Emily Sachar, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Catch, joined Northeast Notebook to discuss the Daily Catch's recent reporting on Bard College.
Bard has made headlines recently as former Bard President Leon Botstein resigned from "all Bard-affiliated positions" after details from a House Judiciary Committee investigation into Botstein's ties to Jeffrey Epstein were shared with the private institution.
The Daily Catch's reporting includes publishing photographs from Epstein's visit to the campus back in 2013, which made the relationship between him and Botstein concrete, and they broke the news that Botstein was taking a sabbatical earlier this year.
Dingman: As we talked about earlier today, reporting on Bard is a very tricky proposition, especially since the Epstein story broke earlier this year.
Sachar: It has become impossible to get even people who used to speak to me on background, and for our listeners, for your listeners' edification, that means that they are giving information, and we can use the information, but we can't attribute it.
I often was able to get a leader on the phone to talk to me to communicate something that was happening, to tell me how a process would work. For example, a really good example of that right now is Leon Botstein is in addition to the president, or in addition to having been the president of Bard, held many leadership roles in music. And so, a big story we'd like to do is what now with all those programs. What's the plan for replacing him?
Dingman: Can I ask you if you have had the experience I have had? And this is a bit of a sensitive question, but some of the stories that I have done personally about Bard, I have gotten contacted by folks at Bard to express concerns, and these concerns were not about the factuality of anything that we had reported, which became clear as I moved through these conversations. They were very awkward conversations for me, to be totally candid because I was like, 'what are we actually talking about here?'
Sachar: I can't think of any. It's an interesting question though because there have been requests for us to move or remove photos. We published a photo a number of weeks ago of Botstein's new housing place, his new home, which is off off campus. And we had run a picture of it, which we thought was a great thing to do, like let people know he's actually off campus or going to be off campus. We were asked to remove it to protect his safety, and we did that. So I don't know, would we have done that if we didn't know the people at Bard so well and have a really nice relationship with them, I think a lot of journalist apparitions would have said, 'No, we're not removing that photo.' There's nothing damning about that photo. There's nothing. We're not compromising anybody's safety with that photo. But needless to say, I don't know if that's really answering your question.
Dingman: I have to say, Emily, I'm very grateful to you for sharing that because I think you're talking about an element of doing this kind of work that doesn't get talked about enough. Which is, just to offer, I have had conversations with representatives from Bard, in some of our coverage who have said if this story were to come out a certain way, it would make us disinclined to continue making people here available for interviews, and that's not unique to Bard. That's the kind of thing that can happen whenever you're covering a powerful institution. But it adds a very odd dynamic to the process of talking about a story like this, especially when this is a question of how safe people in your community feel on the physical campus at Bard. I mean, there's a responsibility to talk about it, but there's also a responsibility to preserve a connection with the place so that you can keep talking about.
Sachar: Exactly, and just this past week we had that really come to full circle with the "Is she for me?" email story. I don't know if you'd like to talk about that. We became aware last February or March as we were poring over the Epstein files about this email that said, "Is she for me, or are you keeping her for yourself?" That's a paraphrase. And it was sent; it was ostensibly sent from the president's office. It seemed the president at Bard to Jeffrey Epstein, and then he forwarded the message to himself. I say "ostensibly" because when a message has been forwarded, you can't really confirm with any certainty the origin of that email. You can't confirm whether it says what it because I'm sure you've had the experience, Sam, of forwarding yourself a message and you might stick a note into it or you might amend it slightly. So you have a slightly different version of the of the original email. So we felt that this email was something we couldn't use. We weren't going to run a story that said we have this email. We're not sure if it's accurate. We're not sure if it's from Botstein. But we're going to tell you all about it, world, just in case.
Dingman: Let me just make sure I understand the timeline here, Emily. You're saying you noticed this "is she for me?" email back in February or March when you were first reviewing the Epstein files, not after it was divulged in a letter from Congressman Raskin last week.
Sachar: That's correct. We were aware of it at the same time that we were poring over the Epstein files because we had a forensic approach and an extremely meticulous approach to looking at the Epstein files, and we were sure we had seen absolutely every email, and we parsed every email with tremendous care. So, in any case, we sat on that story. But then, as you just mentioned, this week or this past week, this email became the cause celebre from Congressman Raskin's office, as they were calling on the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate Botstein, and this was their key piece of evidence. And we still, at the Daily Catch, wonder if it was, if it is a legitimate piece of evidence. We do not think it would hold up in court.
Dingman: We should say, Botstein has on the record denied writing or sending the email.
Sachar: Exactly, and Bard has claimed that they cannot find the original email on their servers. They told us that last March. We couldn't corroborate this story. I would have loved to have run it, of course, but it would have been clickbait, and I felt it would have been really alarming and sensationalizing. This past week, Sam, when I wrote the story explaining that we'd had this email, and here's why we didn't run it, and here's what it says, and here's why you too might want to be skeptical of it, I got a couple of very angry letters from the community saying, 'How dare you have held this back?' Then I got letters from people close to Botstein and close to Bard and others who said, 'Thank God the Daily Catch is so careful.' So which is it? I'm Satan or I'm an angel? Like it depends.
