Stanford accepted $50,000 donation from Jeffrey Epstein
Stanford University accepted a $50,000 donation in 2004 from a foundation funded by deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to a Friday report from Bloomberg News.
The donation, which went toward the university’s physics department, reportedly came two years before allegations about the disgraced financier’s sexual misconduct with young girls began making the news.
“The funds were expended shortly thereafter, and we have no record of any other gifts to the university from him or his foundations,” a Stanford spokesman told Bloomberg.
Stanford did not immediately respond to a FOX Business request for comment.
Stanford joins a growing number of educational institutions that are coming to terms with their connections to Epstein, who was accused of abusing and trafficking dozens of girls as young as 14 in New York and Florida in the early 2000s. He killed himself inside his Manhattan jail cell in mid-August. The multi-millionaire was being held without bail pending trial on child-sex-trafficking charges.
Prior to his arrest in July, Epstein cultivated relationships with some of the most high-profile scientists around the world and became a generous benefactor to some of their research.
Last month, Stanford, among a number of other institutions, told Buzzfeed that they had searched their financial records and could find no evidence that Epstein’s foundation ever made donations. (A spokesman told Bloomberg that Buzzfeed asked about donations after 2006 and that it was forthright about the 2004 gift).
On Thursday, Harvard University President Lawrence Bacow said in a letter that prior to Epstein’s guilty plea in 2008, Epstein gave, in total, $8.9 million to the university. While the university already spent most of that money, it plans to redirect the remaining $186,000 to organizations that support victims of human trafficking and sexual assault.
And in August, Mount Sinai Health System said it planned to make a charitable contribution equivalent to the undisclosed amount of money it received from Epstein to organizations focused on preventing human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, meanwhile, came under increased scrutiny last week following a New Yorker report that it worked to conceal the extent of its fundraising relationship with Epstein.
The director of the lab stepped down on Saturday after outcry over his financial connections to Epstein.
“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately,” the director, Joichi Ito, wrote in an email to the university’s provost, Martin A. Schmidt.
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