“We hear from alumni constantly about how their time at Interlochen Arts Academy changed their lives,” Trey Devey, the president of Interlochen Center for the Arts, said in 2025. The boarding school with its famous 2,000-strong summer arts camp, located about 20 minutes from Traverse City in northern Michigan, had just been named the top arts high school in America. The illustrious list of alumni of either the school or the summer program already spoke for itself: Maria Bamford, Meredith Baxter, Ana Gasteyer, Josh Groban, Jewel, Norah Jones, Chappell Roan and on and on.
This week, though, a shockingreportfrom a law office in Brookline, Massachusetts, detailed a very different way in which the lives of several generations of Interlochen students had been changed on the shores of Lake Michigan. The report, commendably commissioned by Interlochen and the Interlochen board of trustees themselves, recounted decades of abuse at the camp, investigated by the Sanghavi Law Office over a two-year period.
Throughout its history, Interlochen has recruited heavily from the Chicago area.
Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious late sexual abuser, attended Interlochen himself in the summer of 1967. He was a donor from 1990 to 2003, sponsoring a lodge in his name. Interlochen initially believed there had been no abuse by Epstein at the camp, but the evidence later emerged that, at a minimum, Epstein had abused students who he had first encountered at the camp in off-campus locations like New York City.
That information is in this report, which is a summation of two years of investigative work, but it’s hardly the dominant takeaway. Rather, it’s that sexual abuse took place at Interlochen over decades. Especially in the last decades of the 20th century when students’ ability to have regular contact with home was far more limited than is the case today.
All in all, nearly 50 adult individuals were mentioned in the report by former students at the camp.
Notably, the report says, around a third of them are deceased and those who are still alive typically refused to respond to investigators. (The report does not mention names but divides the adults by broader job titles, including leadership and student life positions.) Some of the adults, unsurprisingly, were the subject of multiple allegations of abuse, and there are accounts of abuse continuing as students returned to the camp for a second summer or academic year.
Many of the alums interviewed about sexual abuse as far back as the 1960s are, of course, now senior citizens themselves. Many described its impact on their subsequent career choices, their personal relationships, and their mental and emotional health. One striking alum quote in the report is “abuse and trauma are heartbreaking for generations.” Some also otherwise praised the camp, the friends made there and also detailed the ways in which it was a positive impact on their lives.
As, alas, has so often proved to be the case, there are allegations in the report that an institutional blind eye was turned to the behavior and that opportunities for calling the employees to account frequently were missed.
The report is staggering in its scale: the number of allegations, the number of alleged adult perpetrators, the length of time the behavior continued, the easy provision of opportunities for abuse. There are those therein who note the impact of the permissive sexual culture of the 1970s and, to some degree, the 1980s and 1990s. Interlochen was no island. And it’s hardly news that abusers strike again and again, especially in camp environments where the population changes every year.
But the report is also striking in how it details the particular vulnerability of children with artistic gifts: the inherently personal and physical nature of work that often involves the manipulation of the human body and a student’s emotional impulses; the desire both to stand out in a competitive landscape and fit in with a like-minded community that thrills an arty kid; the particularly acute danger to those teenagers still figuring out their sexual orientation.
This is hardly the only such report. But few cover so long a time period. And few build a comparable case that significant harm happened to so many in an institution’s charge over so long. And that, in some cases, there was a deep, lifelong impact.
The report makes clear that Interlochen now has a variety of new policies and procedures designed to safeguard against abuse. Students now have “multiple pathways” for reporting concerns. Faculty and staff are trained in their mandatory reporting obligations. Employees are now subject to extensive background checks and there is extensive training on the subject of professional boundaries. There are myriad new policies in place to ensure campus safety in all ways. Epstein’s lodge, which already had been renamed, has been demolished entirely, just this year.
In the conclusion of the report, some of the reporting individuals detailed what they believe should happen next, including demands for more accountability, criminal charges where possible and further restorative efforts. There are several other things mentioned, but one of them is that the “well-loved” school, which attracted, attracts and surely still will attract some of America’s most gifted young artists, should always now remember that its first job is to not to train future stars but to support its students.
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