Hold Fundraisers Accountable for Their Role in Epstein’s Rise

It is the job of the fundraising team to support, protect, and set standards for elite nonprofit institutions, including protecting faculty from exactly the kind of manipulation that Jeffrey Epstein conducted so smoothly.

March 9, 2026 | Read Time: 5 minutes

In the search for accountability in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, nearly every day brings fresh evidence of how the convicted sex offender used philanthropy to ingratiate himself with elite institutions. The scholars that Epstein wooed are getting skewered for their seeming naivete, but why hasn’t anyone asked about the fundraisers who were involved?

After all, it is not the job of a geneticist or a theoretical physicist to be an expert in donor due diligence.

It is the job of the fundraising team to support, protect, and set standards for the institution, including protecting faculty from exactly the kind of manipulation that Epstein conducted so smoothly. When we don’t hold these people accountable for their failures — and ask them to make amends for their mistakes — the reputation of all professional fundraisers takes a dangerous hit.

Every institution named in the Epstein files — Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others — has a large, well-resourced and professionally staffed development operation whose explicit mandate is to oversee precisely what failed here. Gift acceptance policies exist to evaluate reputational and operational risk. Legal and compliance teams review significant gifts before they are accepted. These are not theoretical functions. They are staffed, funded, and, at institutions of Harvard’s scale, genuinely sophisticated.

The $9.1 million that flowed from Epstein to Harvard over a decade did not arrive in unmarked envelopes. It moved through well-established institutional channels. Someone processed it. Someone approved it. Someone determined, presumably more than once, that the reputational calculus was acceptable. And when Epstein’s 2008 conviction prompted Harvard to quietly stop accepting his direct gifts, the money continued flowing through intermediaries for years afterward. Why don’t we know who these people are?

What makes this silence harder to excuse is that Harvard’s own internal investigation identified the structural failure in plain terms and recommended fixes.

MIT, to its credit, did things differently. When an independent review examined the university’s Epstein ties, it named three senior administrators, including MIT’s vice president for resource development, who had known about post-conviction donations. The probe concluded that these leaders had done serious damage to the institution. That accountability was imperfect, but it established something important: naming development leadership when gift acceptance procedures fail is possible.

Tarnishing the Fundraising Profession

There is a deeper problem lurking beneath all of this: When development leaders and staff members are never named, questioned, or held responsible, it corrodes the professional standing of everyone who works in fundraising.

Advancement professionals have spent decades, rightly, arguing that fundraising is a serious discipline. Organizations like the Association of Fundraising Professionals have established codes of ethics, certification programs, and professional standards precisely to elevate the field and distinguish it from the glad-handing, transactional image often evoked. All that work is undermined when the profession’s most visible failures produce no professional consequences for those at the top.

Suppose a CFO at a major institution approved a series of financial transactions that later proved catastrophic and reputationally ruinous; that CFO would be named. There would be board-level inquiries. There would be consequences.

The persistent invisibility of development leadership in the Epstein reckoning sends the opposite message: that the advancement function is ultimately administrative, that it processes gifts others have cultivated, and that when things go wrong, the “real” executives and leaders — the faculty, the presidents, the donors — are the ones who will answer for it.

This is a profound disservice to the thousands of fundraising professionals who do their jobs with integrity and take their ethical obligations seriously. Holding development leadership accountable is not a punishment. It is an act of professional recognition. It says: your role has genuine authority, your ethical standards matter, and your failures, just like your successes, have real consequences for the institution.

A Response to Epstein Gifts That Worked

I know this not only in theory but from direct professional experience. Mount Sinai Health System, where I served in a senior development role until 2016, was among the institutions that received Epstein donations, including gifts that continued after his 2008 conviction, totaling more than $250,000.

When the full scope of Epstein’s crimes became undeniable in 2019, Mount Sinai did not equivocate. It did not commission a multi-year internal review or wait for public pressure to reach a fevered pitch. The health system issued a clear public statement, acknowledged what it had received, and committed to donating an equivalent sum to organizations focused on preventing human trafficking and sexual exploitation, as well as to its own Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program, which serves survivors directly.

It was not a perfect response. The amount received was never publicly disclosed, and questions about how the gifts passed through internal review in the first place went largely unaddressed. But the speed, the directness, and the decision to redirect the money toward the very types of people Epstein harmed represented something that Harvard, MIT, and others have conspicuously failed to match: the institutional recognition that accepting this money carried a moral debt and that the debt had to be actively repaid.

To me, this is what institutional character looks like under pressure. The organizations that respond well are not those with perfect gift acceptance processes. They are the ones with leadership willing to say, plainly and without hedging: We got this wrong, and here is what we are going to do about it.

Redirect the Funds to Aid Women

What Mount Sinai did in 2019 should become the floor, not the ceiling, for every institution named in the Epstein files. Every organization that accepted his money should regrant it — in full, publicly, and accountably — to organizations that support women and girls.

This would be a meaningful act of institutional integrity. It would signal that the prestige of a Harvard or an MIT is not, in fact, for sale to those who exploit the vulnerable. And it would transform a stain on these institutions into something reparative.

The pressure to raise money at universities is real and unrelenting. But pressure is not an excuse. The fundraising systems designed to manage that pressure existed precisely for moments like this. They failed. That failure deserves serious reckoning.