At the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, a woman identified in court records as Jane Doe #3 testified that she’d met the defendant, and Maxwell’s longtime boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, “in between classes at Interlochen Arts Camp in the early ’90s.” Epstein and Maxwell stopped to talk to her while she was having ice cream with her friends. After she returned home from summer camp, Jane Doe #3 and her mother “visited Epstein and Maxwell, after which began a period of grooming and later sexual abuse.”

Located in a beautiful cluster of forests and lakes in northern Michigan, Interlochen is an internationally renowned art and music camp for teenagers and younger children. I worked there for several summers during my late teens and early twenties (so about a decade later), and I can attest that, in many ways, it’s a wonderful place. But Epstein was a significant donor. Interlochen even named one of its scholarship cabins after him. The information that he recruited at least one of his victims there should be grimly unsurprising, given how much time he seems to have spent on the campus.

More surprisingly, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), seems to be unaware of her state’s connection to the world’s most notorious pedophile and sex trafficker. In a recent appearance on the YouTube show Breaking Points, Slotkin explained her years of silence on the case by saying that “there weren’t, to my knowledge, Michiganders who were involved.”