Epstein Data Wiki

Bob Kerrey

Properties2
tagsperson, politician, senator, governor, the-new-school, minerva, education, correspondent
aliasesRobert Kerrey, J. Robert Kerrey, Kerrey, Bob

13 min read

How Epstein identified him”senator bob kerry„ not john, he used to run the=new school”, written to Boris Nikolic on 27 February 2013, two days before the first message Kerrey is recorded sending1
Correspondence in the released files1 March 2013 to 30 September 2014. Sheets bearing his name as sender after that date are automated notifications from a messaging service, not messages he wrote234
Institutional link the documents recordMember of the academic advisory board of the Minerva Project, chaired by former Harvard president Larry Summers5
What he told Epstein about Bill Gates”My understanding if that Bill Gates track record in this space is not very good”3
RefusalsSix declines are recorded, including one to Epstein’s office and one from Belize: “I am sorry (actually I am not sorry!) but I will be in Belize with my =amily next week”67
MoneyNone. No payment, fee, gift, honorarium or thing of value to him appears anywhere in the material reviewed for this page8
AllegationsNone. No survivor account in the material reviewed accuses him of anything, and he has not been charged with any offence

Bob Kerrey is a former Governor of Nebraska and United States Senator who was president of The New School from 2001 to 2010. Emails released by the Justice Department under the Epstein Files Transparency Act record a correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein running from March 2013 to September 2014: breakfasts and dinners in New York, an exchange about an experimental university on whose advisory board he sat, and a closing sequence in which Epstein asked him to assess a prospective investment and the people behind it.

Nothing on this page is a finding of wrongdoing. No survivor account in the material reviewed accuses him of anything, and he has not been charged with any offence.

Several of the emails quoted below carry transmission damage in the print itself, an ”=” standing where a character was lost. Supplied characters are given in square brackets, and nothing the print actually carries has been altered.

A note on the name, and on the counting

Two men named Kerrey and Kerry appear in these files and they are different people. Epstein spelled the subject’s surname “kerry”, the other man’s spelling, on 83 containers, and he wrote the sentence that settles which man he meant. On 27 February 2013 he asked Boris Nikolic: “does bill know senator bob kerry„ not john, he used to run the=new school,?? i was thinking of asking him to come tonite.”1 Kerrey makes the same distinction himself, writing to Epstein of “the other Kerry.”9

Across the six name-forms this page treats as his, he appears on 497 sheets in 448 containers.10 That is a floor and not a total: duplicate copies of a single email are counted as the separate sheets they are, and a form not listed here would not have been found at all. The bare surname is not used, because on it the other man outnumbers him by roughly eight to one.

He is the printed sender on a few dozen sheets. Those collapse to something under twenty distinct messages, and no exact figure is given here, because the collapse is uneven: the message of 19 July 2014 alone exists as four sheets, two further sheets are Epstein forwarding one of his notes onward, and the 2017 sheets that name him as sender are a messaging service writing “Dear Jeffrey, You have a new message from Bob Kerrey,” not Kerrey writing.11124

March 2013: an introduction, and a new address

The earliest dated document is Epstein’s, not his. On 27 February 2013 Epstein wrote to Boris Nikolic asking whether “bill” knew him, and saying he was thinking of inviting him that evening.1

Two days later Kerrey wrote his first recorded message, at 12:34 on 1 March 2013, under the subject “Better email”: “Jeff This is a better email.”2 The address itself is not reproduced here. Half an hour later he wrote again: “I head to Belize with my family on 3/17 and return” [the sentence runs on past the fragment captured on the sheet].13

On 13 March, with the trip still ahead of him, Epstein’s scheduler forwarded his reply to an invitation under the subject line “Bob Kerrey/Minerva”:

Below from Bob Kerrey: Lesley I am sorry (actually I am not sorry!) but I will be in Belize with my =amily next week. Please, tell Jeffrey thanks for the offer to get =ogether again. I do look forward to continuing our conversations. Bob6

“Lesley” is Lesley Groff, Epstein’s assistant. The phrase “to get together again” is the first indication on paper that the two men had already met.

April 2013: the dinner

On 9 April 2013 Kerrey answered a question about a date: “April 23rd? It looks open but I am cc[ing]”.14 That evening is documented elsewhere on this site. A schedule for 21 to 24 April 2013 carries “Ehud Barak in NY” and, for Tuesday 23 April, a dinner listing Woody Allen, Mortimer Zuckerman, Nicole Seligman, Kerrey, Joel Klein and Ehud Barak, with a chef engaged to cook. Klein’s thank-you the following afternoon establishes that the dinner took place.15

Kerrey’s own presence that evening is recorded by his acceptance and by the schedule, and no document reviewed for this page records what was said.

Through the spring the two men arranged meetings. On 27 April he wrote: “Thursday May 2nd doesn’t work. Do you mean Sunday May 5th? What time?”16 A breakfast followed, and on 5 May he wrote the message that names the other senator:

Jeffrey Thanks for breakfast. It was=great being with you. If you can get me Terry’s contact information, I will try to get the other Kerry to reach out to him. Bob9

Epstein forwarded that note the same afternoon to Terje Rød-Larsen.12 “Terry” is left as the document leaves it and is not expanded here.

Minerva

The institutional connection the documents establish is a board seat, not a payment. An overview document of the Minerva Project in Epstein’s files describes a university “launching” and “Opening in Fall 2015,” founded by Ben Nelson in 2011 with “a $25 million seed investment from Benchmark Capital in 2012,” and states:

An academic advisory board was formed early on to provide guidance and support as Minerva began to reimagine every aspect of an undergraduate education. Former Harvard University President Larry Summers serves as chairman of the Advisory Board, which includes Patrick Harker, Bob Kerrey and Lee Shulman.5

A separate document records a further role, and its source matters. On 12 August 2013 an automated LinkedIn digest reached Epstein’s inbox under the heading “What are your connections up to?” and reported: “Bob Kerrey is now Executive Chairman at The Minerva Institute”.17 That is what a social network announced, not a statement by Kerrey or by Minerva, and it is recorded here on that footing.

Epstein’s own assessment of him, after a meeting, survives in a message to Minerva’s dean Stephen Kosslyn on 15 September 2014: “met with kerrey, too =sed to not being questioned properly”.18

2014: a visit, and an assessment

On 19 July 2014 Kerrey wrote under the subject “Visit”: “Jeffrey, It was good being with you again. The book I mentio[ned]”, the sentence continuing past the fragment captured on the sheets.11 Four copies of that message are in the release.

The last two messages he is recorded sending are about money, but not his own. On 29 September 2014 he wrote of someone Epstein had put to him: “He’s first rate. Are you gong to inve[st]”19 The following day, 30 September 2014, he answered at greater length:

I believe Boris has the intellect and experience to separate the scientific wheat from the chaff but I do not know if he or his team can separate the leaders who can take a great idea and make it profitable from those who cannot. My understanding if that Bill Gates track record in this space is not very good.3

“Boris” is Boris Nikolic, the same man to whom Epstein had written about Kerrey nineteen months earlier; the judgement about Bill Gates is Kerrey’s own, offered privately. That is the last message in the correspondence.

Refusals

Six declines are recorded, and they are given the same weight here as the meetings. The Belize letter of March 2013 is one.6 On 22 August 2013 he wrote directly to Epstein’s assistant: “Lesley Unfortunately, I cannot come. I am o[ut]”.7 On 2 September 2014, answering about scheduling, he wrote “I think both work but let”, the sentence again running past the fragment.20 A further exchange records a lunch he accepted and then did not attend; the documents show the acceptance and show the meeting being rearranged around him, and a page that reported only the acceptance would be wrong.21

What this page does not contain

No money. Searches of the released files for a payment, fee, gift, honorarium, retainer, scholarship or endowment involving him returned nothing. Two wire memoranda in the release carry the surname without a forename; the release also contains a different man of a near-identical surname working for Epstein in the Virgin Islands at the relevant date, and because the documents do not print a forename on those instruments, neither man is named as the payee here and the wires are not used as evidence of anything.8

A 2004 message about him, which is not evidence of contact. A message of 31 March 2004 in Epstein’s files, written by Ted Waitt to a recipient who is not Epstein, describes a Los Angeles fundraising event: “Went to a deal at Burkle’s house for Kerrey today. Spent a lot of time there, it was good. Huge crowd, and they have a monster one in LA tonight. That’s good. Kerrey did a good job, he’s no Clinton, but a solid job.”22 Kerrey is discussed in that message, not party to it, and it records no contact between him and Epstein. It is noted here only because it is the earliest sheet in the release that mentions him, nine years before the correspondence begins. Nothing else on that sheet concerns him and nothing else from it is reproduced.

No clean screen of the kind that would bar a page. Across the 497 sheets, none of the terms this desk screens for occurs: massage, young women, household traffic, driver, minor, underage, complainant and trafficking are all absent. The single occurrence of “girls” is a magazine marketing circular in Epstein’s inbox; the single occurrence of “victim” is in an essay about the postwar American science establishment.23

Method note

Claims on this page are drawn from the released documents cited in the footnotes, each pinned to the sheet and page where the quoted words appear. Counts are floors over a union of six name-forms, stated above. The bare surname is excluded because it conflates two men. Where a sender, forename or surname is not printed on a sheet, it has not been supplied from elsewhere. One sentence offered to this desk as a quotation from a deposition in this matter could not be found as printed text and is not used.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Jeffrey Epstein to Boris Nikolic, Feb 27, 2013 2:30 PM. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01760974 p.1. Also https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01760955 p.1. Ten sheets in the release carry this message. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Bob Kerrey to Epstein, Mar 1, 2013 12:34:47 PM, subject “Better email”. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01902317 p.1. The address he supplied is not reproduced here. ↩ ↩2

  3. Bob Kerrey to Epstein, Sep 30, 2014 12:59:48. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00869235 p.1. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Messaging-service notifications naming him as sender, Mar and Apr 2017, each reading “Dear Jeffrey, You have a new message from Bob Kerrey”. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02350050 p.1, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02403208 p.1, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02389516 p.1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02365030 p.1. These are not messages he wrote. ↩ ↩2

  5. Minerva Project overview document in Epstein’s files. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01144731 p.1. ↩ ↩2

  6. Lesley Groff to Epstein, Mar 13, 2013 1:40 PM, subject “Bob Kerrey/Minerva”, quoting Kerrey’s reply. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02567383 p.1. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Bob Kerrey to Lesley Groff, Aug 22, 2013 18:41:36. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00385347 p.1. ↩ ↩2

  8. Searches of the released files pairing his name-forms with payment, fee, gift, honorarium, retainer, salary, trustee, endowment, tuition and scholarship vocabulary returned nothing. The two wire memoranda bearing the surname are https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01587589 p.1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01595332 p.4; neither prints a forename for the payee, the second is heavily damaged in the print, and no attribution is made from either. ↩ ↩2

  9. Bob Kerrey to Epstein, May 5, 2013 3:38 PM, subject “Breakfast”. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01758143 p.1. Also https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01975308 p.1. ↩ ↩2

  10. Union of six forms measured against the released corpus: “bob kerrey” 400 sheets / 358 containers; “bob kerry” 90/83, of which 81 containers appear under no other form; “senator kerrey” 23/23; “bob kerr” 4/4; kerrye 5/5; “robert kerrey” 3/3. Total 497 sheets / 448 containers, with no row in the union exceeding 14,781 characters. The bare surname is excluded: on it, the other man’s forename outnumbers the subject’s by roughly eight to one. ↩

  11. Bob Kerrey to Epstein, Jul 19, 2014 7:43:20 PM, subject “Visit”. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00694005 p.1, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01915288 p.1, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02713941 p.1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02586298 p.1, the last with its date line damaged in the print. ↩ ↩2

  12. Epstein’s forward of that message to Terje Rød-Larsen, May 5, 2013 4:25:13 PM. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00959964 p.1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01975308 p.1. ↩ ↩2

  13. Bob Kerrey to Epstein, Mar 1, 2013 1:07 PM, subject “Re: Better email”. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01788490 p.1. ↩

  14. Bob Kerrey to Epstein, Apr 9, 2013 4:13:38 PM. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00958016 p.1. ↩

  15. Schedule for Apr 21–24, 2013. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01899122 pp.1–2. Klein’s thank-you of Apr 24, 2013 3:16 PM is at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01759628 p.1. See Ehud Barak and Joel Klein. ↩

  16. Bob Kerrey to Epstein, Apr 27, 2013 12:56:47 PM. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02141459 p.1. The recipient line is blank on this sheet. ↩

  17. Automated LinkedIn digest to Epstein, Aug 12, 2013 16:17:06. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00652362 p.1. The page is a social-network notification, not a statement by Kerrey or by Minerva. ↩

  18. Epstein to Stephen Kosslyn, Sep 15, 2014. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02353638 p.1. Kosslyn signs as Dean, Minerva School of Arts and Sciences. ↩

  19. Bob Kerrey to Epstein, Sep 29, 2014 00:22:09. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00997848 p.1. Also https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02590272 p.1. ↩

  20. Bob Kerrey, Sep 2, 2014 20:52:02. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00363687 p.1. The recipient’s address is blacked out on this sheet and a third party is copied. ↩

  21. The lunch accepted and not attended is recorded across the scheduling thread cited at 20 and the schedule pages for that week. Stated here as what the documents show, which is an acceptance and a rearrangement, not an attendance. ↩

  22. Ted Waitt to a recipient not named on the sheet, Mar 31, 2004 1:40:01 AM. https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02332719 p.1. Also https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02335309 p.1, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02335832 p.1 and https://epstein-data.com/EFTA00582396 p.1. Epstein is not a party to this message. Other material on these sheets is unrelated to Kerrey and is not reproduced. ↩

  23. Screened across all 497 sheets of the union. The “girls” occurrence is a Condé Nast marketing circular, https://epstein-data.com/EFTA02310301 p.1; the “victim” occurrence is at https://epstein-data.com/EFTA01033955 p.2. ↩

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