HANOVER — A broad cross-section of the Dartmouth College community has renewed calls to remove the name of financier Leon Black, an alumnus and former trustee, from the college’s visual arts center.
In response, the college’s board of trustees has announced that it will appoint a committee to study “naming across campus” at its next meeting, in June.
For critics of Black, who paid $170 million to Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea to soliciting prostitution, the trustees’ action amounts to stalling. Dartmouth leaders should have removed the name of the Black Family Visual Arts Center years ago, they contend.
“I’m glad they’re being thoughtful, but they’ve really had a lot of time to think on this issue,” Diana Whitney, a 1995 Dartmouth graduate and co-founder of Dartmouth Community against Gender Harassment and Sexual Violence, said in a phone interview. “I think any more delay on this is unconscionable,” she added.
“I support the alumni and the students calling for his name to be removed from the visual arts building,” former U.S. Rep. Annie McLane Kuster, D-N.H., said in a phone interview. Kuster, a 1978 Dartmouth graduate, revealed in 2016 that she was sexually assaulted as a student. “I think it’s an important moment for Dartmouth. There’s a long and sordid history of sexual assault on campus. … Dartmouth should take a stand and I call upon the president and the trustees to step up and do the right thing.”
Citing revelations from the Epstein files, Women of Dartmouth, the college’s largest alumni affinity association, with more than 30,000 members, wrote to President Sian Beilock and the trustees on April 7 to say that the group “will firmly support the College in renaming the Black Family Visual Arts Center by removing both the Black Family and Leon Black ’73 names. The time has come for action now given the indications and evidence of indefensible misconduct.”
Dartmouth’s Student Government Association and the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault called for the college to remove Black’s name from the visual arts center in a message to undergraduates on April 8.
The trustees met from April 10 to 12 and a summary released by the college’s newsroom included two paragraphs about the plan to study naming.
“Naming is a topic the board has wanted to address thoughtfully for some time,” Chairman Gregg Lemkau, a 1991 Dartmouth graduate, said in the Dartmouth News story. “Establishing this committee gives us a clear structure to do that work — to engage the community, weigh different perspectives, and arrive at a process that reflects Dartmouth’s values.”
Since then, the editorial board of The Dartmouth, the campus newspaper, has called for the removal of Black’s name.
“We take seriously the allegations that have been made against Leon Black, and we continue to evaluate any new information that comes to light with the seriousness it deserves,” Dartmouth spokesperson Jana Barnello said in a written statement. “Dartmouth currently has no financial relationship with him.”
Calls to remove Black’s name from the visual arts center date back to 2020 and 2021, when links between Black and Epstein began to draw greater scrutiny.
Black, a 1973 Dartmouth graduate who later served as a trustee, co-founded Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, in 1990. His net worth is estimated at between $13 billion and $17 billion, according to Forbes and Bloomberg.
The Black family donated $48 million toward the construction of the visual arts center, which opened in 2012 as the Lebanon Street entrance to the campus and the face of the college’s arts district, which now includes multi-million-dollar renovations and expansions of the Hood Museum and the Hopkins Center for the Arts. Black also commissioned and donated “Dartmouth Panels,” a set of five vertical panels by celebrated artist Ellsworth Kelly that hangs on a back wall of the Hopkins Center, opposite the visual arts building.
The Dartmouth groups point to a growing body of evidence tying Black to Epstein, who served three years of detention from 2008 to 2011 after his guilty plea for soliciting a teenager for prostitution. Dozens of women have come forward to testify that they were trafficked by Epstein and his helpers for sex. Epstein was facing federal charges when he was found dead in his prison cell in New York in August 2019. His death was ruled a suicide.
Black’s $170 million in payments to Epstein from 2012 to 2017 were for tax and investing advice, Black has said. Though Epstein’s advice saved Black over $1 billion in tax obligations, documents from the Epstein files indicate the payments were intended to pay for Epstein’s “operations,” which included trafficking teenage girls for sex. A 2023 settlement agreement between Black and the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein maintained a private island compound and a tax shelter, says that “Jeffrey Epstein used the money Black paid him to partially fund his operations in the Virgin Islands.”
A March 20, 2026 letter from U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, to Black, points out that Black paid 30 times more for tax advice from Epstein than he did to several law firms.
Black has denied wrongdoing and has said that he was unaware of Epstein’s illicit activities. When more information about Epstein came to light, Black said he regretted the connection. In 2021, Black stepped down as chairman of Apollo Global Management and as chairman of the board of the Museum of Modern Art, though he retains an ownership stake in Apollo and is still on the MoMA board.
An email to Susan Estrich, a lawyer for Black, was not returned by deadline. Estrich told The Dartmouth that an “independent investigation” concluded that Black “had no awareness of Epstein’s criminal activities leading to his arrest in 2019.”
Black also has been accused of sexual assault, allegations he denies. One lawsuit, by a woman who claims Black raped her at Epstein’s townhouse when she was 16, remains pending.
“Of the three civil lawsuits filed against Mr. Black, one has been dismissed, the other withdrawn and the other is currently facing a case terminating motion for sanctions,” Estrich told The Dartmouth. “There is absolutely no truth to any of the allegations against Mr. Black.”
Epstein was an early and longtime director of the Black Family Foundation, through which Black’s donations to Dartmouth passed. His name appears in the foundation’s tax forms in 2012, though the Black family has said that was in error and that Epstein’s directorship ended in 2007.
The Epstein files contain emails from 2014 in which Epstein refers to Black’s donations to Dartmouth. The files also includes a May 27, 2014 letter from Robert W. Lasher, Dartmouth’s senior vice president for advancement, to Black that details payments for the visual arts center, $500,000 for the renovation of the Dartmouth president’s house, a campus building, and $3 million for the Ellsworth Kelly commission, an amount the college has never revealed publicly.
The Dartmouth groups argue that Black’s links to Epstein taint the visual arts center that bears his family’s name and that seeing Black’s name causes undue grief to survivors of sexual assault.
“In their refusal to change the name, Dartmouth’s administration sullies Hanover and normalizes Epstein’s apparatus, all without explanation,” Mary Anne Mendenhall, a 2002 Dartmouth graduate who’s now a public defender, wrote in an April 14 op-ed in The Dartmouth. “And 24 hours a day, Dartmouth broadcasts this rot to its future rich guys: The margins for morality have no limits if you get rich enough.”
“Seeing Black’s name on a campus building is an injurious, insulting, persistent and painful reminder to women and men that sexual predators often harm others with impunity,” the Women of Dartmouth statement says.
At two recent Women of Dartmouth town halls, Black was one of the top three topics. “In the post-event discussion, alumnae were vehement, frustrated and indignant that a change had not already occurred,” the statement says.
“Removing the name is not merely a symbolic gesture,” the statement says, “it’s a necessary step to protect the future and the integrity of the College.”
“Regardless of whether Epstein held an official title, files confirm that within his capacity as director and personal consultant to Black, Epstein advised and planned Black’s donations to Dartmouth,” the student government and the Committee on Sexual Assault wrote in their message to undergraduates. “Those donations are a financial scar on this institution.”
The renewed campaign to take Black’s name down is a sign both that the ongoing release and investigation of the Epstein files seems likely to continue to reveal further links between Epstein and Leon Black, and that the issue isn’t going to fade into the background at Dartmouth.
Wyden’s recent letter to Black runs to 20 pages and poses an array of questions about Black’s financial dealings, including tax compliance. In the letter, Wyden asked for answers by April 13. A call to Wyden’s office in Washington asking if the deadline had been met was not returned.
“Furthermore, the files remove any lingering doubt as to whether you were connected to women in Epstein’s network, and the evidence that Epstein and powerful associates in the U.S. and abroad were surveilling and paying off women on your behalf is highly disturbing,” Wyden wrote.
“I don’t think the issue is going to go away,” Stan Colla, a Dartmouth graduate who worked at the college in development and alumni relations for 20 years before retiring in 2005, said in a phone interview. “We can see how it’s going to play out in Congress. There are people on both sides of the aisle who want this to be dealt with in a public way.”
Colla spent two years working on the crisis hotline for WISE, a Lebanon-based organization that advocates for victims of domestic and sexual violence. The Epstein investigation dovetails with efforts to end sexual assault on the Dartmouth campus and in society at large, he said.
“I know how much this issue matters,” Colla said. “For the women who are asking for support,” he added, “it seems to me the college ought to be out in front.”
Kuster was silent for 40 years about her own experience at Dartmouth and began to speak out after it became clear that little had changed since she was a student.
“I realized at the time that my generation’s silence made us complicit,” she said. She founded Congress’ Bipartisan Task Force to End Sexual Violence and has been engaged in efforts at Dartmouth and in New Hampshire on the issue.
“I’m disappointed that it’s taken this long to address the concerns that have been raised,” Kuster said. “We should have a higher standard.”
