Forensic Review Doubts Epstein Email That Led Botstein to Resign

A forensic review commissioned by Bard College has found a "strong substantive basis for questioning the authenticity, integrity, and origin" of an email exchange between Leon Botstein, the college's former president, and the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. FTI Cybersecurity, hired by the Bard Board of Trustees, wrote in its October 19 report that the emails are "highly suspicious", though it could not establish with certainty that they were entirely fabricated.

U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin publicised the May 2014 exchange earlier this month. He has been investigating Botstein's and others' ties to Epstein since June. In the exchange, Botstein purportedly asks Epstein about a woman Epstein trafficked. Botstein denies writing the email. On October 7 he resigned from all of his remaining positions at Bard, saying he did not want "even false allegations about me" to put the institution at risk.

What investigators found

The disputed emails were not on Bard's own servers, including Google Vault records and logs from a 2017 server migration. Investigators concluded they did not exist there as of July 2017.

The exchange is nested in a message Epstein forwarded to himself, and Botstein's original email is not in the Justice Department's Epstein Library. The report says the quoted text came without the metadata or preserved records needed to establish who sent it, when, or whether it had been changed. Quoted text can be edited without altering the headers of the forwarding message.

The dateline in the quoted email reads "Sent: thurs 6 AM". Other emails between the two men include the weekday, calendar date, year and a timestamp to the second. The datelines also appear out of order, with Botstein replying to Epstein more than five hours before Epstein's original message was supposedly sent.

Botstein said in a statement: "As I previously said, I did not author or send that email." A Bard spokesperson said the college hired FTI to determine the veracity of the exchange, and that its review of the other claims in Raskin's letter continues.

Raskin's response

A spokesperson for Raskin said the congressman's inquiry draws on more than one exchange. The spokesperson said the office confirmed that the address in the DOJ file was Botstein's work email, and pointed to "a trove of other email exchanges" between Botstein and Epstein, and between Epstein and the woman.

It is unclear who would have changed the emails or why, if they were altered. Epstein had been accused of writing falsehoods about acquaintances in emails to himself; in 2013 he sent himself a series of messages suggesting Bill Gates had an affair, which Gates denied.

Raskin's October 7 letter also cited whistleblower reports that Botstein used his position to influence Title IX proceedings. Students and alumni have since protested against sexual abuse on campus, and the college has placed music professor Kyle Gann on administrative leave while it investigates an alumna's allegation from 1998.

Source: Inside Higher Ed