when he when pleaded guilty to state charges in Florida of soliciting prostitution, including from a minor. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail and registered as a sex offender. He was arrested again in 2019 and died in prison of a reported suicide.
According to The Crimson, in 2019, more than a decade after graduating from Harvard, Riehl received an email about the $25,000 gift directed toward the women's rugby team. A lawyer hired by Harvard was reviewing the 2004 donation and wanted to know what she could remember, Chiasson and Spenner wrote.
“I’ve seen online that you were the president of the women’s rugby club that year,” the lawyer, Martin F. Murphy, wrote, as reported by The Crimson. “I was hoping you might have a few minutes to speak to me about this.”
He revealed the donor was Epstein, and that was the first time Riehl had heard Epstein’s name connected to the gift.
In 2020, Harvard released Murphy's report, but the gift was not included explicitly, but rather folded into a tally of Epstein’s donations to the school, according to Chiasson and Spenner.
"Left unexamined was the core tension of the gift: Harvard’s internal records tied the money to Epstein from the start, while the cash-strapped players it was meant to support were left believing that Summers had personally answered their plea for help," the authors wrote. "Harvard’s 2020 report acknowledged a total of 26 gifts from Epstein to the University between 1997 and 2008. A Harvard spokesperson confirmed that the 2004 gift to women’s athletes was included in that total — but declined to comment further."
A Harvard spokesperson did not specify how much of the original $25,000 gift was spent on women’s rugby but confirmed that, in 2020, Harvard donated the “unspent balance” — including interest it had accrued — as part of a more than $200,000 donation to two nonprofit organizations supporting victims of human trafficking and sexual assault, Chiasson and Spenner reported.
