Barr-Epstein

Between me and Jeffrey Epstein there is one degree of separation: Donald Barr.

As a high-school senior in the fall of 1958, I qualified for Columbia University’s “Science Honors Program.”  The federally-funded operation was created in hasty response to the Russians’ having launched Sputnik, the first-ever “earth satellite,” in October ’57. Every Saturday morning, some 20 of us overachievers would hear an eminent researcher describe their field and their current projects. I was hooked by Richard Lewontin’s intro to genetics, and can still recall the strong, sweet smell of agar (food for the fruit flies) permeating his lab. I went off to Harvard and majored in biochemistry –until journalism led me astray.

The director  of the Science Honors Program, Donald Barr, was a Columbia School of Engineering assistant dean. During World War Two, Barr had been with the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. If I knew of Barr’s OSS connection back in ’58-’59, I would not have understood its significance. In time I learned that OSS men comprised CIA royalty. Infamous directors Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey had all been OSS officers. I assume that Donald Barr maintained a formal or informal connection to the agency.  (“You never leave the CIA,” say those presumably in the know.)

From June ’63 through May ’66 I worked as an editor at Scientific American in Manhattan (minus six months in Louisiana at Fort Polk). At some point in ’65, Barr contacted me out of the blue to arrange a get-together. I tried to put him off. I had a wife and baby. I worked 9-to-5 in an office on Madison Avenue. I was doing research for a biography of Lillian Hellman and some important odd jobs for SNCC and the peace movement.  I was drafting speeches for a city councilman and drilling once a week at an armory and drinking 16 cups of coffee a day. Donald Barr wouldn’t take no, and invited himself over to our apartment.

What I remember from that night is how relentlessly he tried to convince me that US intervention in Vietnam was righteous. He wouldn’t allow a change of subject. It was awkward and strange. He had become headmaster at the Dalton School (I realize, looking back) but I don’t remember him talking about Dalton that night. Did he think I might make a good teacher if he could save my soul politically?

After that odd encounter, Donald Barr didn’t cross my mind for many years. I made the connection in 1989 when William Barr, his son, was appointed Attorney General of the United States by George “Poppy” Bush (a former CIA director). I read that Willam Barr had spent seven years with the agency in the 1970s, and that in the ’80s, as a legal advisor to the White House, he had given his stamp of approval to the complex “Iran-Contra” scheme to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Then I didn’t pay heed to William or Donald Barr for a few more decades.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In November, 2018, millions of us started paying attention to the Jeffrey Epstein saga, thanks to the reporting of Julie K. Brown in the Miami Herald, and the courage of the victims. (Brown tracked down 60 of them.) We learned: In 2005 Palm Beach police began investigating claims that teenage girls had been molested at Epstein’s waterfront mansion. Evidence was compiled and brought to State Attorney Barry Krischer. Instead of charging Epstein with unlawful sex with a minor, Krischer convened a grand jury that indicted him on the lesser charge of soliciting prostitution. Palm Beach police protested Krischer’s leniency and demanded a federal investigation. Epstein’s team of high-end lawyers then arranged a secret deal with the US Attorney in Miami, Alex Acosta, whereby Epstein was spared federal prosecution. Acosta (who had been appointed by George W. Bush) let Epstein plead to state charges of soliciting prostitution and soliciting prostitution with a minor. Acosta would be appointed Secretary of Labor by Donald Trump in 2017.

Sentenced to 18 months in jail, Epstein was set free in July 2009, after doing 13 months in a “work-release” program that allowed him to be in his office for 18 hours/day. He continued amassing his own fortune, mainly by handling investments and devising tax-avoidance schemes for billionaires. His special angel was Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret. He would own a mansion in Manhattan, an apartment in Paris, a vast spread in New Mexico, and a small island in the Caribbean.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre filed a lawsuit in 2009 claiming that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell had pimped her to unnamed “royalty, politicians, academicians, businessmen.” Epstein’s lawyers denied everything and slandered Giuffre. In the years that followed, more young women told stories similar to Giuffre’s and were treated similarly. Their stories made the news, briefly, if famous men were involved.

Epstein’s web began to unravel on November 28, 2018, when the Miami Herald began running Brown’s exposé. The deal that Epstein had been granted by Acosta was was illegal, she charged, because the victims had not been notified in advance. Federal prosecutors in New York were shamed into investigating Epstein’s operations.

On December 7, 2018, President Trump announced that he had asked William Barr to pull a second shift as Attorney General.  Thus Barr would at the top of the chain-of-command when Jeffrey Epstein was indicted in Manhattan Federal Court on July 6.

The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, asked Barr to recuse himself from the prosecution because he had once been “of counsel” to the powerful law firm that helped arrange Epstein’s sweetheart deal in Florida. Barr refused to step aside.

A federal judge confirmed that the sweetheart deal Acosta had given Epstein in 2008 was illegal. Acosta resigned as Secretary of Labor July 12.

Epstein was found dead in his jail cell on August 10, and all charges against him were dismissed. Had the case gone to trial, Donald Barr’s essential role in Jeffrey Epstein’s career would have been exposed.

The Barr-Epstein connection can’t be expunged, but it can be downplayed –and it has been. After Epstein’s indictment, journalist Sean Elder pitched an Epstein-at-Dalton story to Town & Country magazine. He got the go-ahead and filed his piece promptly. He was very surprised when it then got spiked. Elder posted it on medium.com, with a note: “I wrote this story for Town & Country, where I am a contributing writer, before Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on August 10th. My editor thought that events had outpaced my reporting, but I think the connection between America’s most famous pedophile and a former all-girls’ prep school bears some scrutiny.” Town & Country is owned by the Hearst corporation, BTW.

In the piece that got canceled, Elder described how Dalton had been the launch pad for Epstein’s career. “The connections Jeffrey Epstein made while at Dalton set him up for life,” he wrote. “He was tutoring the son of Alan ‘Ace’ Greenberg there when the Bear Stearns honcho took a shine to the outsider… The headmaster at the time was Donald Barr, father of US Attorney General Bill Barr, and a controversial figure in his own right. One parent called him ‘the Captain Queeg of Dalton School,’ prone to high-handed authoritarianism at a campus with a looser academic reputation. He was rightwing during the Vietnam War, when much of the staff, and students, were on the other side, and some of his hires may have reflected his bias.”

Donald Barr’s role in the Epstein saga was ignored in a Guardian article by Peter Lewis: “Epstein was working as a maths teacher at a Manhattan private school when, the legend goes, the father of one of his students put him in touch with a partner at the global investment bank Bear Stearns. That was 1976. Within six years Epstein had risen through the ranks, working as a trader, before striking out on his own and convincing some of America’s wealthiest plutocrats to let him manage their portfolios.”

The New York Times, too, would have readers believe that Epstein’s career was catalyzed not by Donald Barr, but by “Ace” Greenberg at Bear, Stearns.  The Times’s version of events was published in December, 2025, when interest in the case was at a peak. Attorney General Pam Bondi was reneging on her promise to release what the government had amassed. Photos of Jeffrey and Ghislaine partying with Trump and Melania were being circulated, as was Trump’s birthday card with a cute little drawing and a sly reference to Epstein liking his beautiful women “on the young side.” Files containing Epstein’s correspondence from April 2011 through January 2019 were released by the House Oversight Committee included, revealing that hundreds of rich and famous people were willing to ignore his crimes.  Journalist Anand Giridharadas dubbed them “the Epstein class.” Marjorie Taylor Green quit Congress in disgust.

Four reporters had bylines on the Times’s supposedly definitive history: David Enrich (sic), Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Matthew Goldstein.  “We have spent months trying to pierce this veil,” they wrote. “We spoke with dozens of Epstein’s former colleagues, friends, girlfriends, business partners and financial victims. Some agreed to speak on the record for the first time; others insisted on speaking confidentially but gave us access to never-before-seen records and other information. We sifted through private archives and tracked down previously unpublished recordings and transcripts of old interviews — including one in which Epstein gave a meandering account of his personal and professional history. We perused diaries, letters, emails and photo albums, including some that belonged to Epstein. We reviewed thousands of pages of court and government records.

“What emerged is the fullest portrait to date of one of the world’s most notorious criminals — a narrative that differs in important respects from previously published accounts of Epstein’s rise, including his arrival at Bear Stearns.”

This is how their piece began: “One evening in early 1976, a bushy-haired Jeffrey Epstein showed up for an event at an art gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Epstein was a math and physics teacher at the city’s prestigious Dalton School, and the father of one of his students had invited him. Epstein initially demurred, saying he didn’t go out much, but eventually relented. It would turn out to be one of the best decisions he ever made.

“At the gallery, Epstein bumped into another Dalton parent, who had heard tales of the 23-year-old’s wondrous math skills. The parent asked if he’d ever thought about a job on Wall Street, according to an unreleased recording of Epstein and a document prepared by his lawyers. Epstein was game. The parent dialed a friend: Ace Greenberg, a top executive at Bear Stearns. Epstein, the friend told Greenberg, was ‘wasting his time at Dalton.'”

 

Coverage of the Epstein saga has focused entirely on the sex stuff. The immorality of tax avoidance (his intellectual forte) is never mentioned.

After leaving Bear, Stearns, writes Elder, Epstein was “soon was making a tidy living the old-fashioned way, helping super-rich people find inventive ways to avoid paying income tax. It was his association with Ohio-based Les Wexner, founder and CEO of L Brands (Victoria’s Secret, Henri Bendel) that secured his fortune. He made hundreds of millions managing Wexner’s billions, bought mansions in NY, Paris, and Palm Beach, and Little Saint James in the US Virgin Islands. The staff at his private island called his retreat (the site of many alleged orgies involving underage girls) “Little Saint Jeff’s,” while the jet that brought them was dubbed “The Lolita Express.”

William Barr

Barr is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government.^[1][2][3] In 1989, Barr, as the head of the OLC, justified the U.S. invasion of Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega.

In 1989, at the beginning of his administration, President George H. W. Bush appointed Barr to the U.S. Department of Justice as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), an office which functions as the legal advisor for the president and executive agencies. Barr was known as a strong defender of presidential power.^[26] He wrote an advisory opinion justifying the U.S. invasion of Panama and arrest of Manuel Noriega.^[26] He wrote legal justifications for the practice of rendition,^[27] so that the FBI could enter onto foreign soil without the consent of the host government to apprehend fugitives wanted by the United States government for terrorism or drug-trafficking.^[26]

 

INSERT LATER   After Epstein’s so-called suicide, all charges were dismissed. Had the case gone to trial, Donald Barr’s essential role in Jeffrey Epstein’s career would have been exposed. And while Trump, Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and other bigshots would be linked to Epstein by photographs and emails, Attorney General William Barr’s connection to the dead man would remain hidden.  (That connection can’t be expunged, but it can be downplayed almost of the point of invisibility.)

 

In 2009, Barr was briefly of counsel to the firm Kirkland & Ellis. From 2010 until 2017, he advised corporations on government enforcement matters and regulatory litigation; he rejoined Kirkland and Ellis in 2017.^[85]

 

From 1971 to 1977, Barr was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. He then served as a law clerk to judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In the 1980s, Barr worked for the law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, with one year’s work in the White House of the Ronald Reagan administration dealing with legal policies. Before becoming attorney general in 1991, Barr held numerous other posts within the Department of Justice, including leading the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and serving as deputy attorney general. From 1994 to 2008, Barr did corporate legal work for GTE and its successor company Verizon Communications. From 2009 to 2018, Barr served on the board of directors for Time Warner.

 

Donald’s son William would intersect with Epstein’s orbit while serving as a counsel at Kirkland and Ellis in 2009. The law firm secured Epstein his obscenely lenient 2007 non-prosecution deal, which the Justice Department is now reviewing. In July, Barr the son refused to recuse himself from the ongoing Epstein investigation.

 

“In July 2025, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage to support the conclusion that Epstein died by suicide in his jail cell. When the Department of Justice released the footage, approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds of it was missing, and the video was found to have been modified despite the FBI’s claim that it was raw.”

New York Magazine Brock Colyar first of 10 bylines.

Barr, Donald: The headmaster who offered entrée.

In the 1975 Dalton School yearbook. Photo: The Dalton School
Barr was ousted (THIS IS AT ODDS WITH HIS STATEMENT TO THE TIMES IN FEBRAYR_ shortly before Epstein, 21 and without a college degree, showed up for his first day of work teaching math and physics at the Manhattan’s elite Dalton School in the early 1970s. Barr announced his resignation soon after, in February 1974: “He was disliked by the faculty, he was highly controversial, he hadn’t raised much money, he was very conservative,” said the board’s chairman. Barr’s leadership style was described as “authoritarian” and “undemocratic” at the time. Memorably, several former students told the New York Times that Epstein was overly familiar with teenage girls at the school. Donald’s son William would intersect with Epstein’s orbit while serving as a counsel at Kirkland and Ellis in 2009. The law firm secured Epstein his obscenely lenient 2007 non-prosecution deal, which the Justice Department is now reviewing. In July, Barr the son refused to recuse himself from the ongoing Epstein investigation.

 

 

In October, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first-ever “Earth satellite.” The US was suddenly in danger of “falling behind in the space race.” Government funding for science skyrocketed, and I was a direct beneficiary.

In October, 1958, I took part in the newly created “Science Honors Program” at Columbia University. About 20 high school students got to hear eminent researchers describe their work, past and present. I was enticed by Richard Lewontin’s intro to genetics and the sweet smell of agar (food for the fruit flies) in the Dobzhansky lab. Biochemistry would be my major.

The director of the Science Honors Program was an assistant dean named Donald Barr. During World War II, according to Wikipedia, Barr had been with the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA (which they say you never leave). His son William would put in seven years as a CIA agent and become Attorney General of the United States under George H.W. Bush (former head of the CIA). He was the AG again during Donald Trump’s first term.

In 1965, when I was working at Scientific American, Donald Barr contacted me out of the blue. He was eager to connect. I had married my high school sweetheart (who had also been in the Science Honors Program) and Barr joked about having played Cupid. He invited himself over for dinner at our apartment on West 78th St. He kept trying to convince us that US intervention in Vietnam was righteous. He wouldn’t relent, wouldn’t allow a change of subject. It was a strange.

Barr left Dalton in June, 1974 after repeated clashes with the board of directors. In September ’74 Jeffrey Epstein, a 21-year old college dropout with no classroom experience, began teaching math there. Who but Donald Barr would have hired him?

If Epstein had stood trial, the fact that his career had been launched by the Attorney General’s father would have been publicized. But by an amazing stroke of luck for William Barr, the official at the very top of the law-enforcement hierarchy, two low-ranking guards at a Manhattan jail absented themselves from Epstein’s tier and he hung himself. The two cameras aimed at the cell were out of order, unfortunately.

Why has the Barr-Epstein connection been downplayed? Wikipedia does it, too: “Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher.” Why “alleged?”  Isn’t it a matter of record?

Epstein was indicted in federal court on July 9, 2019. On July 12 Mike Baker and Amy Julia Harris reported, “None of the female students who spoke to The New York Times in recent days remembered Mr. Epstein making unwanted physical contact with them, and he has not been accused of any crimes related to his time at the school.”

They did not report who hired him, and they withheld the name of their key source: “Mr. Epstein’s time at Dalton was brief, and an administrator said it ended in a dismissal… The administrator told The Times that he had dismissed Mr. Epstein for poor performance.”

Fortunately for Epstein, one of his Dalton students had been the son of NAME “Ace” Greenberg, who hired him at Bear, Stearns. The recent magnum opus in the Times dates Epstein’s rise from 1976 and portrays Greenberg as his crucial connection. Donald Barr is effectively canceled.

Epstein’s involvement with the CIA was well documented by Ryan Grim and Murtaza Husein

 

The Dec. 16 Times article dates his career

 

 

Dalton wants it downplayed.

 

According to Wikipedia, Donald Barr was born into a classy Jewish family (his mother was a DeYoung –and a psychologist). He converted to Catholicism in the Cardinal Spellman era and married a woman named Mary Margaret Ahern. Their four kids were raised Catholic.

Wikipedia downplays Donald Barr’s role in launching Epstein’s career: “Barr is alleged to have had a role in hiring future financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a math teacher.” (Why “alleged?”  It was a matter of record.)  But Epstein’s lack of teaching credentials or experience is duly noted, and an astonishing fact is provided: “In 1973, Barr published Space Relations, a science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. It has been noted that the plot of the novel anticipates the crimes of Epstein and his convicted and prosecuted accomplice (the list of politicians and celebrities involved in sex crimes remains hidden), Ghislaine Maxwell.”

In 1974 Barr hired Epstein, who was 21, to teach math and physics at Dalton. Why has their connection gotten so little media attention?  Sean Elder, a contributing writer for Town & Country, interviewed some aging Dalton nymphets and filed a story soon after Epstein’s so-called suicide. His editor –undoubtedly aware that very powerful men wanted the whole sordid affair erased from memory, and maybe hoping to get their own offspring into Dalton–rejected the piece, which can be found at Medium.com. “My editor thought that events had outpaced my reporting,” Elder explains diplomatically.  Some excerpts follow:

 

 

• The connections  Jeffrey Epstein made with parents while teaching at Dalton set him up for life. He was tutoring the son of Alan “Ace” Greenberg in 1976 when the Bear Stearns honcho took a shine to him and hired him. for Bear Stearns from 1976 through 1981, then set up his own “assets management” firm.

 

Bear Stearns collapsed during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008) Epstein would leave the investment bank under murky circumstances and soon was making a tidy living the old-fashioned way, helping super-rich people find inventive ways to avoid paying income tax. It was his association with Ohio-based Les Wexner, founder and CEO of L Brands (Victoria’s Secret, Henri Bendel) that secured his fortune. He made hundreds of millions managing Wexner’s billions, bought mansions in NY, Paris, and Palm Beach, and Little Saint James in the US Virgin Islands. The staff at his private island called his retreat (the site of many alleged orgies involving underage girls) “Little Saint Jeff’s,” while the jet that brought them was dubbed “The Lolita Express.”

“The controversial and outspoken headmaster has resigned in protest of what he considers the trustee’s interference with his leadership.

In 1964 Barr became principal of Dalton, an elite private school on the East Side of Manhattan. In 1974 he hired Jeffrey Epstein, a 20-year old college dropout with no teaching experience, to teach math at Dalton. Barr’s relationship with Epstein may be the most under-reported aspect of that sordid saga. If Epstein had stood trial, the coverage would have been intense, and the fact that his career had been launched by the Attorney General’s father would have been publicized.

But by an amazing stroke of luck for the super-rich perverts who had partied on Epstein’s island  –and for Attorney General William Barr, the official at the very top of the law-enforcement hierarchy– two low-ranking guards at a Manhattan jail absented themselves from Epstein’s tier and he hung himself. There would be no trial.

According to Wikipedia, Donald Barr was born into a classy Jewish family (his mother was a DeYoung –and a psychologist). He converted to Catholicism in the Cardinal Spellman era and married a woman named Mary Margaret Ahern. Their four kids were raised Catholic.

 

• The connections  Jeffrey Epstein made with parents while teaching at Dalton set him up for life. He was tutoring the son of Alan “Ace” Greenberg in 1976 when the Bear Stearns honcho took a shine to him and hired him. for Bear Stearns from 1976 through 1981, then set up his own “assets management” firm. Epstein worked for Bear Stearns from 1976 through 1981, then set up his own “assets management” firm. Bear Stearns collapsed during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008.)

 

Donald Barr retired as headmaster at Dalton in July, 1974. Hiring Epstein to teach math and physics had been his last move.

Susan Semel, who taught social studies at Dalton from 1965 through 1988, has written a history of the school (subtitled “Transformation of a Progressive School”). I asked her how she remembered Epstein. “He was very class conscious,” she said, “very aware of which students came from rich and powerful families.” She knew the future Attorney General as “Billy Barr,” adding that his fellow students at Horace Mann (another elite NYC private school) called him “Bully Barr.”

 

Although The Epstein-Barr connection cannot be covered up completely, it can be –and is being– downplayed. (I’m not getting paranoid in my dotage. In 1975, Werner Erhard paid $5,000 cash to a private investigator for a draft of an article that Jesse Kornbluth was writing for Esquire about the “est” racket. I provided the draft, kept the cash, and helped Kornbluth write a real exposé. But that’s another story.)

 

(212) 725-9410

susansemel@cuny.edu wrote about Dalton

Wikipedia until a few months ago, in its bio of Donald Barr: “For a brief time, at the end of his tenure as headmaster, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was employed as a math teacher. It is unclear whether Barr hired Epstein.[10][11]

In 1973, Barr published Space Relations, a science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. It has been noted that the plot of the novel anticipates the crimes of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.[12]

 

Looking back, I don’t know if Barr made this importunate visit (for which he skipped dinner with his wife and family) to dissuade me from becoming active in the peace movement, or to evaluate me as a possible teacher at Dalton.

 “In 1973, Barr published Space Relations, a science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. It has been noted that the plot of the novel anticipates the crimes of Epstein and his convicted and prosecuted accomplice (the list of politicians and celebrities involved in sex crimes remains hidden), Ghislaine Maxwell.”

Why did the Jeffrey Epstein-Donald Barr connection get so little media attention? Sean Elder, a contributing writer for Town & Country, had interviewed some aging Dalton nymphets and filed a story soon after Epstein’s so-called suicide. His editor –undoubtedly aware that very powerful men wanted the whole sordid affair erased from memory, and maybe hoping to get their own offspring into Dalton–rejected the piece, which can be found at Medium.com. “My editor thought that events had outpaced my reporting,” Elder explains diplomatically.  Some excerpts follow:

• Gambino Roche was a Cuban political refugee who taught Spanish at Dalton, although it is unclear whether he possessed any teaching credentials or experience,” Mark Robinson, class of ’74, wrote in an unpublished memoir about his time at the school.