Epstein files cast pall among US faculty and students: ‘I just feel a deep disappointment’

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“The latest release of the Epstein files has revealed connections between the disgraced financier and prominent figures in academia, leading to widespread outrage and calls for accountability. Faculty and students at institutions like Barnard College, Columbia University, UCLA, and Bard College are demanding investigations, resignations, and policy changes in response to these revelations. The fallout from the Epstein files continues to reverberate across various industries, including politics, business, and entertainment.

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Ties to the disgraced financier run deep through the academic world, documents released by the DoJ show

Sara Braun

Columbia University’s Barnard College in New York City. Photograph: Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Major institutions of higher education in the US are reckoning with the latest release of the Epstein files after discovering the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s relationships with board members, professors and administrators on campuses across the country.

In some cases, professors have been placed under review, research centers closed or conferences canceled. Students and staff have responded in different ways, including petitions, open letters and campus forums.

The Guardian spoke with students, employees and alumni at some of the universities implicated.

On 9 February, faculty at Barnard College, the private women’s liberal arts’ college affiliated with Columbia University, published an open letter signed by more than 70 faculty members calling on the university to “acknowledge and investigate” recently released correspondence between Epstein and Francine LeFrak, a prominent donor and member of the school’s board of trustees. LeFrak appears in the Epstein files 15 times, according to reporting from the Barnard Bulletin.

In one appearance, LeFrak asked – in 2010 – to join a close friend and Epstein during “the holidays”; in another, later that year, she invited Epstein “as her guest” to a trip to Rwanda, where she founded an initiative that provides occupational training and employment for female survivors of that country’s genocide.

The letter notes that the connection between Epstein and LeFrak is “repugnant”, particularly since the interaction took place following Epstein’s 2008 conviction of soliciting prostitution from a minor.

“We do not believe that people who maintained contact with a notorious sex trafficker and convicted sex offender express our values, nor have they behaved as proper trustees of Barnard College,” the letter states. It also calls on Barnard to remove LeFrak’s name from the newly constructed Francine A LeFrak Center for Well-Being, which houses the school’s sexual violence education, prevention and outreach program, among other initiatives.

Many faculty members expressed confusion and outrage specifically regarding LeFrak’s relationship to a program that is meant to encourage the health and wellbeing of young women.

“I just feel a real, deep disappointment, because I think, as a women’s college, our mission is directly antithetical to every revelation of those files,” a Barnard professor, who asked to remain anonymous, said.

“It is some very privileged, powerful, in many cases secretive and nefarious men controlling the lives and narratives around a wide swath of women. How can a women’s college – with its stated commitments to women’s health, wellbeing, excellence – have a prominent name on campus that is now associated with a sex offender?”

A Barnard spokesperson the school has “retained independent counsel to review the facts and advise the college accordingly”, and noted that “Barnard is a place where women’s education is championed and where women are supported, uplifted and given the tools to become the best versions of themselves. Barnard has never accepted money from Jeffrey Epstein, and we are not aware of any connection to the college.”

Elsewhere, Columbia University disciplined two people affiliated with its dental college after documents revealed that they helped Epstein’s girlfriend get into the school. Dr Letty Moss-Salentijn was stripped of her title as vice-dean of the dental college while Dr Thomas Magnani was removed from the school’s admissions review committee and volunteer leadership roles.

The Low Memorial Library on the Columbia University campus in New York City on 10 February 2023.Photograph: Ted Shaffrey/AP

The university also noted that they will be making a donation of $210,000, the same amount it received from Epstein and related entities, to two New York-based non-profit organizations supporting survivors of sexual abuse and human trafficking.

On the other side of country, UCLA community members have been reeling at a swath of email correspondence between Dr Mark Tramo, an adjunct professor of neurology at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, and Epstein over a 12-year span. While UCLA removed Tramo’s profile page from its website, he is still teaching classes at the university.

“As an academic, I am absolutely outraged by how [Tramo] abused his position,” a UCLA alumni who asked for anonymity wrote to the Guardian.

In 2010, Tramo forwarded Epstein messages from two female students – one at UCLA and the other at Harvard – who had written him to express interest in research opportunities through the Institute for Music and Brain Science, which Epstein had donated money to.

The next day, Epstein replied: “are either of these cute.” Tramo responded: “we’ll see! (you’re terrible!)”

A petition calling on the university to fire Tramo has garnered more than 10,000 signatures. UCLA declined the Guardian’s request for comment.

At Bard, the tiny liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, the latest release of Epstein files have struck a nerve at the center of campus.

Tthe campus of UCLA in Los Angeles, California, on 11 August 2025. Photograph: Daniel Cole/Reuters

A long-term relationship was revealed between Leon Botstein, Bard’s president, and Epstein, prompting students to pen an open letter calling for Botstein to resign.

In his own letter to the Bard community, Botstein sought to clarify his relationship with Epstein, writing: “My interactions with Epstein were always and only for the sole purpose of soliciting donations for the college. Mr Epstein was not my friend; he was a prospective donor.”

In response to a request for comment, a Bard spokesperson referred the Guardian to a statement sent out by the school’s board of trustees to the community on 19 February, in which they announced that the school had retained an external law firm to conduct an independent investigation into communications between Epstein and Botstein. The independent review will include “the full scope of these communications, financial contributions connected to Epstein and any related matters relevant to understanding these issues fully”.

“Botstein has created the Bard that we know,” a current student, who asked to remain anonymous, said. Botstein has been at the helm of the school for more than 50 years and is widely considered synonymous with the institution.

That student also said that the Bard community conflicted over whether Botstein should resign. Those against his resignation have noted his longstanding tenure and role as a prolific fundraiser for the school.

“[The Bard community] speaks out about a lot all the time, but this is something that people can’t talk about because if they do, they lose their funding, their livelihoods,” the student said.

Another student, who also requested anonymity, emphasized the significance of Botstein’s fundraising efforts on campus.

“Putting Bard in a transitional period, or a presidential search, would only hurt the more vulnerable parts of the institution,” she said. “We’re not a very wealthy college, and I think we’ve done really amazing things with the money that Botstein has fundraised.”

At Harvard, former university president Larry Summers announced in December that he was stepping down from his teaching position while the school investigated his ties to Epstein. The university also confirmed that it was widening its investigation to look into donor relationships with the disgraced financier. A 2020 internal review found that Epstein donated $9.1m to the Ivy League institution between 1998 and 2008.

Similarly, Yale University barred computer science professor David Gelernter from teaching while the school reviewed his connection with Epstein. In an email, Gelernter recommended a student to Epstein for a software project, calling her a “v small good looking blonde”.

Ohio State announced an investigation into OBGYN and university professor Dr Mark Landon after files revealed Epstein was sending regular payments to him. Union College trustee Brad Karp resigned from his position on the school’s board over emails sent to Epstein, in addition to his role as chair of law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.

Earlier this month, the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) confirmed in an email to the community that they suspended “a FIT employee who has an alleged connection to the Epstein enterprise”. While not named in the email, the professor was identified as Lawrence Delson.

The latest release of the Epstein files has created seismic repercussions in a wide variety of industries in the US, the UK and beyond, including politics, business and entertainment.

In the UK, the long-term relationship between Peter Mandelson and Epstein revealed in the files led to Mandelson’s dismissal as British ambassador to the United States. Mandelson has since been asked to testify in front of Congress about the relationship. More notably, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, was arrested on 19 February on suspicion of misconduct in public office by police investigating his dealings with Epstein.

Ramifications in the US business world were felt by billionaire Thomas Pritzker, who stepped down as executive chair of the hotel chain Hyatt after his ties with Epstein were made public. Top lawyer at Goldman Sachs Kathryn Ruemmler resigned from her role after emails revealed a close relationship between her and Epstein, whom she referred to as “Uncle Jeffrey”.

Dr Peter Attia stepped down from his position as chief science officer for David, a protein bar company, after his correspondence with Epstein, which included particularly lewd language, was released.

Casey Wasserman, a leading Hollywood talent agent, decided to sell his agency after communications with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell were revealed. Wasserman is also the chair of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, but has not yet stepped down from that role.“

 

What’s Happened Since the Supreme Court’s Tariff Ruling

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“The Supreme Court ruled that President Trump’s tariffs violated federal law, striking down his use of a 1970s emergency statute to bypass Congress. In response, Trump announced a 10% global tariff on all imports, later raising it to 15%, and vowed to continue his tariff tactics despite the ruling. This decision has left trade deals uncertain, impacted American businesses and consumers, and raised concerns about the federal budget and potential refunds for collected duties.

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After the Trump administration’s punishing tariffs were invalidated, the president said he would impose new tariffs using a different authority. It’s been a whirlwind.

Feb. 23, 2026, 5:04 a.m. ET

Supreme Court Strikes Down Tariffs

The Supreme Court on Friday, in a 6-to-3 ruling, found that the statute that President Trump invoked to bypass Congress did not allow him to unilaterally impose tariffs.Eric Lee for The New York Times

On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump’s sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners violated federal law. The ruling dealt a major blow to the administration’s economic agenda and left trade deals in limbo as world leaders tried to figure out their next steps.

Here’s what has happened since Friday:

The court’s 6-3 decision determined that Mr. Trump exceeded his authority in imposing the levies.

• Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority that the 1970s emergency statute that Mr. Trump invoked to bypass Congress did not allow him to unilaterally impose the duties.

• Mr. Trump was in the East Room of the White House speaking to a group of governors and cabinet officials when he found out that the court had struck down his tariffs. He told those gathered that he had a contingency plan and ended the meeting early.

• In a news conference at the White House on Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump announced a 10 percent global tariff on all imports, using a different legal authority to impose them. He also said that he would open investigations into unfair trade practices in an effort to secure additional tariffs, and that he would not reinstate the so-called de minimis exemption, a policy that had allowed billions of dollars of low-value imports to enter the United States tax-free.

• Mr. Trump vowed to press forward with his tariff tactics despite the ruling. “It’s ridiculous but it’s OK. Because we have other ways, numerous other ways,” the president said on Friday. “The numbers can be far greater than the hundreds of billions we’ve already taken in.”

• On Saturday, Mr. Trump said that he would raise the new global tariff rate to 15 percent, effective immediately.

Mr. Trump said on Friday that he would raise the new global tariff rate to 10 percent. On Saturday, he said the rate would be 15 percent.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Fiscal concerns swirl as experts assess the fallout from the court’s decision and the president’s reaction.

• The federal budget has reached a new level of volatility. Tariffs had become a key source of revenue, and it’s unclear if Mr. Trump will be able to make up the difference to help pay for an expensive tax cut that he signed into law last year that will add to the nation’s deficit.

• The fate of billions of dollars in duties collected by the United States remains up in the air. The Supreme Court has left it to the U.S. Court of International Trade and the lower courts to figure out refund proceedings. Mr. Trump was also unsure of how the process would work.

• The ruling may have dashed Mr. Trump’s spending dreams, which had tariffs as their centerpiece. He had promised to use tariff revenue to offset the costs of programs that included a bailout for farmers who had faced retaliation from other countries because of his trade wars.

• But Trump aides said on Sunday that the administration was on track to resurrect its punishing tariffs through a new approach that they contended would better resist legal challenges.

“The president has been campaigning on tariffs and protecting American industry for many years,” Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “The policy hasn’t changed.”

American businesses and consumers are unsure how any new tariffs will affect them.

• American companies celebrated the ruling after enduring months of burdensome import taxes. But their relief quickly turned into newfound concern as Mr. Trump renewed his trade war with a slate of new tariffs.

• A poll released on Friday that was taken before the Supreme Court’s ruling showed that 64 percent of Americans disapproved of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

• Consumers will have to wait to see how the ruling affects prices for imported products like apparel, electronics and furniture. Economists warned that any short-term boost to the economy could be hurt by a lengthy period of uncertainty.

• Apple might be among the biggest winners if lower tariffs stick. While the tech giant has moved to shield itself from Mr. Trump’s trade squabbles, it has paid more than $3 billion in tariffs over the past three quarters.

In Washington, an angry President Trump is singling out those who opposed him.

• Mr. Trump castigated the justices who ruled against him, calling them “fools and lap dogs” and said he would push forward with new tariffs anyway. He suggested that two he had nominated during his first term — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — were “an embarrassment to their families” because they didn’t take his side.

• Mr. Trump punished a Republican lawmaker, Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado, on Saturday by withdrawing his endorsement of the lawmaker. Mr. Hurd had joined House Democrats in voting to cancel tariffs on Canada. Mr. Trump backed Mr. Hurd’s right-wing primary opponent.

• A small group of Republicans in Congress lauded the court’s ruling, including Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican and former longtime party leader, who called for their branch of government to reassert its role in trade matters.

With international trade deals imperiled, world leaders look for clarity.

• Countries that had struck trade deals with Mr. Trump to get lower tariff rates are now stuck with them. Last week, Japan committed to $36 billion in investments in the United States and Indonesia signed an agreement in Washington under threat of damaging levies. The court ruling has left their leaders wondering if their agreements will stand.

• In Europe, officials had hoped that this year would bring stability to international trade after a chaotic 2025, but the ruling now leaves last year’s trade deal between the European Union and the United States in flux. With questions of refunds and Mr. Trump’s new unilateral tariffs, European leaders are closely watching the president’s next move.

• For Canada, the most detrimental tariffs remain in place. American levies aimed at Canadian manufacturers — including the automotive, steel and aluminum industries — and the lumber sector were imposed under a different law and are unaffected by the court’s ruling.

Here Are the Countries and Products Subject to Tariffs Now

President Trump ramped up his tariff campaign, one day after the Supreme Court invalidated a large chunk of duties he had previously imposed on most of the world’s imports.

Kim Bhasin is a business reporter covering the retail industry for The Times.“

More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker

 

“It will always be possible to get ChatGPT to produce hate speech at volume. Other ML systems will have algorithmic bias, too, as long as there’s biased input. The problem is that these systems are being used as if they are unbiased, and that just reinforces existing power structures and exacerbates inequality. The same kind of flawed facial recognition technology Gebru warned about is used regularly by police departments, leading to mistaken arrests of Black people and even worse racial disparities in arrest rates. 118 Police also use predictive policing algorithms to determine what areas to patrol, disproportionately impacting Black, Latino, and low-income communities. 119 Nor is law enforcement the only problem. Algorithms are used to mete out credit scores and weigh the risk of a loan; like criminal risk assessment, these algorithms discriminate against Black people and other minorities. 120 Getting a good credit score can determine your ability to buy a car or house, get hired for a new job—or afford chemotherapy. Algorithmic bias is literally a matter of life and death, especially if you’re not a white man. Yet despite the severity of these problems,”

— More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker

https://a.co/02hqquNG

 

Worst of the worst? Most US immigrants targeted for deportation in 2025 had no criminal charges, documents reveal

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“A Guardian analysis of government records reveals that 77% of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction. The analysis, based on data from nearly 140,000 I-213 forms, contradicts the Trump administration’s claims that its deportation campaign targets violent criminals. Instead, the data shows that the majority of convictions are for non-violent offenses, such as traffic violations and immigration offenses.

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A Guardian analysis finds the vast majority of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time from January to August last year had no criminal convictions

Will Craft

The analysis exposes a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality. Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images

A Guardian analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction, exposing a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.

Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) trotted out a phrase that his surrogates would come to use over and over again: “the worst of the worst.”

The term has become a shorthand justification for the administration’s unprecedented overhaul of immigration enforcement – a relentless campaign the administration claims is focused on arresting and deporting violent criminals.

However, a review of records obtained by the Guardian and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against DHS, raises questions about those claims.

The findings come from little-known documents known as I-213 forms. DHS uses these forms in court to prove that a person is in the country illegally. The documents are filed when a person first encounters ICE, and DHS begins the deportation process, which is often when they are arrested. The documents contain biographical details about the person, including their criminal history, as well as any information that DHS feels is relevant to the immigration court case.

The documents released to the Guardian do not cover every arrest since Trump took office, but do cover everyone that DHS started deportation proceedings during most of 2025.

The Guardian analyzed data extracted from nearly 140,000 I-213 forms, from January 2025 through mid-August 2025, and found that the surge in arrests under Trump is driven by the apprehension of people who have never been convicted of a crime.

The analysis also reveals:

• Fewer than half of the people in the data (40%) had any criminal charge against them, and only 23% had a conviction.

• Of those who did have a criminal conviction, nearly half were for non-violent traffic and immigration offenses.

• Traffic offenses alone made up nearly 30% of the convictions, the largest category by far.

• Some 9% of criminal convictions were for assault, while only 1% were for sexual assault and just 0.5% were for homicide.

The findings offer one of the most granular pictures yet of the criminal records of the tens of thousands of people swept up in DHS’s massive deportation campaign, building on reporting by the Guardian and others that show most of the people targeted for arrest and deportation are not violent criminals.

The expansion of immigration enforcement to broad, sweeping arrests, experts say, has led to a massive expansion of immigration detention, with the highest number of people held in US history.

“What is being conducted is dragnet enforcement with the goal of ensnaring as many people as possible in the detention and deportation process, despite all the public claims of the administration that they’re going up for the worst,” said Phil Neff, research coordinator with the University of Washington Center for Human Rights.

The documents reveal a different picture, Neff said. “It really represents a cross-section of society at large in the United States, of people who have been here for many years and who have close ties to communities.”

The Guardian reached out to DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for comment on the findings but did not receive a response before publication.

‘Worst of the worst’

DHS secretary Kristi Noem first used the phrase “worst of the worst” shortly after being confirmed by the Senate in January 2025, telling Sean Hannity that DHS was “picking up the worst of the worst in this country”. By the end of 2025, it was the administration’s go-to line, appearing in hundreds of press releases about its mass deportation efforts. DHS even launched a “worst of the worst” website complete with people’s blurry mugshots and the crimes DHS says they’ve been convicted of.

But the I-213 forms, also known as “Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien” forms, undercut those arguments.

The forms are one of the first things filled out after the government initiates deportation proceedings, said Chris Opila, staff attorney for transparency at the American Immigration Council, and are the key piece of evidence the government uses to prove that a person is eligible for deportation.

“It’s the record that ICE will produce in immigration court to substantiate its claims that this person is present in the United States unlawfully,” Opila said.

There are groups of people not included in the data release, such as immigrants who had deportation proceedings initiated before 2025 but who were arrested in 2025. The Guardian compared the data in the I-213 form release to other datasets released by ICE and found that it covers approximately 80% of the total arrests in 2025 covered in other datasets.

The documents do, however, include every person whom ICE apprehended for the first time in 2025 and show clearly whom the administration targeted during Trump’s second term in office.

The Guardian, working with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, sued DHS and received spreadsheets with data extracted from I-213 forms.

Each form represents a person that the administration is trying to deport. The data contains details of more than 138,000 people swept up in the administration’s deportation pipeline in 2025. Each form contains a person’s name, how they entered the country, the number of children and each child’s citizenship, and detailed information about their criminal history. It is some of the most detailed data yet available on the people that the administration is trying to remove from the country.

The forms have each person’s criminal history, taken from the National Crime Information Center, an FBI database that tracks criminal justice data. The charges are tracked in broad categories, such as “sexual assault” and “immigration”, and sometimes less useful categories such as “general crimes”.

The Trump administration has apprehended people with criminal convictions, but the I-213 forms show that most convictions are for either traffic or immigration offenses, not violent crimes.

A Guardian analysis of the crimes people were convicted of found that only 1% of convictions were for sexual assault and only 400 – less than 1% of all convictions – were for homicide.

“This is not about removing the worst of the worst,” Opila said. “Enforcement is about removing whoever they can to feed a quota, regardless of how long these people have been in their communities, regardless of whether they have stable employment, regardless of what their family situation is in the United States. They’ve decided that they need to remove everyone possible.”

“If there was data that supported the administration’s position that it is only deporting the worst of the worst, the administration would publicize the data,” Opila added. “And they’re not doing that because the data doesn’t support it. We’d have something better than the memes.”

Andrew Arrested - 'Trump Should Be Concerned' Says Prof. David Cay Johnston - YouTube

 

Andrew Arrested - 'Trump Should Be Concerned' Says Prof. David Cay Johnston - YouTube

Supreme Court rules Trump's tariffs illegal - YouTube

 

Supreme Court rules Trump's tariffs illegal - YouTube

Jon Meacham: Trump Introduced a Virus Into Democracy | Amanpour and Company - YouTube

 

Jon Meacham: Trump Introduced a Virus Into Democracy | Amanpour and Company - YouTube

MUST-SEE warning from US Supreme Court

 

This is a major case which could overturn the last sections of the ”Voting Rights Act of 1965” which are still in effect. This is incredibly dangerous for voting rights. We see what is happening in Georgia.