Interlochen Center for the Arts, a prestigious summer camp and boarding school in Michigan, has announced plans to demolish a lodge formerly named after the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The institution's board of trustees approved the removal of the Green Lake Lodge, previously known as the Jeffrey E Epstein Scholarship Lodge, saying the structure carried associations inconsistent with its values.
Epstein attended the arts camp as a teenager in 1967 and later donated more than $400,000 to the school between 1990 and 2003, including $200,000 towards the lodge's construction. The school cut ties with him and removed his name from the building following his first conviction in 2008.
At least two of Epstein's accusers have said they met him at Interlochen in the 1990s. The school said it has invited them to speak with an independent investigator as part of an external review into historical misconduct allegations. Two internal reviews, the most recent after Epstein's 2019 arrest, found no reports of misconduct involving him in its records.
Epstein visited the campus periodically, often with his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, and stayed in the lodge now set for demolition. According to correspondence in recently released justice department files, he directed that tuition for at least one student be paid from his donations and once flew violinist Itzhak Perlman to the school on his private jet.
Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan federal jail in August 2019, a month after being indicted on sex trafficking charges. He had previously served jail time in Florida for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
