In January, a House committee directed NYU to hand over all records related to Jeffrey Epstein, citing claims that the convicted sex offender lured victims by promising them admission to the university. While the request has not been publicly addressed, a WSN investigation found Epstein exaggerated his NYU education.

Epstein enrolled at NYU as a student without an undergraduate degree, took graduate-level classes at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and was sued by the university in 1975 after sending an invalid check to the Office of the Bursar, WSN’s analysis of files released by the Department of Justice indicated. NYU did not respond to requests for comment regarding its history with the financier.

Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter whose “Perversion of Justice” series drew attention to the scope of Epstein’s crimes in 2018, said the university’s lack of transparency “sows distrust.”

“He mentions NYU an awful lot, and that needs to be examined,” Brown told WSN. “The school should be transparent and evaluate exactly why he was doing that — it’s important to the NYU community.”

Epstein claimed to have received a Courant master’s degree on a 1976 employment and personal history form for the now-defunct investment bank Bear Stearns, where he began his career in finance. However, when the company requested Epstein’s records from NYU during a background check, Graduate School of Arts and Science Recording Office employee Mavis Lewis sent a letter confirming Epstein’s enrollment while noting that he did not graduate.

“This is to certify that Jeffrey E. Epstein whose date of birth is January 20, 1950 was registered as a non-degree student in the Graduate School of Arts and Science, Department of Music, from September 1971 to May 1974,” Lewis wrote. “Mr. Epstein did not receive a degree from New York University.”

The letter contradicted a separate 1976 corporate background check that recorded he studied mathematics — not music. Epstein’s NYU transcript, obtained by Bear Stearns in September 1976, similarly lists his major as mathematics and includes courses such as Differential Geometry and Mathematical Physiology of the Heart. Courant professor Charles Peskin, who published lecture notes from teaching the latter class during the last two years of Epstein’s enrollment, told WSN he had “no recollection of him at all.”

CUNY sociology professor Thomas Volscho, who is researching for a book investigating wealthy sex traffickers, said Lewis included a fraudulent year of birth in the March 1976 letter, which Epstein repeated in other documents. Volscho told WSN that Epstein lying about his age marked one step in a broader pattern of fraud.

“He dropped out of both Cooper Union and NYU without graduating,” Volscho said. “In my opinion, he’s not someone who can follow the rules long enough to fulfill a degree — go through all the steps of being evaluated. He couldn’t pass through that. He’s a cheater.”

Epstein’s misrepresentations on his Bear Stearns application were not limited to his NYU degree. As reported by The Daily Californian, he also falsely claimed to have worked as a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley. 

According to a May 1976 report by Fidelifacts, NYU took Epstein to a civil court in December 1975 over an invalid tuition check — yet in his Bear Stearns application, Epstein denied being party to any lawsuit.

“He wrote a check on his mother’s checking account for his tuition and the check bounced,” Volscho told WSN. “When NYU sent a debt collector to his address, his brother answered the door and said he’d gone off to Europe and then coughed up like three or four hundred dollars of the thousand-odd dollars owed.”

After leaving academia, Epstein went on to donate over $1.6 million to Manhattan schools, including nearly $100,000 to NYU, a Bloomberg analysis found. He maintained contact with multiple NYU faculty members, including SPS professor Lawrence Delson, former NYU Grossman professor Elkhonon Goldberg, Stern professor James Rosenwald and Courant professor Yann LeCun — also this year’s honorary Tandon commencement speaker.

Stern Executive Board member and NYU megadonor John Paulson appears twice in Epstein’s contact list and invited the convicted sex offender to a 2013 event hosted by Matthew Bronfman, a President’s Global Council member named honorary chair of NYU Hillel. Former Tisch Dean’s Council members Steve Tisch and Brett Ratner were also in the files — Tisch met several young women through Epstein starting in 2013, while Ratner was pictured side by side with him. 

“He liked to fancy himself as having the kind of mind that was brilliant, and surrounding himself with those people and donating to those institutions made him feel like he was in that group,” Brown said. “Part of it was ego, and part of it was that he probably thought he could influence these institutions — and it looks like he was able to do that to some degree.”

In his Jan. 14 letter to President Linda Mills, Rep. Jamie Raskin, who led congressional efforts to investigate the convicted sex offender, wrote that Epstein offered NYU acceptance to at least six girls — including one high school student — between 1993 and 2004, while his co-conspirators “continued to sexually assault and rape” victims who attended the university. 

Survivor and advocate Lisa Phillips, who was in her 20s when she met Epstein in the early 2000s, told the Wall Street Journal that Epstein arranged for her to visit NYU’s campus and paid for her drama classes while abusing her for years.

“He used NYU to groom — it’s a transactional promise to create a debt with the potential victim, which he then exploits,” Volscho told WSN. “I hope these congressional inquiries help reform the way universities can become vessels of deviance.”

University spokesperson Joseph Tirella did not confirm whether NYU had met the Jan. 28 deadline, nor did he address whether the university had investigated claims that the convicted sex offender manipulated NYU records as part of his sex trafficking operation. His only response was a statement identical to one given to WSN in January, writing that NYU is “fully committed to cooperating with Representative Raskin’s inquiry” and supports “efforts to bring transparency to Epstein’s horrific conduct.”

It remains unclear whether the submission of NYU-related records will be publicly disclosed.

Contact Krish Dev at [email protected].