Two more women have come forward accusing Jeffrey Epstein of sexual conduct at Michigan's Interlochen Center for the Arts — a school that gladly stamped his name on a lodge and cashed more than $400,000 in donations while he groomed students on campus. The question isn't just what Epstein did. It's who looked the other way, and why the press only notices when a law firm drops a report they can't ignore.
A 97-page investigation by Sanghavi Law Office, commissioned in 2024, collected 70 accounts from alumni alleging "physical conduct of a sexual nature" by 47 faculty and staff spanning from the 1950s through the 2010s. Two of those accounts point directly at Epstein. One woman said Epstein brushed against her body "over her clothes, in a manner in which he indicated was accidental" at the very lodge that bore his name. He also paid for her to visit him in New York while she was a student. She told investigators that "every time he was 'handsy' with her, she would freeze until he would stop." The second woman said she gave Epstein a massage at his home and he may have asked her to remove her top.
Follow the money. Epstein donated over $400,000 to Interlochen between 1990 and 2003. The school named a lodge after him. He was a camper there in 1967. That's decades of access purchased with donor dollars, and nobody at the institution asked questions until long after his 2008 Florida conviction — and only then did they quietly scrape his name off the building. The lodge was recently demolished after the Justice Department finally released millions of pages of compiled evidence. The DOJ sat on that material for years.
At least two other Interlochen alumnae have made claims of grooming and abuse against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell outside the school's investigation, according to federal records and media reports. One testified against Maxwell at her 2021 trafficking trial. It remains unclear whether those women were even contacted by the law firm Interlochen hired.
President Trey Devey and board chair Barrett Rollins issued the obligatory letter: "We are deeply sorry for the harm experienced by members of our community." They insist Interlochen today "is fundamentally different from the institution described in this report." Maybe. But more than a third of the accused are dead. None currently work there. The school has handed names to Grand Traverse County authorities to determine what steps, "if any," might be taken. That qualifier — "if any" — tells you everything about institutional appetite for accountability.
Both Arkansas Online and The Guardian ran essentially the same wire copy. Neither pressed on the obvious gaps: Why did Interlochen wait until 2024 to investigate? What did school leadership know about Epstein's access to students during those years of donations? Who else at the institution facilitated that access? The press reports the findings but doesn't chase the cover-up.
This is the pattern. Institutions cash checks from predators, look the other way for decades, then issue apologies when the damage is irreparable and most of the culprits are beyond accountability. The media plays stenographer instead of investigator. The same outlets that lecture Americans about systemic abuse won't follow the money or the connections to power unless a law firm hands them a finished report.
The lodge is demolished. The donor is dead. The apology is posted. What's still standing is the system that let it all happen — and the press that refuses to tear it down.
