Epstein is among those accused of abusing students at acclaimed Michigan arts school

Dozens of former students at an acclaimed Michigan arts school have come forward to allege sexual abuse at the institution over the past several decades, according to a report released this week by the school, which listed convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein among the alleged abusers.

The allegations, by students at Michigan's Interlochen Center for the Arts, were detailed in an external review commissioned by the school following a report from a former student in 2024.

Among the alleged perpetrators of the abuse is Epstein, a former student and school benefactor, and more than 40 former faculty and staff. The incidents allegedly occurred between the 1950s and 2010s. None of the accused remain employed at Interlochen and more than a third are deceased.

"On behalf of Interlochen, we are deeply sorry for the harm experienced by members of our community and extend our apologies to those impacted by abuse at Interlochen," the school's president, Trey Devey, and board chairman Barrett Rollins, said in a statement. "We also want to say clearly: Interlochen will not tolerate predators or those who enable them. Our campus exists to protect, educate, and empower every student."

Interlochen, established in 1928, is a music and arts school in Northern Michigan that also holds summer camps that attract students from all over the world. The center's prominent alumni include Grammy, Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Pulitzer Prize winning artists.

To protect the privacy of the former students, none of the 70 alleged victims were named in the report, and only a handful of those accused were publicly identified.

The school said it had referred the names of those accused of misconduct to the local prosecutor's office to determine "if there is a viable pathway to prosecution."

One of the accused is a former arts faculty member and administrator who was employed at Interlochen for more than five decades. Now deceased, he was the subject of the complaint in 2024 that prompted Interlochen to initiate the outside review, according to the 97-page report.

The investigation identified seven former students in the 1960s and 1970s who alleged sexual misconduct against the former faculty member, who died in 2021.

The report also contains previously unreported details of allegations against Epstein, who attended a summer camp at Interlochen as a teenager in 1967. Epstein would later become a benefactor to the school, and made a donation for the construction of the Jeffrey E. Epstein Scholarship Lodge on campus. The school renamed the lodge in 2019 and demolished the building last month.

According to the report, one former student said Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his now-convicted co-conspirator, paid her tuition at Interlochen but then "withdrew financial support for subsequent schooling after she did not engage in requested conduct." The former student said that during her time at Interlochen, Epstein and Maxwell invited her to his lodge and, while there, Epstein "engaged in sexual conduct with her, brushing against her body over her clothes."

Another former student reported that after her graduation, Epstein paid for her flight to New York and that during a visit to his home "he brought her into a room with a massage table, that she gave him a massage, and that he may have asked her to remove her top. The alum said that after she left his home, she never had contact with Epstein or Maxwell again," the report said.

The student's mother said that she had called Interlochen "pretty quickly after" learning of the incident, but that there was no follow-up, according to the report.

The time frame of the newly disclosed allegations against Epstein are not included in the report.

Allegations from a third former Interlochen student factored significantly in Maxwell's criminal trial in 2021. A witness who testified under the pseudonym "Jane" alleged that Epstein and Maxwell began a long grooming process at Interlochen in the early 1990s that eventually led to escalating sexual abuse by Epstein over several years.

Maxwell was convicted in 2021 on five of six counts related to her role in Epstein's abuse of underage girls, and is serving a 20-year sentence at a federal prison camp in Texas. Though she has exhausted all of her direct appeals, she is presently seeking a new trial or a reduction of her sentence, alleging that her trial was unfair.

Epstein died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on child sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. His death was ruled a suicide by hanging.

Interlochen said in a statement accompanying the report that it had established a fund to cover counseling for any of the former students impacted by the alleged abuse.

"The abuse described in the report is heartbreaking and is contrary to everything Interlochen stands for. We cannot change the past, but we can be unequivocal in stating that this behavior has no place at the Interlochen we care for, not then, not now, and not in the future," Davey and Rolins wrote.