In December 2019, more than a decade after graduating from Harvard, Emily Riehl ’06 got an email about a $25,000 gift directed toward her college rugby team.
A lawyer hired by Harvard was reviewing the 2004 donation and wanted to know what she could remember.
“I’ve seen online that you were the president of the women’s rugby club that year,” the lawyer, Martin F. Murphy, wrote. “I was hoping you might have a few minutes to speak to me about this.”
The donor, he quickly revealed, was convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein.
That was the first time Riehl had heard Epstein’s name connected to the gift.
Documents obtained by The Crimson and Pablo Torre Finds Out show that the connection was explicit from the start. In June 2004, Harvard established the “Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women’s Athletics,” noting a preference for women’s rugby. One month later, then-University President Lawrence H. Summers wrote directly to Epstein to thank him for the contribution.
“Your support of Jerome Kagan and your contribution to women’s rugby are only two recent examples of your sustained commitment,” Summers wrote. “Your generosity does not go unnoticed.”
But to Riehl and her teammates, none of that was visible. They said they believed the money had come from Massachusetts Hall, routed through Summers’ office after players confronted him over a disparity between the men’s and women’s rugby programs.
The team, they said, was never told the money originated with Epstein.
“There’s absolutely no way we would have touched a dime from him had we known the source of this funding,” Riehl said. “But that information was never provided to us.”
When Riehl replied to Murphy, she said she relayed exactly that: Summers had facilitated the donation and Epstein’s name had never come up — and the team had been told to keep the gift quiet.
But when Harvard released the report Murphy was working on in 2020, the episode was not included explicitly — and instead folded into a tally of Epstein’s donations to the school.
Left unexamined was the core tension of the gift: Harvard’s internal records tied the money to Epstein from the start, while the cash-strapped players it was meant to support were left believing that Summers had personally answered their plea for help.
Harvard’s 2020 report acknowledged a total of 26 gifts from Epstein to the University between 1997 and 2008. A Harvard spokesperson confirmed that the 2004 gift to women’s athletes was included in that total — but declined to comment further.
A spokesperson for Summers wrote in a statement that Summers’ fundraising was conducted “with the full involvement of the development office and the university’s legal, financial and due diligence functions.” The spokesperson added that the fundraising reflected the Athletics Department’s desire “to expand women’s club sports to bring them on par with men’s club athletics.”
At the time, the women’s rugby team was fighting to make ends meet. Players said they pieced together a budget of roughly $6,000 a year. They cleaned dorm bathrooms through Dorm Crew, volunteered for psychology studies, and solicited donations from parents.
The men’s rugby team, by contrast, had access to an endowment and a century-old alumni base. The men traveled by coach bus, Riehl recalled, while the women often walked to Central Square to rent cars from Enterprise.
The women's rugby team after a game in 2004. | By Courtesy of Emily Riehl
By 2004, frustration had boiled over. The team raised their concerns directly with Summers, Riehl and another former teammate recalled.
Soon afterwards, the two said, they were told there was good news: the women’s team would receive access to a $25,000 fund — a large infusion of support for the fledgling program.
Under the terms of the gift, the money would be held in a fund, with roughly $1,000 disbursed to the team annually for at least five years — beginning in summer 2005 — according to Riehl.
The Harvard spokesperson did not specify how much of the original $25,000 gift was spent on women’s rugby but confirmed that, in 2020, Harvard donated the “unspent balance” — including interest it had accrued — as part of a more than $200,000 donation to two nonprofit organizations supporting victims of human trafficking and sexual assault.
The sum earmarked for women’s rugby was a sliver of the $9.1 million that Epstein ultimately gave to Harvard between 1998 and 2007. But the gift adds a new dimension to scrutiny of the University’s ties to Epstein — and of Summers’ role in sustaining them.
Documents released by the House Oversight Committee and the Department of Justice since November show Summers maintained a longstanding relationship with Epstein, exchanging emails from the 1990s until the day before Epstein’s 2019 arrest.
The records also detail the extent of that relationship. Summers traveled on Epstein’s private jet multiple times, including during his tenure as Harvard’s president, and spent part of his honeymoon on Epstein’s private island, Little St. James. He was also named as a successor executor in a 2014 draft of Epstein’s will.
The fallout has been swift. Harvard has reopened its investigation into Epstein and his affiliates. Summers has stepped back from public commitments, left his teaching post, and announced that he will resign at the end of the academic year.
For the women who played rugby in 2004, the resolution still feels incomplete.
“I’m glad that it is coming out now, and I’m glad that there is finally some reckoning,” Riehl said.
“Maybe not to the degree that is warranted, given everything that he did — but it’s better to talk about it late than never at all,” she added.
—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at hcc.35. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.
—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at elisespenner.82. Follow her on X @EliseSpenner.