Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is calling foul on a wave of viral posts trying to stitch its infamous 1990 art heist to the Justice Department’s newly released Jeffrey Epstein files. Museum officials said Tuesday that social media sleuths are misreading raw DOJ records and, in the process, muddying an active investigation that still aims to bring the missing masterpieces home.
Last Friday the Justice Department posted millions of pages of Epstein-related documents, which set off a fresh round of online speculation and amateur detective work, according to the Associated Press. As reported by the Boston Herald, some of the buzziest clips online zero in on an email in the DOJ trove in which Epstein allegedly asked, “which paintings would you use as collateral if you could borrow against them confidentially,” listing several Rembrandt titles that happen to overlap with works stolen from the Gardner.
Anthony Amore, the museum’s director of security and chief investigator, told the Boston Herald that the notion the Gardner paintings were being floated as collateral is not just far-fetched but illogical. The idea, he said, “wouldn’t even make sense for money laundering, it would only make the money dirtier.” A museum spokeswoman told the Herald that misinformation bouncing around social platforms “can hinder the museum’s active investigation and delay recovery of artworks” and urged people to pass along credible leads to law enforcement instead of feeding viral conspiracy threads. The museum still fields more than 50 tips every month…