An NPR reporting team sheds new light on how Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell used their access to the Interlochen Center for the Arts to target girls.
ADRIAN MA, HOST:
When it comes to the Epstein files, we often hear about the famous people mentioned in them. But a reporting team at NPR recently focused on a place, the Interlochen Center for the Arts.
AVA BERGER, BYLINE: It’s a prestigious elite school up in northern Michigan for really talented young artists. People who go through there – I mean, there was Josh Groban, Chappell Roan.
MA: That’s Ava Berger, an intern here at NPR. She co-reported a story recently about Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship to Interlochen.
BERGER: We found out that Epstein was in alum. He played the bassoon in the 1960s at Interlochen, and he would come back later in the ’90s and early 2000’s and donate almost a little bit over $400,000 to the school.
MA: The largest chunk of that donation went to building a cabin on Interlochen’s campus. Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell would stay there for brief visits, years before they were convicted for sex crimes. Ava learned how those visits worked.
BERGER: So Ghislaine Maxwell would contact a school administrator. We’d like to come and stay in the cabin. The administrator would say, yes, great. What do you need? And Ghislaine would get back and say, I want – we want these things, and we’re coming. Once they’re there, they really were on their own.
MA: And that’s where the story takes a turn.
BERGER: This lodge was his base there. And while he was there, he was walking around campus, and he had a little dog with him with Ghislaine Maxwell. And that’s where he ended up meeting two – a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old girl.
MA: Those girls, now women in their 40s, became wrapped up in Epstein’s orbit.
BERGER: The first woman who testified in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial – she described years of sexual abuse. The second woman who we talked to – she described a relationship that was manipulative and controlling and an abuse of power.
MA: To unravel this story, Ava had to dig through a lot of documents. So as we sat down for this week’s Reporter’s Notebook, I asked her what it was like to dig through the Epstein files.
BERGER: It’s a mess. The Epstein files are really a mess. They – there are redactions in some places of people’s names that aren’t victims, and then they’re not redacted in other places. And then there’s so many repeats of files. Or you’ll have, like, an email chain, and you’ll have one email, and then the next file is the second email, and the next file is the third email, and then the last file is all six of the emails on the email chain, if that makes sense. So it’s – a lot of it is just going through being – I saw this, I saw this.
MA: So this reporting involved hundreds of documents and sifting through and piecing a lot of things together. How do you go about assembling a coherent story from all that?
BERGER: When I was looking at these documents, I was trying to find a theme. And the one point that stuck with me was from a statement that Interlochen released, and it said they did not allow unsupervised contact with donors or students. And it just didn’t make sense in my head how that could be a policy when we knew that Epstein had met two campers and gone on to have relationships with them. So I was trying to find details that explained that – what could tell us how Epstein got access, how he was able to have a lodge and the cabin, how he was able to get in contact with these young girls. And that – those were the details I was looking for.
And – ’cause I think part of where – when we looked through, like, so many pages of documents – and anyone who looks through things, you have to have something in your head that grounds you into, why is this important? Why does this matter? And to me, it mattered because it was so horrifying to think that – I went to a summer camp growing up – that these young girls who loved and trusted this place could end up in the situation they were in, which is, they met Epstein and Maxwell and were in their orbit for years.
MA: Can you say more about verification because with, you know, countless pages to sift through and all kinds of conversations and records, how do you verify what you’re looking at and know that you’re getting the accurate story?
BERGER: So part of it was using other documents to verify what we were seeing. But a big part of it is actually my conversations with these – I talked to two former administrators where really – a lot of them was me saying, do you remember this? What does this specific detail mean? What did you mean by this? Why did you tell Epstein and Maxwell this? And a lot of that doesn’t make into the story ’cause we are just trying to confirm with people who were there at the time what this means. So that was a huge part of our corroborating, the details.
And then talking to that other woman who met Epstein and Maxwell on the campus. She was also able to fill in some gaps for us that that we wouldn’t have known otherwise. So I think the interviews is the really key part that we needed to take it a step further. We couldn’t just rely on the documents.
MA: Also in the story, you interviewed a woman who was a camper at the time, who talked about how she met Epstein and Maxwell. And in the story, she’s anonymous. Can you tell us about the process of what it was like engaging with her and, you know, asking her to tell her story? – ’cause it sounds like it could be difficult.
BERGER: Yeah, it was really difficult, Adrian, especially because talking about this can be re-triggering and bring up thoughts that she might not have had for a really long time. And another part of it that I didn’t know – I mean, we see all this reporting on the Epstein files, and we see a lot of the victims speaking out and wanting the Epstein files released. But there are people who were part of that world who do not want anything to do with this anymore, who really – who want people to understand what they went through, but seeing the photos of Epstein and Maxwell everywhere is not a good feeling.
And I didn’t realize that there was so much nuance there, that it – these people are not a monolith. And that was really what we got from talking to her – that you can want your story shared but not want your name out there and not want to be the center of attention with all of this. You might just want to be living your life. It’s been years now, and you want to move forward.
MA: Yeah. Do you have a general sense of, like, how long she talked to you?
BERGER: Hours.
MA: So it’s been a couple weeks since you published this story. What’s the reaction to it been?
BERGER: It’s been very – within the alumni community, it’s been very large. We’ve – people have reached out to us and shared stories from that time period. And I think, in general, people are really horrified. There’s a sense that this camp is so – and it’s a camp and a school – is so beloved among people, and it’s just so – a place of such happiness. And so it’s really hard for people to wrap their heads around, how could this happen?
MA: Ava, we mentioned earlier that you’re an intern at NPR. How did reporting this story change how you think as a reporter?
BERGER: Yes. I think it goes back to that woman we were talking about and that you never know – and this can apply to so many stories – you never know what the story is until you talk to the people who are part of it. And she really helped us understand what this story was and that I can never overlook voices versus just a document. You know, like, you always have to take that next step and interview that next person and reach out even if you think someone won’t respond. Sometimes they do, and you really never know. So my – what I’ve taken away is just, it never hurts to go the extra mile.
MA: Ava Berger, thank you for taking the time to talk about your reporting with us.
BERGER: Thank you, Adrian.
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