How an Élite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

New documents show that the M.I.T. Media Lab was aware of Epstein’s status as a convicted sex offender, and that Epstein directed contributions to the lab far exceeding the amounts M.I.T. has publicly admitted.

"Current and former faculty and staff of the media lab described a pattern of concealing Epstein’s involvement with the institution. Signe Swenson, a former development associate and alumni coordinator at the lab, told me that she resigned in 2016 in part because of her discomfort about the lab’s work with Epstein. She said that the lab’s leadership made it explicit, even in her earliest conversations with them, that Epstein’s donations had to be kept secret...

Swenson said that, even though she resigned over the lab’s relationship with Epstein, her participation in what she took to be a coverup of his contributions has weighed heavily on her since. Her feelings of guilt were revived when she learned of recent statements from Ito and M.I.T. leadership that she believed to be lies. “I was a participant in covering up for Epstein in 2014,” she told me. “Listening to what comments are coming out of the lab or M.I.T. about the relationship—I just see exactly the same thing happening again.”"

He Who Must Not Be Tolerated; The New York Times, September 8, 2019

Kara Swisher, The New York Times;

He Who Must Not Be Tolerated

Joi Ito’s fall from grace for his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was much deserved. But his style of corner-cutting ethics is all too common in tech.

"Voldemort?

Of all the terrible details of the gross fraud that the former head of the M.I.T. Media Lab, Joichi Ito, and his minions perpetrated in trying to cover up donations by Jeffrey Epstein to the high-profile tech research lab, perhaps giving a pedophile a nickname of a character in a book aimed at children was the most awful.

“The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or ‘he who must not be named,’ ” wrote Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker, in his eviscerating account of the moral and leadership failings of one of the digital industry’s top figures."

The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab; Slate, September 8, 2019

Justin Peters, Slate; The Moral Rot of the MIT Media Lab

"Over the course of the past century, MIT became one of the best brands in the world, a name that confers instant credibility and stature on all who are associated with it. Rather than protect the inherent specialness of this brand, the Media Lab soiled it again and again by selling its prestige to banks, drug companies, petroleum companies, carmakers, multinational retailers, at least one serial sexual predator, and others who hoped to camouflage their avarice with the sheen of innovation. There is a big difference between taking money from someone like Epstein and taking it from Nike or the Department of Defense, but the latter choices pave the way for the former."