Jamie Raskin says ‘startling’ email asked whether young woman was ‘for me, or are you keeping her for yourself’ A powerful Democratic lawmaker has called for a criminal investigation into former Bard College president Leon Botstein after congressional investigators uncovered an email from Botstein to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey…
Page A207From§Eachthe early evening edition — 7 October 2026
Bard president quits over Epstein ties in May, quits the rest when the email surfaces in October.
As it ran on the front
Leon Botstein resigned from Bard College's presidency in May, citing — in the phrasing of the wire services — his ties to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. That resignation covered one title. He kept his professorship. He kept his roles in Bard's music programs. The ties, whatever they were, were apparently containable.
Five months later, congressional investigators found an email, and the ties stopped being containable. The email runs to one sentence, and the sentence is Botstein's own: he asks Jeffrey Epstein whether a young woman was "for me, or are you keeping her for yourself." All together now — read that twice. The man who stepped down in May over his friendship with Epstein had, at some point, sent a question about a woman as though she were a line item.…
…(cont) The email surfaced this week. Botstein resigned everything else the same day — the professorship, the music-program roles, whatever remained of the fifty years he had spent at Bard. Representative Jamie Raskin, who called the email "startling," is asking for a criminal investigation into what it says — not into whether Botstein knew Epstein, a fact established in May, but into the sentence itself.
It is worth noticing what did the work here. Not a Bard faculty committee. Not an internal review. Not, as far as the record shows, Bard's board at all — the retirement in May was Botstein's own announcement, and so, it appears, was October's. What moved him was congressional investigators reading his correspondence and a lawmaker reading it back to the public. The New York Times, writing up the same resignation, describes the thing Botstein kept in May as a "longtime friendship" — the paper's word; the receipts give no count of years beyond it. A longtime friendship was enough to end a presidency. A single sentence was enough to end everything attached to it.
The distance between those two resignations is the actual finding here, and congressional investigators found it the way anyone could have — by reading what the man wrote.
“"Ties." That's the word they used back in May — ties, like he was related to the guy, not like he was asking whether a trafficking victim was being saved for later use. Bard didn't investigate one thing; the man announced his own retirement twice, five months apart, and this time he called it resigning "the rest." That's not an institution holding anyone accountable, that's a man managing his own exit paperwork on a schedule he set.”
“Nobody's disputing the email exists, we're disputing what it means — context matters, people write all kinds of things. He didn't forward it, fine, he wrote it, but the point stands: Professor Botstein already resigned once, in May, voluntarily, which is exactly the accountability we want from an institution. Doing it twice just shows thoroughness. Did I say that? That's not — let me start over.”
Earlier in this story
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The receipts
Leon Botstein had already retired from the presidency of the liberal arts college this spring, after emails showed he had maintained a longtime friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
· Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in New York, U.S., announces his retirement over his ties to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. (AP) (The Independent) from the morgue, 1 May 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.