Elite families have a familiar playbook for getting their children into America’s most selective universities: wealth, influence, and connections.
In 2018, one Upper East Side mother wielded all three in an attempt to gain a competitive edge for her son’s application to Penn. She enlisted an old friend: convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Modeling agent Faith Kates hoped to leverage Epstein’s ties to Marc Rowan, a prominent Penn alumnus and board member. Kates — who worked as a top executive at Next Management, a modeling and talent agency, until November 2025 — has awell-documentedrelationship with Epstein.Records show she introduced Epstein to women on the agency’s books, secretly took his business advice, and regularly met with Epstein long after headmitted guiltin a federal plea deal and served 13 months of jail time.
But their decade of now-published correspondence extended well beyond business dealings. Files released by the Department of Justice and reviewed by The Daily Pennsylvanian show how Kates sought Epstein’s assistance to help get her son, Dylan Kogan, a spot in Penn’s Class of 2023.
A University spokesperson wrote that “Epstein had no ties” to the admissions process at Penn. The spokesperson maintained that “Penn makes admissions decisions” based solely on the “required materials submitted by each applicant.”
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Many messages in the DOJ files, including those between Epstein and Kates, contain typos and misspellings. Those errors have been retained as they originally appear in the documents.
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In May 2014, before Kogan entered high school, KatesaskedEpstein to tell her son how important it was for him to “do something different to get into a top school.”
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Whether the advice made its way from Epstein to Kogan is unclear, but Kogan embraced playing tennis and spent his summers working for the Junior Tennis Championship Center, a youth sports nonprofit.
In the summer of 2018, KoganemailedEpsteinseeking donationsas part of a project for JTCC. Soon after, the former financier sent a $10,000 check “from jeffrey.”
Kates later sent Epstein what appears to be the text of aletter of recommendationfrom Raymond Benton — a 1983 Wharton MBA graduate andformerCEO of JTCC.
