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The lawyer who repped Jeffrey Epstein in his 2008 teen-prostitution plea deal maintained personal ties with him, newly unsealed files show — and was later hired by Columbia University to fight the White House.
Department of Justice documents on its probe into Epstein revealed that former Epstein lawyer Jay Lefkowitz kept a personal relationship with the sex offender after his conviction, including by tooling around on the millionaire financier’s private helicopter, attending his dinner parties and inviting Epstein to his son’s bar mitzvah, the Columbia Spectator student news outlet first reported.
Victim-rights groups said they are outraged that the beleaguered Ivy League institution then still hired Lefkowitz to help negotiate the school’s $221 million settlement with the Trump DOJ this past summer over civil-rights claims of discrimination against Jewish students.
“It’s absolutely not appropriate,’’ said Erica Vladimer, co-founder of the Sexual Harassment Working Group.
“There are plenty of attorneys out there Columbia could have hired who don’t have a reputation for defending child sex abusers,’’ she told The Post.
Lefkowitz — a prestigious Columbia alum and lecturer and former Bush White House lawyer — was one of the attorneys who negotiated Epstein’s controversial sex-case plea deal in Florida nearly 20 years ago.
Epstein was accused at the time of paying a 14-year-old girl $200 to give him a massage at his Palm Beach mansion in 2005, with him using a vibrator on her while he masturbated.
Epstein avoided federal charges — which could have seen him face life in prison — and instead received an 18-month state prison sentence by pleading guilty to one count of soliciting prostitution and one count of soliciting prostitution for someone under the age of 18.
He was able to go on “work release” to his office for 12 hours a day, six days a week while doing his time. He was released on probation after 13 months.
Here’s the latest on the release of the Epstein files
- DOJ says it has released less than 1% of Epstein files, with more than 2 million documents under review
- Bill and Hillary Clinton face contempt of Congress for dodging on Epstein subpoenas again
- Rage as California lawmaker spared jail for felony child abuse due to ‘Epstein loophole’: official
- DOJ ‘working around the clock’ on Epstein files release, with millions of pages left to review
Many critics considered the sentence a slap on the wrist.
Epstein was so thrilled with the sweetheart plea deal that he gave Lefkowitz and others on his legal dream team an added bonus: nearly $1 million worth of donations to their favorite charities, including a tony Manhattan prep school, The Post wrote in 2019.
Epstein’s C.O.U.Q. nonprofit donated $500,000 in 2007 to the Ramaz School on the Upper East Side, where Lefkowitz was a prominent member of the school’s Orthodox Jewish community.
In the Columbia case, some of the school’s Jewish students said they were forced to endure extreme antisemitism on campus since the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Palestinian terrorists on Israel and ensuing Gaza war, prompting the White House to take on the school, which ended up settling for the whopping amount.
Acting Columbia President Claire Shipman was grilled about Lefkowitz’s and other Columbia associates’ ties to Epstein during a faculty Senate meeting last month.
During questioning, University senator and professor of writing Susan Bernofsky asked Shipman to “commit to commission an independent review of the Columbia affiliated individuals who were more seriously entangled with Epstein, as is coming out,’’ according to the Spectator.
Bernofsky specifically brought up Lefkowitz.
Shipman said at the time it was “premature” to address the Columbia-Epstein connections but that it would be done at a future meeting, the outlet said.
A Columbia rep declined comment to The Post about Lefkowitz’s ties to Epstein or whether it was appropriate to appoint him to represent the university in a civil-rights case.
The representative also declined comment on whether Columbia paid Lefkowitz or his firm, Kirkland & Ellis, for his work and if so, how much.
Lefkowitz declined comment.
He is an accomplished and well-connected lawyer.
English (US)