Episode 123 [PATREON PREVIEW] -- The Botstein Files
In Bed With The Right
Adrian Daub and Moira Donegan
4.8 • 661 Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the men whose presence in the Epstein Files has been making a lot of news is Bard College's forever president Leon Botstein. While there is no suggestion that Botstein participated in any of Epstein's crimes, his relationship with Epstein was longstanding and close. Revelations about their interactions have brought to the forefront several symptomatic issues about how colleges handle sexual assault, campus anti-rape activists, and their young charges more generally. In this episode, Moira, herself a graduate of Bard (Class of 2012, baby!) walks Adrian through what the Epstein/Botstein friendship can tell us about the last 50 years of anti-feminist politics.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of articles we refer to in the episode:
-- Botstein's 1999 op-ed "Let Teenagers Try Adulthood" can be found here
-- Botstein's book Jefferson's Children can be found here
-- Sarah Gerard's Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable can be purchased here
-- Reporting on the various lawsuits and Title IX investigations against Bard and its president can be found here (2015 case), here (2016 case), here (2020 case), here (2022 case)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Adrian Dobb, and you're with in Bedbred the Right. |
| 0:02.9 | So this is a Patreon exclusive episode where we're giving you a little bit of a preview. |
| 0:08.5 | This is a in-depth look at one particular college, its president, and what the Epstein files can tell us about American colleges, university presidents, and gender politics on campus in 2026. This is a super long |
| 0:24.6 | episode, part of why we didn't produce a regular episode this week. It goes into a lot of depth. |
| 0:30.4 | There are a bunch of trigger warnings attached to it. All of it is pretty dark. But if that sounds |
| 0:35.4 | like your shit, you should consider subscribing on patreon.com |
| 0:39.7 | slash embed with the right. We have a lot of cool stuff coming up there as well. Our next |
| 0:44.3 | regular episode is going to be on none other than Withering Heights, a book that both |
| 0:50.9 | Moora and I adore and a movie that we just saw on Tuesday and that we had feelings about, |
| 0:56.8 | which you will all hear about next week. That'll be on the main feed. Meanwhile, on Patreon, |
| 1:02.0 | this March, I will use the Patreon to finally get into a series that I've long teased and |
| 1:08.3 | equally long delayed, which is the rights view of higher |
| 1:12.3 | education, not as sort of an enemy of actually existing colleges, but as defenders of some |
| 1:18.1 | kind of true scholarship, real research, et cetera, et cetera. So that's something that I'm very |
| 1:23.0 | excited about. That's going to be mostly on Patreon. Patreon really is the place where we, as Moria likes to put it, |
| 1:29.0 | can let our freak flag fly. If you thought we were spicy on the main feed, you ain't seen nothing yet. |
| 1:33.7 | We tend to get quite real. We tend to get quite excited. We tend to go quite deep. And there are things |
| 1:39.3 | that we put behind the paywall because we don't want people who we talk about to find it. |
| 1:43.4 | So if that |
| 1:44.4 | sounds like it's your speed, come over there and join us. Anyway, enjoy. |
| 1:54.7 | Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb. And I'm Moymer Donagan. |
| 1:57.8 | And whether we like it or not, we're in bid with the right. |
... |
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