Amid Epstein Files Fallout, Bard’s Sexual Misconduct History Gets New Scrutiny

Story by Elias Guerra, WAMC/New York Public News Network

“So my argument is a pretty simple one — that 16 is now what 18 was 50 years ago.”

That’s what Bard College President Leon Botstein said in 1999, talking to Diane Rehm on WAMU about his book, “Jefferson’s Child,” which argues that students should start school at a younger age.

“Menstruation and the onset of maturity happens now [at] 12-13 [years old], and used to be 14-15,” Botstein said in 1999.

Botstein’s 1999 comments, of course, have been public for decades.

A spokesperson for the college said of the comments that they “refer to early college options — then a pioneering concept and now widely adopted across the United States — which show that many 16-year-olds are academically ready for college work.”

But some students and alumni are looking at them and other actions now with renewed scrutiny after Botstein’s name appeared more than 2,500 times in the Epstein files — including emails that show Botstein visited the late sex offender’s island in 2012 and welcomed Jeffrey Epstein to Bard in 2013.

In 1991, students protested Bard College’s lack of action in handling cases of sexual violence. Decades later, some students and alumni are calling on the college’s president, who has been at the school since 1975, to resign.

One student, Owen Denker, says sexual abuse remains rampant at Bard College — and just under the surface.

“It ranges from everything from student-on-student sexual misconduct that is not adequately addressed, professors having sexually inappropriate relationships with students, administrators with sexual harassment issues that remain on the job. It is extremely common,” Denker said.

Denker, a senior literature major at Bard, is the spokesperson for the student group Take Back Bard. He described the organization as a loose group of students and alumni sharing stories, and says the group is calling for the college president to resign immediately.

Botstein has said he will not resign.

Following the news that the Bard College Board of Trustees hired an outside law firm, WilmerHale, to investigate the relationship between the college’s president and Jeffrey Epstein, the student group sent a public letter signed “Concerned Students of Bard College” to the Bard community, asking whether the investigation will look into the larger problem of sexual abuse on campus. Denker says the problem is rampant.

The public letter asks in bold letters: “Why are the voices of survivors and the existing evidence not enough for Bard to commit to much-needed change?”

The student group points out the issue goes back decades.

On May 10, 1991, the Bard Observer published a photo of students standing on top of a building, with a sign behind them that read, “Why does Bard tolerate rape?”

In 1991, over 30 students occupied Ludlow Hall, Bard’s administration building, for more than two days, to demand that the college formally acknowledge it had mishandled many cases of sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape.

At the time, students demanded that administrators be available 24 hours a day to respond to students who experienced sexual assault, harassment, or rape, and that the college create a hotline to respond to those kinds of cases. The demands, as printed in the student newspaper, were approved by 200 concerned Bard students. That was over 30 years ago.

Denker says the underlying problem persists.

“When freshmen come in, they pass around names of professors you don’t want to be alone in a room with. This is extremely, extremely common. I’ve gone outside my dorm and heard students finding common ground over the same professor hitting on both of them,” Denker said.

Sarah Gerard, a writer and investigative journalist, wrote a book called “Carrie Carolyn Coco” about the 2016 death of her friend, Carolyn Bush, who was stabbed to death by her roommate, Render Stetson-Shanahan. Stetson-Shanahan was convicted of manslaughter.

In researching her book, Gerard said she began investigating Bard College’s history of sexual violence.

“The school is sort of a cult of personality. People have described it to me as cultish, with Botstein as the figurehead and face of the school. And his ego is very merged with Bard and its history and his legacy there. He creates the culture in which these things happen, and then when they do, washes his hands of any responsibility for it,” Gerard said.

Gerard says, in researching the book, she looked at all the lawsuits against the college she could find in the Dutchess County and city of Poughkeepsie courts.

“There’s a long history of Bard students being raped by their male classmates and being harassed or ignored by the administration until they drop out of school with no other recourse, or they sue the school, and the lawsuit drags on for years, and that becomes another form of harassment and revictimization for that woman. That’s just been their strategy for 50 years, it seems to me.”

A review of reporting by various news outlets over the past two decades points to a pattern in which the college allegedly failed to handle sexual misconduct appropriately.

In 2015, Buzzfeed reported that a woman filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education after she was forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement by Bard College after she was raped. In 2016, the Huffington Post reported about three federal complaints of sexual assault made against Bard College around that time.

In a 2020 lawsuit reported on by the New York Times, a student alleged that her former music teacher at Bard had groomed and sexually assaulted her. During the investigation, the student found out that he had two previous Title IX complaints against him. The teacher had been allowed to continue teaching at Bard after making a written apology and taking an online anti-harassment course.

Owen Denker says, even with such reports in the public domain, people are afraid of coming forward.

“Everyone is terrified. If they’re a student, they’re terrified their degree will be withheld. If they’re working at the college, they’re terrified they’re going to be fired. Fear is the name of the game here at Bard College,” Denker said.

A Bard College spokesperson told WAMC in a statement, “Our Gender-Based Misconduct Policy goes beyond federal Title IX requirements by covering conduct both on and off campus, prohibiting sexual exploitation and additional forms of sex-based harassment.” The statement says Bard also maintains an anonymous misconduct reporting hotline and that “Bard has never been found liable for failure to uphold Title IX laws, and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has never found the College in violation of Title IX.”

One Bard alumna, Tallula Woitach, who has been organizing against Botstein for over two years, says there are so many examples stretching back years.

“It’s not like one mistake or one ‘oopsie’ or ‘oh, we just didn’t know.’ Just the really clear endorsement, not just negligence, but endorsement. Not just not firing someone, but rehiring them, for example,” Woitach said.

Michael Deibert, a journalist who graduated from Bard in 1996, interviewed a student who said she was sexually assaulted in 1995 during the Tivoli Bay rapes — a series of rapes that happened near the campus in the 1990s. The former student told Deibert that she and her parents did not feel that Bard was very concerned for her.

“The impression they got from Botstein and from the administration was that they basically did not feel that student safety was particularly their priority, or I should say, student safety perhaps just off campus, which I think would strike most people as a little bit strange,” Deibert told WAMC.

In the Feb. 23, 1990, issue of the Bard Observer, Botstein said, when talking about alcohol laws, “We would like to stand for principles and moral standards, but we would not like to be guardians or enforcers.”

Deibert says he remembers during his time at Bard in the 1990s that Botstein promoted a culture of ultimate personal freedom, which, he said, can easily go too far.

“I think when you have this ambience of really libertine, personal freedom, combined with sometimes serious drug and alcohol abuse, combined with a real, pretty steady drumbeat of sexual and gender violence that can become very problematic and very dangerous,” Deibert said.

Woitach says Bard’s response has never been to take responsibility.

“Even when so much does come out, [their response is] not going to be to look at it deeper. It’s going to be to find more and more creative ways to excuse it and to remove and sweep away the person bringing them up as the problem, rather than the abuse itself,” Woitach said.

The scrutiny into Bard’s handling of sexual misconduct comes as the Department of Justice’s Epstein library shows longstanding communication between Botstein and Jeffrey Epstein. From the time of their earliest communications, Epstein was classified as a level 3 sex offender. Level 3 sex offenders are required to register for life with law enforcement and are considered the highest risk category.

In 2023, Botstein told the New York Times about Epstein, “We had no idea, the public record had no indication, that he was anything more than an ordinary — if you could say such a thing — sex offender who had been convicted and went to jail.”

Botstein has defended his dealings with Epstein as being solely about fundraising for the private college.

WAMU provided audio used in this story.

Image Credit: Elias Guerra