How I Ended Up In the Epstein Files

A search for my own name led me to the stories these millions of documents have to tell, and a social history of life on the margins of a predator's gilded world

Feb 04, 2026

A parlor in Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse; phot taken during a police raid on July 6, 2019. Image credit: United States District Court, Southern District of New York/FBI/Wikimedia Commons

This is how I found out.

On Sunday, I was on the train to New York. I was scrolling mindlessly through X (as one does) when I stumbled on a post from journalist and political historian Rick Perlstein. “I’m in the Epstein Files!” he wrote, showing a screen shot of three documents where his books were cited in communications with convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein.

As anyone who knows me could tell you, I am super competitive. So, naturally, I stopped scrolling immediately and navigated to the Department of Justice website. where the millions of documents about Jeffrey Epstein live. As everyone knows 3 million more documents were released last Friday, competing in the news cycle with the premiere of the First Lady’s “documentary,” Melania. I entered my name in the search bar, certified that I was older than 18, and….

…there I was.

When I called up the document, it turned out to be an entry in the Fall 2014 curriculum for Global Studies at what was then called The New School for Public Engagement. That semester, I taught a course on blogging (you can find it on page 22.) But that only raised more questions about what possible interest the Department of Justice, or Jeffrey Epstein, have had in I taught at The New School.

Who would be better to go down this rabbit hole than a trained historian?

Time to cast a wider net. I went to the search bar and typed in: “The New School.” Quickly (or as quickly as an iPhone works on a Metro North train lumbering from New Haven to Manhattan) I came up with the motherlode: 27 pages of references to my employer between 2012 and 2024.

As I clicked through each item, I realized that there are far more “Epstein stories” than the ones that make the news. And, like most history, it pays to read the original documents rather than merely read summaries that either reaffirm what we already know or drop a new celebrity into the mix of tawdry money grubbers and icky men who paw teenagers.

But first, some context.

I am not the only person in those files who is not a pedo, an Epstein flatterer, or a participant in the man’s insatiable pseudo-intellectual pursuits. There are tons of people whose names will pop up because Epstein received a political newsletter from someone named Gregory Brown of GlobalCast partners. It’s unclear who this person is: I found a Reddit thread that speculates about his identity (be my guest), but like many people who contacted Epstein, he may have been trying to sell an idea or a service.

But this same newsletter included a summary of a piece Heather Cox Richardson wrote for Salon back in 2016 before she was famous Substacker Heather Cox Richardson; while Billie Jean King and others had the bad luck to be on a fundraising committee to promote junior tennis that invited Epstein to a fundraising, so they are all in the files as well. A historian who is particularly all over the media to this day gets four mentions from Brown; then, there is one email that puts him in a group of people who had accepted an invitation to preview a film. Who is he? Out of friendship, I won’t say. But his presence at this event does support the notion that there were people who may not have known about Epstein’s Florida conviction for sex trafficking in 2011.

Where the historian (for whom I just randomly searched) led me is a far more interesting story than the one of ambitious men fawning over Epstein and each other: a description of host’s diffident participation in the event. He planned to welcome the group, then leave as soon as the lights went out. While his guests watched the film, he would attend a recital, returning as the lights went back up. And many of the documents show this kind of frenetic activity. Remember, because of his conviction, Epstein was not allowed to return to New York City until 2011, and it seems that this is when he went into high gear as a philanthropic entrepreneur, while at the same time recommencing his sexual activities with numerous women.

This is where The New School, where I became employed in the spring of 2012, comes in. And the motherlode of documents from my former employer contains information that you would—and would not— expect.

Here is what you might expect: a celebrity president, but a somewhat lower ranking one than Harvard’s Larry Summers, former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, who led The New School from 2001-2010. After having been forced out, a process that was initiated by a 2008 no-confidence vote by the faculty, Kerry threw his hat in the ring for his old Nebraska Senate seat. Having not lived in the state for a decade, he failed and was apparently casting about for a new career. That project was Minerva University, an innovative higher education institution which had as one of its premises that students would have an international education, circulating between campuses on four continents. Kerrey became the Executive Chair of the project in January, 2013. On February 22, Kerrey met Epstein for lunch at the townhouse, where they were joined by two other people leading out Minerva, Steve Kosslyn and Ben Nelson.

Can you convert to paid?

Whether Epstein was interested in Minerva or not (and I have found no evidence that he invested in the project), he added the former Senator and vice-chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence to his collection. There is an email expressing “NEED to start coordinating dinner w/ woody, soon yi, bob Kerrey for April 23” (media magnate Mort Zuckerman was ultimately included in the group too.) Kerrey breakfasted with Epstein in May; in June, he attended a lunch at Epstein’s townhouse with former Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, described in several emails not as a social event but as a “meeting.” In August, there was a last-minute invitation to a dinner party featuring Leon Botstein, (Kerrey declined, as he was in Sag Harbor), and in September, a lunch with Peter Thiel. By the spring of 2014, Kerrey seemed to be a valued guest: “Who do we tell Bob Kerrey will be at lunch?” reads the subject line of an April 2014 email with no other content.

What is more than a little odd is that, although much of this correspondence went directly to Kerrey, some of it also passed through his scheduler, a woman employed by The New School—even though Kerrey had not worked there for three years.

The document that contains the Ehud Barak lunch is worth a read, because it shows how many pots Epstein had a finger in while, at the same time, navigating life as a convicted sex offender. The schedule for February and March 2013 begins with a reminder to Epstein, in large bold type, that he had to have a new photo taken for the New York State Sex Offenders registry, and repeated in a subsequent page lest he forget. This urgent task brackets a dizzying schedule that includes (among other things): visits with Bard President Leon Botstein, tech giant Elon Musk, comedian Lewis Black, defense lawyer Reid Weingarten, Larry Summers, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, financier Leon Black, and designer Vera Wang (!!); a trip to St. Petersburg (Russia); and lunch with Woody Allen in Paris.

Jeffrey Epstein, host. Image retrieved from Reddit.

What news reports of these files will not tell you is how much the Epstein files are like so many collections of government documents I have worked in: it’s like falling into a trashcan, and searching them on line makes them, if anything, more incoherent. They are repetitive; they are out of order; and they skip forward only to skip back again. Shocking documents (like screen shots of text messages with the new cadre of young women Epstein had assembled in New York) are sandwiched in between banal conversations about where the plane is and why the $800 programmable TOTO toilet won’t work. There are literally dozens of emails (finally stopped counting) about bathroom fixtures (I stopped looking on page 53); memos on food preparation (“J.E. muffin warmed in microwave—top only”) and flower arrangements; credit card bills; and which apartments need clean sheets and towels.

Similarly, the files contain information and gossip about incredibly important people (November 2016, all names redacted: “I remember flying back with Donald on his plane the first weekend I went to visit you in Florida was the weekend he met Melania and he kept coming out of the bedroom saying ‘wow what a hot piece of ass’”) as well as far too many minor players to count.

Yet here’s the secret to government documents that every historian knows. You may have guessed that Donald Trump said nasty things about the woman who became his wife, and you may even suspect from this document that she was trafficked to him. That may be as may be.

But it is the minor players, like me, or The New School, that are breadcrumbs that guide you to a story you didn’t know about Jeffrey Epstein: one of the ways he kept numerous women in his orbit was by paying for their education. And at least three I have identified (their names have been redacted in the documents) attended The New School. Which is how my course ended up in a DOJ file: one of these women was interested in the course of study where it was listed and sent it to Epstein for his approval.

But before we go there, let me just say: it seems that Epstein was a mark for every educational institution looking to fund something. He had acquired a reputation for this, and the New School was no different. In 2014, as Kerrey was probably trying to wheedle money out of Epstein for Minerva, The New School’s Senior Director of Development formally approached him. “Over the next several months,” the fund raiser wrote, “I will reach out to you for guidance and participation as we endeavor to geographically unify our three performing arts divisions.” To translate for you: this means “we are going to put you on a committee with other wealthy people like you, where everyone will pony up large sums of money.”

I cannot emphasize enough how normal this is in the world of higher education, and particularly for cash-strapped schools. Cooper Union wanted an upgrade to its IT infrastructure.

I don’t think The New School got any money from Epstein, probably in part because Kerrey poisoned the well. I mean, wouldn’t you have? In any case, there is no further correspondence with The New School’s development office after that date.

But it is also true that a development office soliciting Epstein’s participation in a capital campaign would have known that he had a conviction for trafficking underage girls. Such people are researched minutely, and the reason I know that is because I have seen documents about such people. But to offer my former employers a modicum of grace, what may have happened by 2014, is that Epstein’s warp-speed campaign to get back on top had worked. So many institutions and projects had taken money from Epstein, so many important people had passed through his doors and sat on his toilets that he had effectively been washed clean—even as he continued the crimes that put him on the sex offender registry in the first place.

But the real story about The New School in the Epstein Files is a snapshot of the strange world the women he exploited lived in. Many were promised that they would be rewarded for their service with an education, and that promise appears to have been frequently fulfilled.

There were strings attached. Lots of them. But these were women who learned fast. Numerous documents show flirtation coupled with hard-nosed negotiation about which programs would meet his intellectual standards and, at the same time, accommodate the “massage” schedule. One prospective New School student who wanted permission to enroll in 2011 closed her message with “Have fun in France!!!! I will see you soon!!!! BIG kiss!!!” All of them reassured Epstein constantly that school was just a detail: what really mattered was sex with him. “Thank you so much again for the money,” one wrote in 2017. “Can’t wait to be done with school and spend more time with my chubby mellow sneaky dog.”

At the same time, The New School had a second advantage for women who needed to trade sex and flattery for the educations that would potentially free them. Like many cash-strapped institutions, it had a generous admissions policy that appealed to women so marginal they did not know that most colleges required SAT scores. In February, 2014, one of these women decided to enroll in the division I taught in at The New School, and Epstein paid the tuition through something called the COUQ Foundation.

“Sorry sneaky,” short for sneaky dog, the nickname for Epstein in their iPhones, “I can’t pickup in class will finish at 7:50” one wrote in November 2015. In 2017, another woman informs Epstein that there are two graduations in May, “one that is exclusive for Parsons” the design school, and a big graduation—where she will put him on the list for tickets. “I looooove you,” she signs off. Yet another was admitted to a graduate program in 2018, and she had to prod Epstein multiple times for permission to enroll.

But it also seems not unlikely that the colleges where these women enrolled became new hunting grounds where Epstein continued the pattern of using women already in his network to recruit new women—this time of legal age. Take this email from 2015, for example:

This is the real Epstein story that has yet to be told: not about Ghislaine Maxwell, the Clintons, Leon Black, a fistful of Harvard intellectuals or even, I am sorry to say, Donald and Melania Trump. It’s the little people—the numerous women who just wanted a little piece of Epstein’s heaven for themselves, and the dozens of factotums who made that happen.

It’s the story of those of us who might have seen what as playing out before our eyes—professors, admissions officers, deans—and had no idea what we were looking at.

And the story of that other New York—the have-nots, the want-to-haves, and those who just went about their business? It’s all in the Epstein files for the person who has the patience to look for it.

Political Junkie

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?