Another View: Epstein files reveal affirmative action for the rich and powerful

In 1995, a retired insurance executive named Walter Kaye recommended a friend’s daughter for an unpaid internship at the White House. You will remember her name: Monica Lewinsky.

But you probably don’t remember Kaye, who had contributed about $350,000 to the Democratic National Committee. He had advised then-President Bill Clinton on how to use his personal insurance policies to pay his legal expenses in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. Kaye had been an overnight guest at the White House. And he was “very tight’ with Hillary Clinton, a former Clinton administration official said.

He was also close to Lewinsky’s mother, who asked him to put in a good word for her 21-year-old daughter. Lewinsky would later have a scandalous affair with Bill Clinton, who was impeached for lying about it. Nobody batted any eye at an otherwise unremarkable young woman getting a plum Washington internship simply because of her connections to the rich and powerful.

I’ve been thinking about that history amid recent news that Jeffrey Epstein helped filmmaker Woody Allen get his daughter into Bard College. Wealthy people get an unfair advantage in college admissions and everything else. Let’s call it what it is: affirmative action for the rich.

And it’s on rich display in the Epstein files. In 2016, Epstein emailed Bard President Leon Botstein and asked him to coordinate a visit to the campus for Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen’s wife. A frequent correspondent with Epstein, Botstein wrote back and said he was “delighted to help.”

The same day, Previn sent a note to Botstein. “Thank you so much for your offer to help our daughter, Bechet Allen, get into Bard College,” Previn wrote. “I will take you up on the offer.:)”

In a statement last week, Bard College said that Bechet Allen “was accepted on the merits of her own qualifications for admission.” Perhaps so. But it’s a whole lot easier to display your merits when a billionaire financier is vouching for you.

All of this comes amid attacks by the administration of President Donald Trump of race-based affirmative action and its pledges to return to the ideal of merit. “We believe that whether you are a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer or an air traffic controller, you should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence,” Trump told Congress back in March. “You should be hired based on merit.”

That rings hollow coming from the same administration that recently sent out a recruiting message seeking prosecutors for the Department of Justice who “support President Trump.” That’s affirmative action based on ideology, not race. No Democrats or “never Trump” Republicans need apply.

Despite its insistence upon“merit-based admissions policies” at universities, meanwhile, the White House hasn’t moved to challenge the most obvious form of affirmative action for the rich: legacy preferences. Over 500 institutions still give you a leg up if your mom or dad went there. But we haven’t heard a peep about that from Trump.

Maybe that’s because three of Trump’s own children attended the University of Pennsylvania, where Trump went (and where I teach).

Trump’s brother, Fred Trump Jr., was an old friend of a Penn admissions officer. In 1966, Trump Jr. called his buddy and told him Donald Trump wanted to transfer to Penn from Fordham. Shortly after that, Donald came down to speak with his brother’s friend. And he was accompanied at the interview by his father, the real estate mogul Fred Trump Sr.

Would Trump have gotten into Penn without the boost he received from his moneyed connections? We don’t know. But here’s what we do know: affirmative action for rich people makes all of our institutions poorer.

Just ask Kaye. In 1998, he told a grand jury that he regretted helping Lewinsky get her internship at the White House.

Clinton bears the primary responsibility for their affair and everything that came after it. The reality is that Lewinsky wouldn’t have been at the White House without affirmative action for the rich. It happens every day. And that should be a scandal, too.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest. ©2026 Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.