By Sheeva Azma
This project is entirely self-funded. Donate to the GoFundMe here.
This blog talks about violence at elite universities, as well as Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, and is therefore not suitable for all audiences.
It is physically, mentally, and of course, vocationally unsafe to be a woman in elite academic circles.
Elite academic institutions do not care about the women who matriculate there.
Anyone who disagrees with me probably has not been a young woman studying at an elite academic institution.
The danger of being a woman in elite academic circles isn’t just to our physical bodies and mental health — it’s to our careers. Yes, a lot of people are concerned about women’s physical safety, and rightly so, in our world, but I do feel like people forget that the impacts of sexual violence disproportionately impact women and their career progression more than they impact the male perpetrators. (Yes, there are other permutations of sexual assault…but stay with me here.)
Before you tell me that you don’t care about the education of women at elite institutions in the United States, because women should be cooking and cleaning in the kitchen (pffft, says this MIT grad), allow me to make my point. (Can you tell I’ve been reading my Instagram comments a little too closely?)
The more I read about scientists in the Epstein files, and the more news comes out about women being assaulted on college campuses, I can only come to one conclusion: universities simply don’t care about the young women that go to them.
Maybe they care in words, but they do not care in practice.
That is one of those the truth will set you free, but first it will make you mad kinda statements.
Keep reading, if you want to get mad before you start feeling set free by the knowledge of things not talked about so publicly until now.
These universities, known for their elite names and prestige, could lead the way on reforms to make universities safer for women and girls — but, so far, they haven’t.
To be fair, they have had no real incentive to do so…either internally or from society.
I mean, just look at the case of the former MIT professor David Sabatini. After he was found to have violated MIT’s sexual harassment policies in his romantic dealings with a woman he mentored in his lab, he left his tenured professorial gig at MIT on April 1, 2022. Howard Hughes Medical Institute, where he was also an affiliated researcher, fired him (high five! what a win for ending toxic science culture!).
After that, though, Sabatini (and his one Epstein files mention we did not know about yet) packed up and started a new career in Europe, with a $25 million donation from billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackerman so that he could pursue his research both in Europe and in Boston.
That hedge fund managers don’t care about sexual harassment policies should be no surprise, given big banks’ role in the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender and known trafficker.
A report on big banks’ enablement of Jeffrey Epstein’s activities from Senator Ron Wyden’s office states:
“By failing to report—or choosing not to report—his suspicious financial transactions to federal law enforcement, these banks allowed Epstein to send cash payments and wire transfers to his victims, friends, and collaborators around the world. The bankers who needed to be asking questions didn’t ask them. Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes were hiding in plain sight.”
We live in a time when large corporations and big banks are not viewed favorably — and, hey, maybe stuff like this is part of why.
In any case, Sabatini is raking in the big bucks now. He recently sued his accuser for defamation and won $6 million there, too.
Add it all up and he’s $31 million richer, all because he worked the system and it worked for him.
I looked up the sexual assault rates for MIT, from where I graduated in 2005, and a 2014 report in Inside Higher Ed states that, at the Epstein heyday just after when he was inviting scientists to his ranch, a campus survey showed that 17% of women students at MIT said they were sexually assaulted.
In 2019, MIT did another report, this time in conjunction with other universities on sexual harassment and assault. Things had not gotten better, perhaps for obvious reasons at this point — like multiple MIT professors being friends with a known sex offender?
“We have worked diligently to prevent and respond to sexual misconduct at MIT but it remains clear from these results that we continue to face a serious problem,” wrote Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart in a letter announcing the report.
“The overall aggregate rate of non-consensual sexual contact by physical force, inability to consent, coercion, or without voluntary agreement was 16.5 percent in 2019,” she wrote of the 33 universities, including MIT, and yes, Cornell (we’ll get into that later, if you keep reading), who participated in this survey.
A 16.5% rate is approximately 1 in 6 people across 33 universities. As I get to later, though, this number has been more recently reported to be much higher — more than double this rate — at Cornell, which has been in the news lately for its sexual assault problems.
Chancellor Barnhart, one of our rare women administrators at MIT, found the information disturbing. “A colleague said to me recently that a community’s culture is defined by the behaviors the community tolerates. Sadly, we have continued to tolerate deeply disturbing behaviors, and that tolerance has caused pain to many members of our community,” she wrote in the closing.
You can read the report for the details. They are not pretty.
On September 18, 2026, The Cornell Daily Sun, the Ivy League’s student newspaper, made international headlines when they published a story about a woman who filed suit against members of a university fraternity that, she alleged, sexually assaulted her.
I was shocked to learn that the woman’s case was not taken seriously and that the perpetrators were instructed to write an essay reflecting on their experience. What? That’s not even a punishment if you are a writer, like me?!
After that news came out, multiple women who studied at Cornell started coming out of the woodwork, talking about their sexual assault experiences that somehow just involved their perpetrators writing essays. You can read the full coverage at the Cornell Daily Sun here.
Then, ABC News reported that over 1 in 3 women undergrads — 35% — say they have been sexually assaulted. UC Berkeley posted some of their own stats in their student newspaper, the Daily Cal: 735 reports in 2025, and only 20 disciplined. That’s just less than 3%.
(Reader, time to take a deep breath and reflect on how you feel after reading all of these statistics, especially if, like me, you are a woman with one or more elite degrees.)
Awareness is the first step towards change, and believe you me, I am feeling very aware of it all nine months into looking into scientists in the Epstein files.
The stats made sense when I saw this woman’s social media post. She shared her story of sexual assault as a Cornell student — and how she learned that she and her friends experienced sexual violence by the same perpetrator.
Since I’m sure you were wondering, it turns out that the Cornell sexual assault problem does link back to the Epstein files (surprise, surprise…not). A group of Instagram creators posted an Instagram reel of the Cornell alumni who are in the Epstein files, and guess what, one of them was my very own college professor, the now-retired-due-to-Epstein-files-mentions Dr. Mark Tramo.
I have been writing about, for several months now, that Cornell and other elite universities are well-represented in the Epstein files.
As this news has become public, some elite universities have lashed out at students who have organized to protest the Epstein associations of university benefactors.
Barnard College is an undergraduate women’s college affiliated with Columbia University. It was founded when women couldn’t attend Columbia. In the early 1980s, when Columbia started admitting undergraduate women, Barnard chose to keep its status as an independent women’s college.
Barnard’s trustees include a woman named Francine LeFrak who has Epstein ties. On May 4, 2026, Barnard students, as part of the activities of the student group Epstein Off Campus, were “initially placed on disciplinary probation for protesting in the Francine A. LeFrak Foundation Center for Well-Being,” writes the Barnard Bulletin, but the probation was dropped when the students appealed.
Ironically, the LeFrak building “houses Barnard’s sexual violence education, prevention, and outreach program,” as the Columbia Spectator writes.
Epstein Off Campus recently protested sexual violence on college campuses in the wake of the Cornell news, but luckily for them, they were not reprimanded this time.
Nevertheless, it all feels like a cycle of violence and disenfranchisement designed to keep women from actually being successful in life — which, sadly, is the literal point of going to college.
All those scientists in the Epstein files mean something
Jeffrey Epstein was a predator, and he took advantage of science’s existing problem with toxic science culture. In fact, given his association with numerous high-profile scientists, he fit right in!
We have been unpacking science in the Epstein files since February 2026 on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, our blog, and Substack.
One cannot look at all of the things we have uncovered in the past several months and reasonably conclude that science should preserve its status quo.
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