Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
To the members of the MIT community,
Last night, The New Yorker published an article that contains deeply disturbing allegations about the engagement between individuals at the Media Lab and Jeffrey Epstein.
Because the accusations in the story are extremely serious, they demand an immediate, thorough and independent investigation. This morning, I asked MIT’s General Counsel to engage a prominent law firm to design and conduct this process. I expect the firm to conduct this review as swiftly as possible, and to report back to me and to the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, MIT’s governing board.
This afternoon, Joi Ito submitted his resignation as Director of the Media Lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute.
As I described in my previous letter, the acceptance of the Epstein gifts involved a mistake of judgment. We are actively assessing how best to improve our policies, processes and procedures to fully reflect MIT’s values and prevent such mistakes in the future. Our internal review process continues, and what we learn from it will inform the path ahead.
Sincerely,
L. Rafael Reif
"I told the @nytimes everything. So did whistleblowers I was in touch with inside @MIT and @Edge. They printed none of the most damning truths. @joi is on the board of the NYT. THANK GOD FOR @RonanFarrow"
EDIT: NYTimes is now indicating that Ito has resigned from NYT Co board, effective immediately [2].
For example, Xeni's pinned tweet references this other tweet (https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1165266579560521728), which implies that anybody who was ever at a dinner with Epstein should be considered complicit in Epstein's crimes. Take this quote, for example:
> I would like to not be sued or disappeared, but I would also like people to seriously register the fact that Amazon and Google CEOS/Founders were at the gathering alluded to in this Twitter thread. Their names are in the screen grab. Don’t sue me please. I have no money.
This seems to imply that anybody at this dinner (that Epstein) was complicit. Other attendees include Daniel C. Dennett, Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky (yes, that Marvin Minsky!). Is it just me, or does that strike anybody as an overreaction?
It just sounds like you haven't been paying attention at all. Are you aware that a woman has claimed that she was forced to have sex with Marvin Minsky by Epstein on his island?
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jef...
Are you aware that Pinker has flown on the "Lolita Express" and helped with Epstein's legal defense, a legal defense that led to him avoiding a prison term in a manner that seems aptly describable as "corrupt"?
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/17/steven-pinker...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/12/alex-acosta-...
If you were not aware of these things, please engage in some honest introspection regarding how you ended up decrying attempts to reach justice for them as overreactions on the Internet.
I've been shocked to see in the past few years how common it is for nothing more than the implication of some unqualified 'association' between people/groups to settle folks' minds on some issue or other.
That some vague association exists between people/groups at most creates a demand for more information—it's a type of statement characterized by the giant hole in its front and center. Further, it's a type of statement whose information content is 100% latent until the hole is filled. It is a prompt for investigation—not an indictment of any kind.
Note: I have no comments on the particulars of this situation (in fact everything I've read leads me to believe a lot of people with varying degrees of guilt are being rightly exposed)—I'm only commenting on the general structure of stance-taking, information sufficiency, and valid argument forms in general.
This is true but instead of acting or speaking out against these loopholes in the justice system which to be fair are exploited by every rich/influential person convicted of a crime, what is happening is that people have got out the pitchforks and they want to burn everyone who ever associated with Epstein. A mere association or even a suspicion of association is being equated to a crime. This is not justice this is a mere knee-jerk reaction to the inadequacies of the justice system and will do more harm than good.
I was reading it the same way, until I got to this:
> I attended some of them [the same dinners] and I can confirm!
It seems like this person is tarring people for doing not more than she herself did.
I submitted an article detailing all this stuff on the day of Epstein’s death, it had reached the top links of HN in less than an hour but then it was ominously flagged. I lost a great deal of let’s call it respect for the people that keep this website up, apparently letting other people know that a now dead AI luminary was a paedophile is considered tabu.
Edit: I was looking for a bit more context than a random tweet. Had to search through a bunch of tweets to find it, but apparently Xeni tweeted about Joi Ito's connection to Epstein weeks ago.
MIT banned Epstein from donating after his Sex Offender conviction. Ito did an end-run around that ban (in addition to taking Epstein’s money personally which is a separate level of unethical).
Xeni spilled the beans on this (Epstein bypassing the ban, Ito’s involvement) to the NYT, which then buried the story likely due to Epstein’s political connections. Many papers and media outlets killed Epstein stories.
So, I imagine many editors from NYT and many other papers has resigned from their jobs and their memberships in whatever professional organizations, boards, etc. they have been on, because of that? Or the press is not supposed to be held to ethical standard because... well, because they are The Press, so they are above scrutiny?
Taking money from a dirty source is one thing; hiding it from the university because they've blacklisted that person in particular is about as unforgivable a crime as you'll find in academia
TBH, I've never heard of a blacklisted donor at MIT, so I'm a little surprised (pleasantly, as an alum).
It doesn't seem like any of the journalists even asked. That sounds like a very interesting story in and of itself.
It all highlights the difficult job facing people tasked with taking money from donors in this way. They won't always have 20/20 hindsight. They may learn about sketchiness after they already took the money. They may be so blinded by what they see as generosity and good will that they may be less able to see character flaws. I am not saying any of this happened here, but I would not like to be in a position to make these decisions.
Your hypothetical example is pretty thoroughly unrelated to the case here.
There are red lines beyond which a person should be considered socially radioactive and ostracized.
-- http://nymag.com/news/features/41826/
That's why.
I think it was his way to enmesh them and make them unwitting partners in his systemic abuse. Most people just went along, and were eventually given a massage from a child at his behest to further enmesh them into the conspiracy. No one could play the innocent whistleblower because of their tangential complicity.
The gossip I’ve heard is confirmed by those who knew him - https://www.salon.com/2019/07/09/i-was-a-friend-of-jeffrey-e... ;
> In the early ‘90s, at a Joan Rivers dinner party, my wife and I encountered Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of disgraced British publishing mogul Robert Maxwell and Epstein’s girlfriend for a brief period in the '90s. She has been accused of recruiting and grooming girls and women for Epstein; she denies this. I’d met her several times with Epstein; we were also “friends,” in that transactional Manhattan way. And might now become better friends. “If you lose 10 pounds, I’ll fuck you,” she said, with my wife standing next to me. And she too became dead to me.
> As his legend grew, many others were fascinated or amused or impressed by Epstein or simply delighted that he wrote checks to their charities. His interest in young women was no secret; Donald Trump famously applauded it in 2002. Vicky Ward, who published a long profile of Epstein in Vanity Fair in 2003, recently revisited transcripts of her interviews: “What is so amazing to me is how his entire social circle knew about this and just blithely overlooked it . . . all mentioned the girls, as an aside.”
It’s why he was so disgustingly coy about what he did. It’s why Ito, who is quite smart, probably knew what was what. And it’s why he deserves his fall from grace.
I think what's interesting is the ethical dilemma here.
You have 1000s of people around you. No one is saying anything. Then they offer you money. Do you take it? Everyone else is? Then the counter to this is that of the 1000s of people that come crashing down why is it just Joi Ito and a few others?
The key detail here is that Joi isn't an isolated "king" like the rest of the people here.
They will all escape justice.
Excuse me, but noting something, is not the same as applauding it.
> According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room.
> On the day of the visit, Swenson’s distress deepened at the sight of the young women. “They were models. Eastern European, definitely,” she told me. Among the lab’s staff, she said, “all of us women made it a point to be super nice to them. We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them.”
Ito worked with someone whom his staff suspected of continuing to traffic women — right there in their own office.
He also enriched himself from this relationship. From this NYT article:
> Mr. Ito acknowledged this past week taking $525,000 of Mr. Epstein’s money for the lab, as well as $1.2 million for his personal investment funds.
Truly despicable.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-univer...
So they should either clearly say underage-looking girls or remove that paragraph because it's irrelevant and confusing.
I mean this is a story about child abuse and the author didn't think to ask those women if the "models" looked underage?
This guy was having sex with underage teens and possibly pre-teens, not "models" and not "young women".
FTFY. An adult can’t “have sex” with a pre-teen.
As an example pedophilia in Finland is defined in criminal code as having sex with a person under 16. Rape is a different crime.
Sure you can also define it using rape and defining that a minor cannot give consent.
In the end these are just semantics. End result is the same.
But Signe Swenson wasn't as willing to put up with that, even if she couldn't personally stop it. And by 2016, she was in the room too.
You can look at this through a "fuck the patriarchy" lens or insist on the fact that this was just people being people. But at the end of the day this is why diversity matters. Epstein's lures only worked on hetero men, and he fell when faced with a world of influential women.
You're being hyperspecific here with your disagreement.
I think if start enumerating them, you'll find almost all of those advantages you believe in are isomorphic to "different perspectives prevent groupthink". And alignment with the social world of a hyper-rich sex peddler is absolutely a kind of groupthink, no?
Again, Epstein could have his way with organizations run by horny men. That was literally his scam. And as the article (and others) details, this remained true even after he got caught, because enough horny men didn't "really" see what he did as so bad. But that ended once someone was in the room who didn't see things through that lens. That is diversity at work.
I have heard about Epstein, obviously with hindsight all sorts of things he did can be seen in a new light. I just don't understand what is so damning about the passage above.
Would somebody who is trafficking women really take them everywhere he goes? I thought it would be more of a secret affair.
If your point is "they probably weren't trafficked at least in the lurid sense we mean when we talk about trafficking", sure, but that's not the point. The point is that Ito's collaboration with Epstein was not incidental, but rather deliberate, overt, and actually disruptive to the operations of the Lab.
In that it's extremely common. In the gritty real world, people know of such guys and what they do. Many have personality men such gentlemen and their entourages (of course most not at the level of Epstein, but frequent some circles in Eastern Europe, Russia, Paris, London, Italy, etc, and you'll meet such guys, no doubt in Asia and L. America too), and know what "assistants" who look like models and are from Eastern Europe sum up to...
Of course it won't be as evident to someone in rural Iowa, or growing up in the boy scouts, they'd need to have things spelt out for them...
>Would somebody who is trafficking women really take them everywhere he goes? I thought it would be more of a secret affair.
At such meetings like at MIT usually no.
But shady rich guys with political/drug/mafia/trafficking connections take their women (even underage or barely legal) all around, in restaurants, boats, nightclubs, business deals, parties, etc. And not just criminal/underworld types: this even includes world leaders, like Berlusconi, all kinds of royalty, rich moguls, etc...
In some countries you can't throw a rock in a public event without hitting one such...
I'm trying to assume good faith, but it's not easy.
The simple answer to this question is: Yes. He did.
And it was precisely the people who didn't take it at face value that allowed him to get away with it for so long.
You are reading stuffs. People have seen this. If they were uneasy at this sight, they must have felt/observed something more than that, so much so that they thought that these girls might not have been there by choice.
People do get suspicious of fishy people and if you ask them why they are suspicious of some people, they would say, "he was behaving a bit different, something was off about him". And people like you will dismiss it.
Even in real life, I see people walking around with girls. Most of the times I feel or suspect nothing but sometimes I do feel something is off or fishy about it but yet I can't describe it fully.
Now you know a lot more about Epstein, what do you think why he brought "2 models (possibly quite young, given the reputation of Epstein) who are possibly from eastern europe" in MIT lab?
Now we know a lot more about Epstein, people must have felt something much more about those 2 girls which you can't imagine.
Personally, I feel like you are arguing for the sake of arguing. I was shocked at your line of thinking.
As far as secrecy, Epstein apparently wasn't very secret at all. Many reports from Virgin Islands where he had a home.
The world isn't TV, you might be surprised what people can get away with in plain sight.
When you're supplying these girls to British royalty, politicians at every level, certainly law enforcement of various flavors, and plenty of generic rich people (VC/finance, old money, Donald Trump, etc.), yeah, you might kinda get the idea that you're operating with impunity. Because you are, especially when you have blackmail material on all of them.
Trafficking of young women from the former Soviet Union is a complicated issue. During the collapse, and well into the 90s and mid 00s, many people were desperate. Literally starving, with ~no public services. And many criminals took advantage of that, recruiting young women for work as models, nannies and prostitutes. Plus of course all of the websites for Russian etc brides.
And that's still happening, because many areas are still very poor and chaotic. And Epstein clearly took advantage of that. Along with many other Americans, mostly in less abusive ways.
Generally, people who recruited destitute young women in legitimate ways would have no reason to hide that. Wives, nannies, servants, models, etc. So I guess that Epstein was just trying to maintain a pretense of legitimacy.
Edit: Here's a personal example. Indirectly through family, I knew a young woman who made it to the US in the late 80s. She'd been trained as a restoration artist, and the demand for that collapsed along with the Soviet Union. But once here, she worked for some years as an exotic dancer.
Why are you so incredulous that people would assume the worst when the guy had a reputation and the girls looked way too young to be traveling the world with the sleazeball?
After everything Epstein has did and got away with, I don't think it's a stretch that he would have been brash about it. Look at how brash Trump is about some of his personal sexual exploits.
I'm not sure the point is these women were trafficked for sure, but Ito was obviously unwilling to overlook a pretty questionable situation for his personal financial gain.
Regardless, he isn't being thrown in jail, he's just losing his position of power because he obviously isn't capable of avoiding conflict of interest.
Oh I'm sure that happened! /s
It is worth noting that this person not only resigned in part because of the ties to Epstein (according to her) but also knew about said ties before she took the job.
Why is it hard to simply tell everything as it happened without trying to embellish one's picture in vain?
I have to assume at least some of the more contrarian views are coming from people who haven't been following the full story in the US news, and so don't quite grasp the nature of the allegations. The case is far from just "some rich guy turned out to be an abuser".
If you can't understand why the reaction is so strong against those who maintained ties with Epstein, it's worth looking into the full story, perhaps starting with the Miami Herald's "Perversion of Justice" story last year.
Of course, this depends on the nature of those ties: How much good are they doing, versus how much bad? If it's possible to do that cost-benefit analysis, we might as well do it, because why not?
In this particular case, I have no idea how much additional good the Media Lab was doing as a result of this money. Thus, it actually is impossible for me to do the cost-benefit analysis, because I don't know the benefit side of the equation. But I can enumerate some of the costs:
- It contributed to Epstein being able to feel that he's accepted by society and can shameless appear at meetings and such, in public, with reputable people, despite engaging in despicable behavior. Alternatively, ostracizing him would've sent a strong message and perhaps contributed to a change in his behavior.
- It signaled to people at large that Epstein is a good guy who donates to charitable causes. (This was somewhat mitigated by keeping the donations anonymous.)
- It signaled to people at large that it's okay and normal to work with people who do despicable things. (This was also somewhat mitigated by keeping the donations anonymous.)
- It risked to the Media Lab's reputation if discovered, thus hindering the organization's ability to do more good in the future.
- Other things I'm leaving out?
So clearly a ton of bad. And I'd guess the bad outweighed whatever good was done, given that many people who were working within the Media Lab were opposed to accepting the donations.
But I don't know if it's as simple as "if the guy is bad then always say no full stop." That seems like an oversimplification, and not necessarily the best way to analyze it.
Makes me think that in the future these organizations are still going to accept the money but bring in a "fall guy" to accept the blame when the anonymous donor is found out.
I don't think Joi would have done this personally. He's a smart guy.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neoteny#section-over...
It's conjectured that a lot of humanity's advanced intelligence & culture has been achieved with the help of our species' extended retention of juvenile learning-capacity & neural plasticity:
Wikipedia must be skipping over some important details, but it describes him as a two-time college dropout, a nightclub manager in Japan, (EDIT: nevermind, mystery solved! His MIT bio says he was the founder of Japan's Digital Garage and CEO of its first ISP [1]), then he's the president of MIT Media Lab, visiting Harvard Law School professor, on several boards of directors, and runs a VC fund.
I'm not implying he got his money by nefarious means, just that it's interesting to see people who find success (and in this case, downfall) within these institutions despite their unconventional backgrounds.
But the problem is that doing so normalizes the behavior. Everybody who has doubts about working with the creep looks around the room, and when they don't see anyone else objecting, ends up thinking "I guess we're all ok with this behavior" and goes along to get along.
But everyone doesn't do it, and so we have this norm about how if someone X is an investor of Y, then some of Y's reputation transfers to X -- we assume Y did due diligence on X for us.
The problem exists because accepting morally tainted money isn't a norm. (I'm not arguing that it should be!)
Let's be honest - a lot of people in the tech community and related subcultures (particularly genre fandoms) are either ok with, or are ambivalent towards, this behavior, or have a lack of empathy which leads them to view things in purely game-theoretical terms.
When it appears in tech, it's usually relatively harmless.
When it appears in business, it can literally be lethal.
The same can be observed in adtech, Facebook etc employees
The number of YC based start-ups that took dirty money is rather large. You may be on to something there.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/world/yuri-milner-faceboo...
And given his insistence that the donation be made anonymously, it seems like he was well aware the optics would be bad if the public knew there was a connection between the two, and yet he chose to make the donation through Epstein anyway.
It's pretty clear that for certain individuals higher up in the social hierarchy than most of us will ever see, Epstein offered a very exclusive service. And was part of a world of that we mostly think of as fiction. Similar to when the Snowden leaks happened we all saw that "yes, the government really does perform mass surveillance on the population", we are now seeing that "yes, the extremely wealth do play by completely different rules and shape our society in complex ways".
But we won't see much more. Joichi Ito is probably the least powerful person caught up in all this, and him and people like him provide the public retribution we all want to see. We'll see the justice has been served, and return the illusion that this was just a strange aberration rather than the status quo.
Many philanthropists will say "I wish to donate $X", and then ask a friend/group/organization, "Where would you like me to donate this?", hence a "directed donation".
Doesn't add up.
This certainly doesn't look good for Bill Gates. I have trouble believing that Ito was lying in his 2014 email concerning the Gates donation. Possibly, he was mislead by Epstein but I can't think of any reason Ito himself would lie.
As someone else commented about a different aspect of the article, I'm doubt we will ever learn more.
I was just responding to your question of why a rich person "needs" someone to be a middleman on where to donate.
Ultimately, this thread does feel a lot like the author making a dreadful scandal about himself.
That's not clear at all, at least if you're talking about an investigation conducted or commissioned by MIT. Ito's sudden resignation seems likely to have been prompted by the damning New Yorker article published yesterday. Another commenter posted the email sent out by MIT's president today, which refers to yesterday's New Yorker article and indicates that the university has just commissioned an investigation in reaponse to it.
This is what Hoffman is saying, and it would be very on-brand for Giriharadas to do so.
> “Epstein was introduced to Bill Gates as someone who was interested in helping grow philanthropy. Although Epstein pursued Bill Gates aggressively, any account of a business partnership or personal relationship between the two is simply not true. And any claim that Epstein directed any programmatic or personal grant making for Bill Gates is completely false.”
Note the part “Although Epstein pursued Bill Gates aggressively” which implies that Gates was a victim or at least an uninterested party in this affair. If that is true, why then cough up $2 million dollars via Epstein? Why does it matter if Epstein was aggressive or not if Gates wrote the check?
Some follow-up questions that Gates should answer to clarify his role:
1. What correspondence or communications did Gates have with Epstein regarding the $2 million donation to the MIT Media Lab?
2. What correspondence or communications did Gates have with Epstein since his conviction in 2008? Best option would be to list all of the times Gates (including any representatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) met with or liaised with Epstein since 2008 - including via any intermediaries or third parties and electronic communications.
3. What is the definition of business partnership in Gates’ above refuttal?
4. What is the definition of personal relationship in Gates’ above refuttal?
PR and disaster management ‘gurus’ often wordsmith their clients’ way out of these affairs.
Gates should at least clarify his role here. Otherwise, his position as a philanthropist also seems tainted.
To respond to concerns that the two were spotted together frequently. This is an answer to a question. Figure out the question and you will understand.
We are livid right now. She has to help a lot of orgs navigate it, where the rules can sometimes be tricky and somewhat counter-intuitive, especially if you don't have accounting experience (and let's face it, most people in fundraising foundations are some of the lowest paid people on campus, and you get what you pay for). Stuff that could get you fined or jail time for what lay-people might consider an honest mistake (but definitely should be considered 101-course material for fundraisers, considering the stakes).
Joichi Ito's actions go way, way beyond that. Who knows just how far the harm he has caused will actually spread. He's harmed the reputation of his institution, his program, and anyone associated with the program. He's lied and cheated for personal gain. It's a no-brainer that he needs to go to jail. Whatever investigation will follow should be focused on finding all the people who knowingly helped him to lock them up alongside him.
Others come up as errors of classification. A certain donor might donate a certain good or service instead of straight money. That donation has to be recorded at fair market value and has to be treated as if it were a proper vendor relationship. Determining that value can be quite complex, especially considering such donations are usually done out of excess stock or time that the donor doesn't have a good valuation on out of their own books.
And often, those sorts of donations come with an expectation of quid pro quo: I give two dozen bails of hay that I have just lying around and expect to get a ticket to the next fundraising ball (which might have a few-thousand dollar list price). If the foundation gives that ticket, the bails of hay are no longer a donation and listing it as such is tax fraud.
Yes, it is about world views. Everything is.
Anyway, in this retrospective he never apologizes for his blunder. I'm not really sad to see him go. He seems like a bad character.
This is the 7th paragraph in the story. Shouldn't it be higher up?
However, news is currently breaking that Ito has since resigned from The NY Times Co. board as well.
Ethics is also a touchy subject, people can't fully agree on whether taking a criminal's money to do good with it is ethical or not. So it's not as cut and dried.
He did however violate MIT policy so that's a valid reason for his resignation or even firing in my opinion.
Personally I suspect Ito was more incredibly naive than scumbag, but being naive is also not a good trait for the leader of a prominent group like the Media Lab.
Just look at who Epstein and Weinstein have been photographed partying with over the years...
"I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it.
You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
That same future president being quoted in an article about Epstein in 2002.
Wait, did something change this morning? AFAIK it's still fine and dandy to take Saudi money (esp. if you're the US government) and Chinese too.
Remind you of anyone?
Within the last couple of years I became aware of an extended family member who was intermittently violently abusing his wife. This is someone I see at most once a year, usually at funerals.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would do if I found myself in a social situation with this person. The best I could come up with was personal ostracism.
I decided that I would not call him out, due to fear of unintended consequences, but that I would treat him as a pariah. At a recent family reunion, I was set to avoid him, but all of a sudden he was next to me, asking after me, and jutting out his hand for a shake. I reflexively shook his hand (I fucking hated myself at that moment), but managed to turn away and put my back to him as he was talking.
I feel like I eventually held up to my principles, but was a disgusted by how the people around me just ignored the elephant in the room. And yet ... difficult situation to be in. I mean this as a bystander, not someone with something to gain from associating with him.
EDIT> The time of "open secrets" needs to be over. I dislike gag orders and secret settlements because they deprive the public of crucial information. How many people are victimized by someone who is anecdotally known to be dangerous, but still socially tolerated? Epstein was radioactive since 2008-2011, and we should be very critical of anyone who treated him normally after that period.
EDIT2> My family member had already been reported to the police and his wife went back to him. So, he's on record as being an abuser. I am not covering for him in that sense.
Yes, quite a lot. (In the American sense of 'quite', not the British...)
Just look at what has come out of the Life-Long Kindergarden lab, and see how many things you recognize. Historically the Media Lab has done a lot of very creative things. A person could spend a happy lifetime doing nothing but following up on ideas that started there.
This is a bad episode for the Media Lab, for sure. But don't paint all of the researches within with a scarlet letter because of it.
-- Edit: Translate English to English
Mr. Cohen, now the director of development for computer and data science initiatives at Brown University, did not respond to messages seeking comment on Saturday.'
While Ito is rightfully being held to account I think it's important to consider all the other enablers who condoned and accepted these arrangements as well.
The world has given me far more reasons to be pessimistic.
Joi Ito: What World of Warcraft taught me about being a better leader (chronicle.com) - 32 points by yarapavan on Apr 28, 2011
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493209
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-director-of-...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/50295603@N02/48589712471/ https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/10/487685.html
To the members of the MIT community,
After recent events centered on the Media Lab, I know there is a tremendous sense of pain, sadness and disappointment across campus and throughout our global community. We all want answers.
For now, I write to share two important updates. Last Saturday, we retained the law firm Goodwin Procter to perform a thorough investigation of the facts surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s interactions with MIT. This work has already begun. We have asked the firm to explore all donations received by MIT, both those that came directly from Jeffrey Epstein and his associated foundations, and any donations that may have been received at the direction of Jeffrey Epstein. In addition, the investigation will cover who at MIT may have been aware of the donations. We have instructed Goodwin Procter to follow the evidence where it leads, and we are counting on this independent investigation to ascertain the facts. As I noted on Saturday, the firm will report back to me and to the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, MIT’s governing board.
If you have information relevant to the investigation that you would like to share with the law firm, please email REDACTED.
To be thorough, such an investigation will take time, on the order of a month. Although media reports will continue to focus on the issues during this time, I am hopeful that the MIT community will avoid forming a final judgment before the process is complete and will respect the privacy of members of our community who may have become involved in this matter in the course of doing their jobs for MIT.
Once we have the results, and once our separate internal review of our current processes on gift acceptance is complete, we will be able to understand what happened and what needs to change. Supporting the members of the Media Lab must now be at the center of our attention. The Provost has asked the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning to work with the Media Lab community on interim leadership for the lab and a search for the next director. The interim plan will be finalized shortly, and we will share the news as soon as possible, along with other plans to support the lab community. I know this is a difficult and disorienting moment. But I have profound faith in the MIT community to learn from these events and find a constructive way forward.
Sincerely,
L. Rafael Reif
Ito will be fine.
He was convicted of a crime, and he served his time. In hindsight, the sentence was too light, but as regular people are we really supposed to understand all the details? If I met someone who went to jail, should she be exiled forever after serving her sentence? I just don't understand. And people get lenient sentences all the time, am I as a non-lawyer supposed to understand this and then give my own sentence on top of that? Or should some people who commit crimes should never, ever be allowed to interact with other humans again?
As far as I can tell, from the perspective of those around him in 2014, Epstein was convicted of a crime, and served his time. By 2014, he had committed no further crimes from what people knew at the time, so why exactly is this an outrage. Obviously in 2019, we know that he committed further crimes and he rightly went to jail, and it's sad that he won't face justice. But in 2014, did anyone know this and should they be treated so harshly if they didn't?
The only real problem was covering up the donation, which Ito definitely should have been fired for, but I don't understand why Epstein at that time should have been considered a persona non grata.
The biggest question is: should criminals never ever be forgiven for their crimes? And should anyone who decides to forgive them and associate with them also be considered despicable as well? Or is it just some criminals depending on their crime? Who judges which crimes should never be forgiven and which should?
Want to remain a part of polite civic society? Don’t rape kids.
But what about people who feel otherwise and think that by serving out his sentence he has paid for their sins? If those people associate with criminals who have served their sentence, are those people worse in your eyes? It seems like not only is redemption for criminals no longer allowed, but you're not allowed to believe in redemption for others as well.
For every Epstein, there are others who have been convicted of similar (or worse) crimes who, ten years later, have served their time, are reformed, and are no longer a threat to society. This doesn't mean you don't have the right to choose to avoid interacting with them (I personally wouldn't when it comes to underage solicitation as was Epstein's conviction), but I'm inclined to agree with the poster that I wouldn't morally judge those who do because they on good faith, and with no contrary evidence, assume the person has faced justice and has been rehabilitated. I think it's important that as a society we don't have a general rule that it's OK to discriminate against convicted felons -- it seems wise and just to, in general, try to forgive and be fair to those who have been convicted of a crime in the past and who have no other evidence to disprove the claim they have changed and are rehabilitated.
To me this has no bearing on the details of this specific case here, because based upon peoples' behavior it seems likely that everyone involved actually knew this guy was still an abuser after his conviction. It sounds like Epstein made a point of telling people about his behavior as a means of controlling them, so in general anyone who took money from this guy I think is guilty of at the very least a moral failure.
But if you don't impose a life sentence, but then believe a person should continue to pay for their crimes after the amount determined by a court of law, isn't that hypocrisy? Having someone serve their sentence in jail but then making them never able to interact in society again because of outrage over their crime is fundamentally unfair. If you're going to do that, then just execute them or throw them in jail forever, because that's effectively what they're doing. And as I said, I'm perfectly okay with making execution for crimes the punishment for a large swathe of crimes, including everything that Epstein did.
And even worse, if someone believes that a person deserves the right to be forgiven for their sins, and they are thrown into the same bucket for even associating with them, is that even fair?
Apparently Bill Gates met with Epstein several times after his conviction. Should he be punished as well?
https://web.archive.org/web/20170606013136/http://www.thedai...
People knew, or should have known, who they were dealing with.
Interesting his choices made it unimpeded through his own conscience though.
Imagine somehow being able to tag bitcoin address / transactions with "this money came from a man convicted of sex trafficking"
Then having that tag appear on the accounts sheet at NIT
Would that help?
Why taint the money, when it can help us learn, build, heal, and grow? Epstein, not the money he donated, is responsible for bad things he did.
As an alum, I'm not surprised at the Institute's cowardice, but I'd like to see MIT stand up for someone, ANYONE in its community when under fire publicly, just once.
In a situation where people are communicating and facilitating the donation with such a blacklisted person they are a) able to confirm the donation and b) are in a position to participate in some kind of quid pro quo -- this seems extremely hard to justify given the difficulty of disproving that no such quid pro quo took place. In this specific instance, it sounds like Epstein did receive material attention and visitation so safely assuming that this was a neutral transaction flies out the window completely.
He donates 2 million dollars, threatens to pull the funding when you don't let him visit.
What happens? If you think its anything besides "welcome with full access" I don't what to tell you, because that's whats going to happen in 999/1000 cases.
He was already on the MIT donation blacklist for this very reason.
This is way beyond "the dude is evil, but his money isn't"
Because when that much money is involved, there are strings attached. In this particular case, Epstein got to visit the lab and had people like Ito covering for him, pretending the situation was normal and on the level.
The MacArthur Foundation today accepted the resignation of Joi Ito as a member of our board and our affiliate @LeverforChange , effective immediately. We thank Ito for his service.
https://twitter.com/macfound/status/1170443088055144448
Good god, did they really have to thank Joi Ito for his service?
> I don't get it.
Sorry, but a 60-something "finance" guy with an entourage of teen models doesn't add up. Sure some of these people have trophy wives half their age, and it raises eyebrows, but this is far beyond that and totally unacceptable once somebody looks into this guy's history.
At a minimum Ito should have used better judgement after being altered to this stuff.
The law is the law. Seems easier to comply than to transgress.
Or do you object to young women (and otherwise beautiful men and women) acting in movies and things like Victoria’s Secret shows as well (well, you could object on the “encouraging body image problems” angle but that’s orthogonal).
And anyway, if it were some kind of "fair exchange", WTF is going through his mind to bring that "entourage" to a place like the media lab. It sounds like a script to a Sacha Baron Cohen film.
Also it is highly unusual for somebody to show up at an academic event with even a trophy wife in tow.
As for the VS fashion show you do know that Epstein had some kind of hold on the CEO of their parent company, he harassed women under the pretense he was a talent scout for them and plausibly could have abused the models.
Please avoid this.
Let me preface this by saying that I have no idea who Epstein is except that he's some rich, white guy that got caught up in some kind of sex scandal, was arrested and is now dead. I'm not belittling his acts nor ignoring his accusers, I'm saying that I did not know. Now let me explain why.
Over the past couple of years, there have been non-stop stories of one powerful white man after another being revealed doing heinous sexual things to women. The reports are non-stop and it has come to the point that I have tuned them out. A good number of us here are in the tech industry, we're busy enough as it is. Whatever free time we have is focused on things that are more immediate. A large number of people in my immediate bubble have no idea who Epstein is. I'm not even sure if his first name is Jeff or James, except that it starts with J.
I'm likely not the only one.
So according to the HN guidelines, please assume good faith when people ask why.
Might want to tune back in a bit; the demise of Epstein is one of the most kelptocratic things that's ever happened in the US. It doesn't even matter exactly how he died; there is no 'fact pattern' you can subscribe to that isn't a consequence of in-your-face public corruption.
We're not all Americans here.
Although if I was going to comment on something very specific to the US and wasn't quite sure what it was about, I'd probably do some fact-finding beforehand.
I can't imagine what relevance you think this case has to the lives of most people on this forum, or even to most people living in the USA. It doesn't impact their future, their well-being, the well-being of people they know or are likely to know, or have (any? much?) lasting meaning for rational policy decisions.
The survival of the republic is most assuredly not dependent upon everyone on the internet clinging to the details of every morbidly awful high-profile sexual misconduct case.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20907187 and marked it off-topic.
i honestly am pretty sure the vast majority of the contrarians really are just not familiar with the whole Epstein story, and may only be hearing about it as it intersects with the tech world.
> reminder to self: don't invest with or take money from assholes
@ 4:20 PM · Mar 12, 2008
Epstein had already been convicted and banned from MIT donations.
In a position of leadership you are responsible to keep a healthy and safe workplace. That’s part of the job of running a lab. If you are unable or unwilling to do that, you should not be in a leadership role.
makes sense now
Playing devil’s advocate here: Accepting tainted money as charity is not the problem. Promoting the donors, giving them prestige, contacts, access or some other benefits as a result of donations is the problem.
For example:
> Mr. Epstein — who killed himself in jail last month while facing federal sex trafficking charges
a purposeful misrepresentation of a fact
with knowledge that it is false
to a victim who justifiably relies on the misrepresentation
who suffers actual loss as a result.Who suffered an actual loss as a result of these donations? Civil fraud is grasping, some.
(1) a purposeful misrepresentation of a fact
(2) with knowledge that it is false
(3) to a victim who justifiably relies on the misrepresentation
(4) who suffers actual loss as a result.
He donated for access to famous and future famous people, so he could implicate them in sexual crimes and compromising relationships and extract money and favors from them.
That's what the guy did, its not some kind of secret now, or then.
And you can bet your top dollar Joi Ito was compromised too, which is exactly why he broke the rules around the MIT blacklist banning Epstein's donations and kept everything secret.
“They were models. Eastern European, definitely,” she told me. Among the lab’s staff, she said, “all of us women made it a point to be super nice to them. We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them.”
And what did these people go home and start doing for Eastern European models since then? I find this pretty condescending. I know a few Eastern European models who are incredibly smart, and perhaps dated some folks who they wouldn't have dated if they were born in the U.S., but used those relationships to get themselves out of possible hellish, abusive, misogynistic situations back home (this is somewhat speculation, but our current First Lady seems to fall in this category). They were young but had been through hard times like the disintegration of the Soviet Union and starvation, and aren't so naive. They were honest about things, and weren't living in delusion. Some of the toughest and smartest people I've ever met in fact. There just seems to be a lot of phony moral outrage here.
The implication is the staff were concerned that Epstein was bringing literal slaves into the office.
One nit about the OP, is when any press outlet reports this as a "suicide". At the very least, this should be reported as an "assisted suicide". My infant can't poop without us having video evidence. The odds of this being an individual act given where and who he was are maybe .1%? Only problem is so many people wanted him gone, hard to figure out who helped him.
Do you?