Stop the Demolition: Before Interlochen Tears Down the Epstein Lodge, Law Enforcement Needs to Get In There

What the Building Is and What It Holds

The Green Lake Lodge sits on the shore of Green Lake on the Interlochen campus in Grand Traverse County. It was built with money Jeffrey Epstein donated to the Interlochen Center for the Arts between 1990 and 2003. Epstein gave more than $400,000 to Interlochen across that period, including $200,000 specifically for the lodge’s construction. In exchange, he was allowed to stay on campus for approximately two weeks each year.

That arrangement, according to DOJ documents and NPR reporting, gave Epstein private quarters on a campus filled with gifted children from across the country, ages 8 to 18, attending one of the most prestigious arts programs in the world. The lodge was his. He was not monitored. He was a donor.

At least two of Epstein’s accusers say they first met him at Interlochen. A 2020 court filing includes a claim from a woman who says she met Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at Interlochen in the 1990s when she was 13 years old, that they met with her alone at the lodge, and that she views it as the beginning of grooming behavior that eventually led to years of sexual abuse. If verified, that would make her one of Epstein’s earliest documented victims. That meeting happened inside the Green Lake Lodge.

What Forensic Examination Actually Looks For

A building is not an inert object. It is a record. Physical structures retain biological material in ways that environmental conditions and time do not always erase. Blood. Semen. Hair. Skin cells. Fingerprints in wood grains and on surfaces that have not been cleaned. Biological deposits in mattress materials, flooring seams, wall cavities, and drain fixtures. These are the kinds of evidence that criminal investigations recover from structures decades after the events that produced them, in cases ranging from homicides to sexual assaults.

Physical structures also retain information about how they were used and modified. Locks added to interior rooms. Windows blocked or covered. Soundproofing materials. Modifications to plumbing or electrical systems inconsistent with standard construction. These are the kinds of features that tell investigators whether a space was configured for a purpose its original plans did not describe.

Interlochen conducted two internal reviews of Epstein’s activities on campus and found no evidence of crimes committed at Interlochen. Those internal reviews did not involve swabbing surfaces. They did not involve forensic luminol testing of flooring. They did not involve structural examination of the building’s interior modifications over time. They involved reviewing records and interviewing people. Records can be incomplete. People can be wrong. Buildings do not lie.

The Two Investigations Already Running

Michigan’s political moment on Interlochen is already in motion, and it is not moving fast enough. In April 2026, Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou introduced HR 284 with bipartisan support, a resolution that would create a special House committee to investigate Interlochen’s relationship with Epstein. The resolution named the DOJ documents, the survivor accounts, and the question of how Epstein gained unsupervised access to children at a campus where children should have been safe.

In May 2026, Tsernoglou held a press conference renewing the call. The following day, House Speaker Matt Hall removed her from all her committee assignments, including the House Oversight Committee. Hall said it was because of her conduct in committee. Tsernoglou said it was retaliation for asking questions about Epstein. She stated: “Speaker Hall has a history of silencing the voices of strong women. I won’t be silenced. I won’t stop speaking out for survivors.”

The pattern of stripping a woman’s committee assignments the day after she publicly calls for accountability on child sexual abuse is in the documented record now. It joins the documented record of boards threatening journalists, administrators calling abuse a family dispute, and institutions expanding their reach while investigations are pending. The machine is running in this case too.

Separately, since June 2025, Interlochen has engaged the Sanghavi Law Office, a Massachusetts civil rights firm staffed by former federal civil rights attorneys, to conduct an independent external review of sexual misconduct allegations against former faculty members from the 1960s and 1970s. Alumni accounts have been described as sobering. At least one person under investigation is deceased. The Michigan Attorney General’s office, when asked about these allegations, said it had not received a criminal complaint.

These are two distinct investigations running in parallel. The Epstein connection: at least two known victims, documented unsupervised access through a donor arrangement, a building that served as Epstein’s private campus quarters. The historical faculty abuse: multiple former faculty members from the 1960s and 1970s, alumni accounts described as sobering, an external law firm engaged since 2025 with findings not yet public.

The 1960s faculty abuse investigation and the Epstein access pattern overlap in one specific way that has received almost no public attention. Epstein first attended Interlochen in 1967. That is the same decade in which the historical faculty abuse allegedly began. The same campus. The same era. Whether or not those two streams of abuse are connected to each other is a question the current investigations have not addressed publicly. It is a question that a physical building on that campus may be able to help answer. If that building still exists when investigators finally ask it.

What Michigan State Police Should Do Now

This is not complicated. Michigan State Police has jurisdiction. The Michigan Attorney General’s office has jurisdiction. Federal law enforcement has jurisdiction given the documented connection to Epstein’s federal sex trafficking charges. Any of these agencies can contact Interlochen and request a hold on the structure pending forensic examination. That request does not require a criminal conviction. It does not require a filed complaint. It requires only the recognition that a building where a convicted sex trafficker had documented private access to children for over a decade should be examined by someone with forensic training before it is turned into rubble.

The examination should be independent of Interlochen’s internal processes. The Sanghavi Law Office investigation is a civil firm hired by the institution. That is appropriate for the historical faculty abuse review. It is not a substitute for independent law enforcement forensic examination of a physical structure connected to federal sex trafficking charges.

The Survivors Who Are Not in the Public Consciousness

At least two of Epstein’s accusers are in the documented public record as having met him at Interlochen. Those are the ones who came forward, who filed court documents, who gave statements to investigators. They are a fraction of the children who attended Interlochen during the years Epstein was a donor and a regular campus presence.

Interlochen’s summer camp and boarding school draws gifted young people from across the country and internationally. In any given year, hundreds of talented children spend weeks or months on that campus. Epstein was there every year for over a decade with private lodging, institutional legitimacy, and a donor relationship that gave him access he would not otherwise have had. The two accusers in the public record did not meet him because he was unlucky. They met him because the access structure was designed to give him contact with children.

There are survivors of what happened at Interlochen who are not in the public consciousness. There are people who experienced things in connection with Epstein’s campus presence, or in connection with the historical faculty abuse from the 1960s and 1970s, who have not come forward, who do not know that investigations are underway, who have spent years carrying something they were never asked about. Those people exist. Their accounts matter. And a building that may hold physical corroboration of what they experienced is about to be demolished without anyone having looked.

If you were a student at Interlochen and you experienced or witnessed anything involving Epstein, Maxwell, or any faculty member that felt wrong, the Sanghavi Law Office investigation is still open. Contact them at investigation@interlochen.org or 231.276.8093. And contact Michigan State Police. And contact the FBI’s Detroit field office. Your account matters. The statute of limitations question is separate from whether your account is heard.

The OCCK Lesson Michigan Cannot Afford to Forget

I have spent the last several months working through the FBI FOIA documents on the North Fox Island investigation, the MSP case files on Christopher Busch, and the documented history of how Michigan’s institutions handled physical evidence in child sexual abuse cases across five decades. What I have learned is that evidence does not stay available indefinitely while institutions make deliberate decisions at their own pace.

The Green Lake Lodge will tell investigators something. It may tell them a great deal. It may tell them very little. But it will tell them something, and that something will be permanently unavailable the moment the first wall comes down. Michigan has paid for institutional delay in this category of case for fifty years. The families of four murdered children never got answers in part because the people who should have looked did not look when they had the chance. Cathy Broad has spent two decades fighting for documents that should have been preserved and examined in 1978.

Nobody at Interlochen is suggesting they are trying to destroy evidence. Nobody has to be. The effect of demolishing a potential crime scene without forensic examination is the same whether it is intentional or not. The evidence is gone. The survivors’ accounts lose physical corroboration. The investigators who eventually ask the question get the same answer Michigan has heard too many times: there is nothing left to examine.

That answer is not acceptable here. Michigan State Police, the Michigan Attorney General, and federal law enforcement need to act before the machinery of institutional self-protection makes the decision for them. The building is still standing. The evidence, if it exists, is still there. This is the window. Use it.