In early February, texts swirled in group chats, the student gossip mill ran and faculty meetings were called. The news had dropped: The Masters School and its Board of Trustees were named in the Epstein files.
“Hi Jeffrey,” Paul Barrett, Jeffrey Epstein’s family banker of several years and ex-JP Morgan employee, wrote. “My son Jason was waitlisted at Riverdale School, Fieldston and The Masters (in Dobbs Ferry) for eighth grade. Do you by any chance know anyone on the boards (listed below)? Contracts are due back next week so hopefully some spots open up but any help from you would be greatly appreciated.”
Encoded in his email with the subject “Favor” was not information incriminating our school or its trustees in a scandal of sexual abuse, but an exposé on the web of gifts exchanged between the rich and powerful.
Epstein replied the next morning, in unpunctuated lowercase text that illuminates the perceived casualness of Barrett’s request, “late, but ill try.”
Nearly a month later, Epstein haphazardly confirmed his efforts to pull strings in private school admissions to fulfill his banker’s plea for a favor: “yes i called , i will check.”
The casualness of Epstein’s messages demonstrates more than a powerful man too busy to respond in full sentences. It brings to light the normalization of favors through networks of the rich and powerful, ones that place people in a class that supersedes systems – like private school admissions – by which most of us abide.
And yet, the news of our school’s mention, alongside our Head of School Laura Danforth and current and previoustrustees, sent shockwaves through the student body. But why are we so surprised?
Masters is an overwhelmingly privileged community deeply connected to the networks of the wealthy and powerful.
The 96-acre campus, complete with a state-of-the-art Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, brand-new hall for performing arts and hyper-qualified faculty, is nestled in Westchester – one of the country’s wealthiest counties. Our Board of Trustees comprises heads of foundations, real estate moguls and managing partners, embedded in the favor trade by their wealth.
As much as we’d like to mask our connection to Epstein’s gossamer web of evil, our distance is an illusion. However, our proximity is exactly what empowers us to change the system. The only way to shift the status quo is from the inside.
Many of us will end up with lots of power – powerful friends, money or important leadership positions – because of our education. In those positions, it is our duty to use that power to enact tangible and positive change. As Masters students walk across Graduation Terrace and are handed a key to circles of the elite, we are obligated to move throughout this unlocked territory with the mission statement as our North Star.
It will be up to us to challenge the corruption and evil enveloping so much of the world that we move through, and to do what we can to use our position of privilege and power to fix that unjust system from within. In the end, it’s the action we take with power that matters. Our mandate is to enter the world as powers for good.
